by Judy Handley | May 5, 2010 | Chagos, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 191, Year 5: Work Day, Play Evening
Date: Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Weather: Sun Mixed with Rain and Wind
Location: Ile Fouquet, Salomon Atoll, Chagos
Today was all work. We didn’t intend for it to be that way, but things happen. I sanded and varnished the cockpit one last time (maybe) while Mark took off the wooden Dorade vent covers and prepared them to be sanded and varnished. I cleaned the sides of the cabin top, polished all of the stainless frames that hold up the bimini, and polished the stainless frames around all the ports/windows on the boat. Somewhere in there, it decided to rain on my freshly varnished cockpit wood, but I am hopeful that it was dry enough to withstand the wet. When things dry tomorrow, I’ll look carefully and hope that I don’t have to varnish yet another time as paint supplies are running low. I have only two more pieces of 220 sandpaper and fewer foam brushes than I thought. I usually sand the Dorade vent covers by hand, but due to the shortage of sandpaper, Mark offered to sand them with his orbital sander. So I put him in the dinghy, handed down the Dorade boxes, let out the extension cord, and let him drift behind the boat to do the sanding. We didn’t want to chance getting sanding dust in the not yet cured varnish in the cockpit. When all of this was done, it was time to get ready to go to Constance for our Cinco de Mayo celebration with Ed and Lynne and Jeff and Kathy of Mirage.. Ed margaritas were great and the Mexican food was yummy and we enjoyed it all despite the heavy evening rain. Jeff and Kathy on Mirage are probably leaving for Malaysia tomorrow, so this evening was also a farewell to them. Constance and Mirage have known each other for the many years that they have been cruising in Southeast Asia, so this was a major parting for them.
Tomorrow I’ll do the first of many coats of varnish on the Dorade boxes, we’ll put the cockpit back together (if the varnish cures okay with all the dampness), and take some time for the snorkeling that got put off today. I’m not sure what is on Mark’s list of To Do’s, but I have a feeling fishing might be on that list somewhere. The cupboard is bare.
by Judy Handley | May 4, 2010 | Chagos, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 190, Year 5: More Than a Month
Date: Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Weather: Nice Day but Windy-SE 15 Knots, Gusts to 20
Location: Ile Fouquet, Salomon Atoll, Chagos
We have been in Chagos for just over a month so we are halfway through our stay here. Last night Mark posed the question, “Just how much fresh food do we have left?” Well, the answer is not much, but actually it is more than I would have expected. We still have about 10 carrots from Gan and 5 from India, 2 banana peppers from Gan, a huge bag of ginger from India, and 4 limes from Gan that are refrigerated. We have 8 potatoes and 28 still unripe tomatoes from India, 1 pumpkin and 1 white squash from India, and 4 dozen eggs that are mix from Thailand, India, and the Maldives. I’m keeping a few from each place to see which ones keep the longest. These things are not kept in the refrigerator. We have over 150 onions and about 50 heads of garlic and many bags of flour and rice. We ate the last of the cabbage this week and soon I will use the jar of mashed bananas that I put in the refrigerator a month ago. I poured lime juice on top of the mashed bananas and they are still a beautiful yellow. So we will have one more loaf of banana bread soon. The only meat we have is canned, but with all the fish we have here, meat is just not an issue. I have a number of cans of artichoke hearts and am going to start making a rice-artichoke salad (favorite recipe from my friend Linda Stuart back in Concord, NH) since we haven’t seen lettuce since Thailand and have no more cabbage. I never thought of cabbage as salad material, but shredded cabbage and carrots, along with thinly sliced onions with a lime and olive oil dressing is now one of my newest favorite things. I used to really dislike cabbage, but I have become a lover. We still have 60 rolls of toilet paper and 10 rolls of paper towels, but we are very low on Ziploc bags. My sister offered to give me boxes of Ziplocs when we left North Carolina, but we had no more room in our already overstuffed suitcases. I now wish I had taken more of her generous offer but I didn’t and we will learn to live without baggies. The world would be a much kinder place if we all stopped using so much plastic. We still have lockers full of canned food, but we are starting to use more and more cans each day. But I have a feeling that we will still be eating some of the canned food when we reach the Caribbean next spring. We have enough beer left for each of us to have two cans a day. We have been on this “beer diet” for six weeks now and so far we are sticking to it. I stopped drinking Coke when we arrived in the Chagos so Mark can still have one a day. I think we have enough left for him to continue to have one a day until we leave here, but then he will be without for the month it will take us to reach stores in Madagascar. Yes, we are still two months away from a store, so I’ll give another food update when we arrive in Hell-ville in Madagascar in early July. It will be interesting to see what it is that we have run out of by then.
Today was a free and easy day. We got up super early and I sanded and varnished the cockpit. I thought it was going to be my last coat, but I am not happy with the finish. So tomorrow morning, I’ll give it one more coat and then I will call it quits on that job. We are once again using the toilet that Mark repaired. The fixes he made seem to be working, but it is possible that we still have a small leak at the base of the toilet. We’ll keep watching that and hopefully have a leak-free head before the end of this week. We had hoped to walk to the outer reef at low tide today to take a look at the wrecked cargo ship that has been sitting there for a couple of years, but our tide information was way off. We are going to have to wait for another low spring tide just after the new moon in the middle of month. The water will then be low enough to easily walk out there. Today we would have been trudging through a foot of water and it just wasn’t worth it.
Tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo. A boat named Mr. Curley that comes here year after year always hosts a big all you can drink Margarita celebration down at Boddam, but we are not going to make it. It is just too windy to take the dinghy down there, so Mr. Ed on Constance is going to make margaritas and we will have our own celebration here at Ile Fouquet with Constance and Mirage. So we’ll snorkel in the morning (after sanding and varnishing) and celebrate in the afternoon. Sounds like a plan.
by Judy Handley | May 3, 2010 | Chagos, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 189, Year 5: The Exodus Continues
Date: Monday, May 3, 2010
Weather: Rain Overnight, Nice Day, Rainy Evening
Location: Ile Fouquet, Salomon Atoll, Chagos
Four more boats left Salomon today, some heading back to Thailand and some heading south to Mauritius. So for a short time, we had only eight boats in the anchorage, but then in the afternoon a new French boat arrived so we are now at nine boats in the Takamaka-Fouquet anchorage, and I think six boats remain in the Boddam anchorage. Only four boats are still in Peros Banhos, so all totaled there are about twenty-one boats currently in Chagos. We know of at least two more boats leaving in the next day or two, so the numbers continue to dwindle.
The weather behaved itself today allowing me put coat #2 of varnish on the cockpit woodwork. In fact, I got up at 6:30 am, wiped away the rain we had overnight, sanded, and had everything varnished by 9:30. In that time, Mark got the toilet reconnected and I also baked a coffee cake. We then went over to Mirage for morning coffee with Jeff and Kathy and Ed and Lynne of Constance. We chatted until late morning and then we came back, had lunch, and then Mark went fishing and I started cleaning the stainless. Those adorable little Brown Noddies that have been roosting on our bow pulpit had made a royal mess of the stainless, so I scrubbed away the guano, which looked like we had whitewashed the whole bow pulpit, with water and brush and then polished the stainless. I still need to do it again, but I ran out of patience and settled for a job that looks okay but doesn’t really meet my standards. But it will do for now. I then had to re-rig the lines of hanging CD’s that we have been using to discourage the birds from roosting up front. There was very little wind, so the CD’s weren’t flying around, and when I looked up front there were six little lovelies sitting on the newly polished stainless. I went running up the deck to scare them off, tripped on the rubber fender that we sit the dinghy on when it is on deck, and along with the birds, off flew my glasses. This was a big gift for Neptune. Not only are my Titanium glasses expensive, I only have glasses with an old prescription for a back-up. I have been wearing them all evening and they do fine for everything except reading and computer work. They work for that but I have to push the computer or book far away. So I dug into a bag of reading glasses that my niece Lynn gave me to give away to people along the way who might need them and found two pair that are the right magnification for me for reading. So I can wear my prescription back-up pair of glasses for general use and use the cheap reading glasses when working on the computer or reading. It will be six months before we reach South Africa and I have any chance of getting a new pair of prescription glasses, so I hope this system works.
Mark and Ed came back empty-handed from the fishing expedition, so we’ll have to try that again tomorrow. Peppy and Bob from the boat Far Niente invited us over for sundowners this evening and we had a great time getting to know them better. Their Chagos permit ends on May 20 and they will be heading to Madagascar. They are also thinking of going to Mayotte and then on to Tanzania, but they will need to check a piracy up-date before making that decision. Once in a while we are tempted to do the same, but the piracy activity north of Dar es Salom makes it seem a little too risky.
Tomorrow’s low tide is at 10:30 am, so after doing a third coat of varnish, weather permitting, we might take the dinghy to the north tip of Takamaka and walk out to the wrecked ship that still sits at the edge of the reef. So a little exploring, a little fishing, a little stainless polishing, and a little photo editing sounds like the menu for tomorrow’s activities.
by Judy Handley | May 2, 2010 | Chagos, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 188, Year 5: Rain, Rain, Go Away
Date: Sunday, May 2, 2010
Weather: Overcast Day, Rain During Night and Morning
Location: Ile Fouquet, Salomon Atoll, Chagos
It was a dark and stormy night and morning. The rain stopped late morning, but the sun didn’t come out to play today. We took advantage of the rain water this morning and washed the dodger and bimini cockpit covers inside and out. We’re still trying to get rid of the Cochin dirt and I now think we have done all we can do. Some of the streaks of gray still didn’t come out, but I’m sure they will disappear in time. Probably just in time for us to reach Richards Bay in South Africa where we will be waiting for the right weather to head to Cape Town. Unfortunately, if the winds are blowing as they did last year, the coal dust from the inland mines all ends up on the boats in Richards Bay. Then the fun starts all over again.
The rainy morning gave us an excuse to continue watching programs in the Blue Planet series. We watched two of the programs last night and two more this morning. This is an old series that was done jointly with the BBC and The Discovery Channel, so some of you might have seen this. It is all about the world’s oceans and it is fun to watch it while sitting here on the ocean with nothing to see for hundreds of miles except ocean. Tonight we are hoping to watch two more programs. Then we’ll wait for the next rainy day to continue. Tomorrow we are hoping for sunshine so I can continue my varnishing in the cockpit. I was hoping to do five coats but if the weather doesn’t cooperate, I might just do three coats for now. We are suffering from not having our living space outside that protects from the rain, so we are both anxious to get the cockpit varnishing completed so we can live outside once again.
Mark’s spent his day working on a leaky toilet. He thought he had this fixed while in India, but last night, the aft head sprung another leak. So he dug out the toilet repair kit that we had sent to India and went to work. Unfortunately, the new parts didn’t fix the problem, so he broke out the 5200 caulk and did a little glue job on the pump unit. He has to wait 24 hours to reconnect things, so we are using a bucket tonight. More fun!
Tomorrow morning I will varnish early and Mark will continue with his head project. Then we’ll take a break and go for a visit on Mirage. Jeff and Kathy have invited us over for morning coffee. Jeff and Kathy will be leaving soon, so it will be nice to get together.
by Judy Handley | May 1, 2010 | Chagos, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 187, Year 5: Another Yellowfin Tuna
Date: Saturday, May 1, 2010
Weather: Partly Sunny, Windy Day with Sprinkles Here and There
Location: Ile Fouquet, Salomon Atoll, Chagos
Mark finally was the fisherman of the day. He, Ed, and Jeff went out and came back with one Yellowfin tuna that Mark caught. I think they all caught Bonitos that they threw back and they were hoping for a Wahoo, but no Wahoo today. While Mark was gone, I did a laundry, baked bread, washed the cockpit seat cushion covers, and sanded and varnished the cockpit cap rail. This is the wood that sits on top of the coaming that surrounds the cockpit. I guess it is a bit like the top railing around a porch. Tomorrow when I sand and put coat #2 on the cap rail, I will do a first coat on the wood around the main hatch and the table in the cockpit. That is, I will do that if the weather allows. It looked a little like rain all day today and as the sun set, the really dark clouds rolled in. So we shall see what tomorrow brings. This afternoon, Mark taped off the additional pieces that will be varnished tomorrow and he and Ed went to shore to burn garbage. I finally finished the Madagascar anchorages spreadsheet, so now we know where we will and will not go on the northwest coast. The next research job will be reading the Lonely Planet, but that can wait for a couple of weeks.
At sunset, Mark and I took the dinghy up into the pass between Fouquet and Takamaka and floated our way back out into the anchorage. We were hoping to see rays, but I think the water is too choppy right now with all the wind and the rays are hiding. At least a couple of boats left here today headed for Mauritius and there are a few more waiting in the wings. The weather is a bit unsettled here, but hopefully it is better a little south of here. Tonight, we are going to watch some of the Blue Planet series that we got from Jeff and Kathy on Mirage. They gave it to us when we were in Peros, but we never got around to watching it. Last night, Jeff really encouraged us to watch the series while we are here, so we’re going to give it a go. I’ll report on that in tomorrow night’s log.
by Judy Handley | Apr 30, 2010 | Chagos, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 186, Year 5: A Full Anchorage
Date: Friday, April 30, 2010
Weather: Beautiful Day with Threatening Evening Clouds
Location: Ile Fouquet, Salomon Atoll, Chagos
The anchorage area in front of Ile Takamaka and Ile Fouquet is getting full. There were only three boats when we arrived here, but now there fifteen. This is really the only protected anchorage in Chagos once the southeast trades start blowing and even though they are off and on, a lot of boats have moved here. Jeff and Kathy on Mirage moved here from Boddam and will be leaving a couple of days headed back to Phuket. Another three or four Dutch boats are leaving for Mauritius and one of them has come here before leaving. We once again have the French quarter in front of Takamaka and the four American boats are all in front of Fouquet. It is possible that we will not move to Boddam but just take day trips down in the dinghy. We’ll just have to see what the weather brings.
Early this morning the Pacific Marlin came in through the pass and anchored. This time the marines were aboard and they took off in their high powered dinghies with one going to Boddam and one to the shore on Fouquet. The marines walked the beach, collected the recycling, and then snorkeled on the wrecked sailboat. Mark and I were also out there snorkeling the wreck trying to get better pictures than we did when we were there at a higher tide. We then picked up Lynne and went out to snorkel on a big bommie between our boats and the pass. The water was clear over the bommie and we enjoyed the coral and the few fish that were there. We saw a very large Emperor Angelfish which was beautiful to watch and a couple of Blunthead Platax that were extremely friendly. This fish is mostly fins. Their flat bodies are about the size of small saucer with a long dorsal fin extending upwards about six inches and a long anal fin extending downwards about six inches.. And then they have pectoral fins that hang down like a long beard. They are not colorful, just black, brown, and pale yellow, but I love watching them move through the water with their swaying fins.
Before leaving, the Pacific Marlin checked in with each boat except for those of us who were out snorkeling or exploring and they announced that they would be hosting their end of the month barbecue in Peros for the four or five boats that are still over there. So once again we are in the wrong atoll for the special BIOT barbecue, but they said they will be back the end of May, so maybe we will be in the right place for that one. We were also disappointed to learn that the boat, Mr. Curley, will not be hosting the annual Cinco de Mayo margarita bash down at Boddam this year. I guess we will just have to have our own celebration. Ed makes fantastic margaritas and I still have salsa and taco chips. We still have tomatoes, beans, and taco shells so I think we can throw something together.
I spent my entire day sorting through the remaining 160 red onions onboard, carefully peeling off outer layers of skin to get rid of the black mold between the layers. What a tedious and nasty job, but it is done and the onions should last a bit longer with the moldy layers removed. Mark cleaned off the green algae that was growing just below the waterline and prepared the cockpit area for varnishing the cap rail. This required removing the plastic panels that protect us from the rain and then taking down the bimini. This means that we are totally unprotected from the rain in the cockpit, but the hardware that holds up the canvas cockpit covering had to be removed so we can sand and varnish. He taped off everything so that we can start sanding and varnishing tomorrow morning.
Tonight we went to Constance for sundowners, along with Mirage. We had a lovely evening together and Mark, Ed, and Jeff have decided to go fishing in the morning. I’ll try to get the initial sanding and first coat of varnish on the cockpit cap rail before they leave and then go to Constance to play a mean game of Scrabble with Lynne and Kathy. But back to tonight, we just saw a rainbow in the night sky. It is sprinkling rain and with the nearly full moon shining, we could see a complete rainbow, sans color, to the west. Mark called it a moon rainbow.
