Day 304, Year 5 Feels Like Home
Date: Thursday, August 26, 2010
Weather: Beautiful; Winds ENE 8-10 Knots
Latitude: 13 18.105 S
Longitude: 048 10.660 E
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
Windbird returned to Nosy Sakatia today and is anchored in front of Sakatia Towers. The only other boat here is Constance and it feels like we have returned home. Unfortunately, we had to motor most of the way here as the winds today came from the ENE all day. I don’t think we have seen this before. We sometimes get wind from the NE as it backs or clocks changing from land breeze to sea breeze, but consistent winds from the NE is a new one for us. At least the seas were calm and it was a beautiful day and we got to sail for the last hour or so and that was nice.
We went to shore to Sakatia Towers in the late afternoon to see John Sheppard. As always, he was a wealth of information and great company. He gave us the name of the local computer guru but it will probably be Monday before we can get an appointment with him. His name is Giam and his father owns the resort just south of Sakatia Towers. Sometimes Giam comes here for the weekend, so it is possible that we might get to see him sooner than Monday. Whatever, in the meantime we will try to cure Mark’s computer virus. But of that doesn’t work, we now know that there is someone who can help. John offered to have his chef pick up some fresh veggies for us in Hell-ville tomorrow morning and also figured out a way that we can get dinghy fuel delivered to us. Then he invited us to attend tomorrow’s local Rotary meeting. It is being held on Sakatia this week. A boat that was here a couple of weeks ago donated a huge spinnaker to the club and tomorrow it will be laid out on the school playing field to decide just how best to cut it up to make small sails for the local pirogues. John thought Mark might be able to lend a little expertise to this decision-making process, so we will tag along and enjoy yet another Madagascar experience.
My great triumph for the day was that I finally finished organizing all of the Chagos and Madagascar photos. This has been a long and arduous process, but it is finally done. I feel the weight of the world lifted from my shoulders. Until we can get our computer virus under control, we have no idea whether or not we will be able to upload all of these photos to the website. But if not here, surely we can do this in South Africa.
After visiting with John at Sakatia Towers, we went to Constance for sundowners. It was great to see Lynne and Ed again and to talk about our plans from here to South Africa. Many decisions to make.
