Day 231, Year 5 Winds Abating
Date: Monday, June 14, 2010
Weather: Sunny, Winds SE 15-25 Knots
Location: Ampanasia Bay, NW Madagascar
I don’t remember a time when I have been happier about lessening winds. It was still a windy day but nothing like yesterday and the day before, and as evening approached the winds started to quiet down even more. Let’s just hope this continues into tomorrow. Mark needs to go up our mast to check out our sagging inner stay and Ed needs to get in the water to check out the gouge in the side of Constance and then he needs to go up his mast to check out their broken headstay. So a quiet day would be great. We might even get to go to shore for a walk in the dry bush country. It looks desolate, but I’m sure when examined up close there all kinds of things to see. The land here looks very much like the Northern Territory in Australia. It is red soil bush country just begging to be explored. Maybe tomorrow.
Mark continued working on projects all morning while I worked on my never ending job of editing and naming photos from Chagos. I had been looking at photos of turquoise water, white sand, and green islands for about two hours and when I went outside to hang out a laundry. I looked around and wondered why everything had turned brown. It really took me a second to remember where I was. Certainly not in Chagos! After lunch, Ed came over in his dinghy and took us over to Constance. We all examined the damages to Constance and then Mark and Ed worked on replacing a reefing line in the boom. The line had broken sometime during the trip. Lynne and I sat and talked and just enjoyed seeing each other in person again. We got out charts and discussed plans for where we would anchor between here and Nosy Be and Ed got on the SAT phone and called a phone number for a marine shop on Nosy Be that we found in the notes we have about Madagascar. He was told to call another number and finally reached a gentleman on a boat anchored somewhere on Nosy Be who is going to research the possibility of having Constance pulled out of the water for repairs if necessary. We didn’t find out any definites but it was good to make contact with someone who might be able to help. After returning from Constance I was out on the back deck rinsing out the clothes that had gotten salt water splashed on the way back to Windbird. All of sudden I hear Jingle Bell Rock, and I knew instantly that Mark had turned on the CD player. Evidently we haven’t listened to any music since Christmas in Thailand. He had been removing wooden panels to check out the chain plates to see if there was evidence of leaks. In doing so, he jostled some wires from the CD player and decided he needed to check it out. I came in and took out the Christmas music and put in some of our favorites. Right now we are listening to a Nora Jones CD given to me by my friend Linda Stuart back in Concord. Linda gave me the CD as a going away present so I would think of her when playing the CD thousands of miles away. Well, it worked. Linda, I’m thinking of you and missing you so very much.
