Day 120, Year 5: This and That
Date: Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Weather: Hazy, Cooler Morning; Clear, Hot Afternoon
Location: Bolgatty Hotel Anchorage, Cochin (Kochi), India
Yea! The first convoy of sailboats cleared ‘pirate alley’ and reached Aden in Yemen today. We are so thankful to know that they have arrived safe and sound. The World War II convoy strategies they employed worked. Robert and Tina of Shirena have sent daily reports and it has been most fascinating to follow them. They did not see pirates but they ‘witnessed’ an attack on a merchant ship on the radio. The merchant ship radioed a warship for help, but Robert said the captain was certainly not as responsive as he thought he should have been. The captain just kept asking questions about the number of attackers, types of weapons (to which the reply was “large, large weapons”) while the merchant ship crew was fending off the pirates. Only after a second attack was repelled did the warship commander say they were on the way to help. But by the time they arrived the pirates were no where to be found. So the threat is still out there, but at least the first twenty-five boats made it in safely. I guess if we hadn’t chickened out, we’d be in Yemen right now, but then we wouldn’t have seen India or be going to the Maldives or Chagos or Madagascar and South Africa, and we are now getting quite excited about each of those stops. The arrival of the Madagascar books yesterday got us on a roll and we spent all of this morning researching anchorages along Madagascar’s northwest coast. After lunch we turned our attention to boat maintenance. We borrowed a broom from Constance to sweep the dirt off our sail cover and the top of our dodger and bimini. We then washed down the cabin top and polished more stainless. Mid-afternoon, I stopped to work on photos and Mark continued with the stainless polishing. While we were doing this, we could see that Ed was cleaning his waterline from his dinghy and just about the time I came in to work on photos, he called and said he was working on a newsletter and wondered if I had any photos of Constance on the passage from Thailand to here. I did and he came over to get those. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get the photos off the memory stick, so he just included a photo of Windbird instead of Constance. Constance and Windbird are the only boats with people aboard in the Bolgatty anchorage and today we both spent our day doing a little of this and a little of that.
Saying that reminds me of Dave and Judy on Freebird. When they checked out of India the officials kept confusing Freebird with Windbird. They finally asked while pointing wildly to the official documents, “Are you this bird or that bird?” Judy assured them that they were ‘that bird’ which makes us ‘this bird.’ Now when she emails, she always puts ‘This Bird from That Bird’ in the subject line. When they emailed yesterday afternoon, they were finally sailing for the first time in seven days. Hopefully the wind will continue and they will reach Salalah in Oman soon.
Our best story of the last twenty-four hours is about a call to West Marine International to check on the order we placed for toilet repair parts. The parts were sent to Bolgatty Place (not Bolgatty Palace) in Indonesia (not India) with a zip code that we certainly didn’t supply. FedEx is telling us that the package must come back to West Marine in the US and be sent to us from there. We talked to West Marine tonight for about an hour and a half (thank goodness for Skype) and the end result is that (we think) they are going to send a replacement package to us, but that took a lot of doing. We had a wonderful Hispanic woman named Teresa dealing with us and she finally got through to her supervisor who approved the shipment. Unbelievable that it took so long, but we are so happy that West Marine finally decided to do the right thing.
We have not yet heard from Lynne, but then she has still not reached Florida. I’ll have to report on her arrival in tomorrow’s log. I’m not sure what we are doing tomorrow, but one activity will be going to the market to buy more onions. So that’s it from Windbird for today.
