Day 198, Year 5: Yucky Weather
Date: Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Weather: Rain Overnight; Overcast Day; Early Evening Rain
Location: Ile Fouquet, Salomon Atoll, Chagos
We’re still waiting for those gorgeous, sunny days to reappear. We have had rain every day or night since April 30. We have certainly had periods of sunshine but there have been a couple of days when it rained all day. So we think it’s time for a string of days without the threat of rain. We do like collecting the rain water, but just a few sunny days would be great. I have all sorts of low tide early morning activities planned for the rest of the week and into the weekend and I need sunshine! We still haven’t made the rain catcher. I’m sure if we get that made and installed, the rain will stop, so if it is raining tomorrow the rain catcher will get made.
Rain came in the early morning hours today and we were up at 5:00 am emptying the collected rain water into water jugs. Then we decided to go back to bed and we didn’t wake up until 7:15 am. Constance called us around 8 o’clock to let us know that we had been called by someone on the USS Lopez in Diego Garcia. That would have been Jay Burgess, a merchant marine from Hopkinton, New Hampshire. Our friend Alan Kanegsberg in Concord had made the contact for us and we had said that we get on 4483 MHz every morning at 7 am-every morning but this one. Constance answered the call for us and we will be on in the morning and hope to talk to Jay then.
I did more sanding and varnishing inside the cockpit today, made bread, banana bread, and granola. So it was a super busy day on Windbird. Mark and Ed went trolling for fish on the reefs close by, but came home with only a small Bonito. I guess this means it is time for a major fishing expedition outside, so that will probably happen tomorrow or Friday. It is amazing how much time it takes to keep us in food between fishing and baking, but then we don’t have to spend time at the grocery store. And I definitely choose the fishing and baking to shopping.
Nepenthe made it to Madagascar a couple of days ago. They were the first boat headed in that direction this year and they had a good, but somewhat boisterous passage. They are headed on to the coast of Africa in Mozambique and then north to Tanzania, so we won’t see them when we arrive in Madagascar. There is only one other boat leaving this month for Madagascar and then Susan Margaret, Constance, and Windbird head that way the first of June. All of the other boats going that way have already left and are going south to Mauritius and will head back north to Madagascar in September. It is a bit of a strange year in that so few boats are headed straight to Madagascar and then to South Africa. The fact that there is only one South African boat here and that boat is headed to Thailand is really unusual. But the combination of the economy and piracy issues getting off the coast of Africa anywhere north of South Africa are probably the reasons for that. So we are a small but mighty group headed west and then south to the Cape of Good Hope. But that is months away. For now we will enjoy the beauty of Chagos and look forward to our time in Madagascar.
