American Spirit II - Day 128; Mother's Day USA, Great Rainbow, & Joel Installed New VHF Radio; Sunday, May 11, 2014

Raining at 6:00 AM, so Joel got up and closed all hatches. Got up at 7:01 AM. At 7:33 AM saw a brilliant double ended rainbow, where you see both ends of it. And the rainbow was really close and wide. How often do people see double ended rainbows? Very cool. When I say 'close' I mean one of the ends was only 500 yards away. The colors were very intense and wide; with rally boats in the foreground.

At 10 AM the first group in our fleet started for Suwarrow. The fleet is split into 2 groups, Group 1 and Group 2, starting 2 days later, because our second stop on this leg, an island called Niue, has only 20 mooring buoys, so with 37 boats we can't all visit that island at the same time. And this island either doesn't allow you to anchor or the anchorage is so deep you can't anchor. We were originally signed up for Group 1 but had to move to Group 2 due to my infection and that I wanted to see the doctor Monday before we departed Tuesday.

In the Group 1 start only Follie a Deux and Nexus had spinnakers up. Good job!

Starting at 8:00 AM this morning Joel and I made Mother's Day calls. Because of satellite network issues, we had to use our cell phone instead of the cheaper satellite phone. Even then the connections were not good.

Joel installed a new VHF radio on the boat today, an ICOM M-604 that I had gotten from the parts locker on Nexus. Our 2nd Raymarine radio stopped working properly so we're moving on to ICOM. We already had a SSB ICOM board and have been very happy with it. It took Joel half a day to do the installation. While Joel was doing that I went into the yacht club and got more water; and made a provision run into town for our next leg starting Tuesday.

I changed my bandage and for the first time there was no ugly drainage. Good!

The sun set at 5:45 PM. No Green Flash due to rain clouds on the horizon. Too bad as atmospheric conditions were good.

We spent Happy Hour in the yacht club with Tommy, John and Marianne from II Audeacious.

Dinner consisted of spaghetti with butter, olive oil and garlic. It was very good except that I used too much New Zealand butter.

After dinner we watched the last 2 episodes of The Americans.

After the movies, I tried sending emails but couldn't via the internet or the SSB. Never a dull moment trying to communicate outside the USA.

Days until home 356 (May 2, 2015)

Brian Fox