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American Spirit II - Day 137; Most Dangerous Snorkel, Climbing into a Dingy, Laundry, SSB Problem, Tom Neale Party on Beach & Coordinating New Crew Flights; Wednesday, May 21, 2014



Up 7:41 AM. Cloudy, small rain shower drifting by. Closed all the hatches. Seems like it happens every morning at Suwarrow.

A rainbow at 8:11 AM. Faint. I'd give it a 3 on a 10 scale.

Two boats, Skylark of London (I wonder where that boat is from?) and Dash Away left the atoll before 8:30 AM.

I filled out the custom forms for Niue before it got too hot outside. That way I won't sweat on the forms. Always have to keep a rag handy to wipe the sweat off your wrists as you fill out these forms. Niue, which has a population of 1,500, requires more data on entry than any place we've been to for some time. They even ask how much money you have on board, and they want a list of all drugs on board. Should I list the Cialis or Viagra? Just kidding.

At 9:00 AM I violated a cardinal rule on the boat. I set a cup of coffee next to my Kindle on the cockpit table. And you guessed it, I then knocked over the cup of hot steaming coffee with sugar in it all over my Kindle and the table. Due to the Kindle being in a protective cover it was not damaged. Lucky. That's why down below we never set a drink down on the navigation desk. If the navigation computer gets wet, that would be a real problem. That's how we send our logs and emails. There is a spare computer on board tha,t we hate because it has Windows 8 on it; and we'd be forced to use it. Joel's computer just died, so we've down to 2 on the boat now. The World Cruising Club says that the average boat in the rally will go thru 2-4 laptops on the circumnavigation.

Getting back to the coffee mess in the cockpit. When I threw the canvas bucket with the rope attached into the water behind the boat to get some sea water to clear up the mess I caused, as soon as that canvas hit the water sharks appeared within seconds. They honed in on tbe noise. So jumping off the boat is not a good idea unless you want to draw attention to yourself. Slipping into the water is probably safer. The sharks that circle our boat all day and night are of the small variety - 2-3 feet mostly. Not sure why the larger ones don't hang around our boat all the time. A couple of 5 to 6 footers did visit the boat one day when we were checking out our anchor. And 5 to 6 footers are more curious and aggressive than the small ones.

Breakfast consisted of bacon, scrambled egge, fruit and toast.

At noon today we dingied over to the entrance pass into the lagoon. About a half mile away. Remember what I said above about making noise when you or an object enters the water. Well, Joel leaned off the dingy and fell back into the water, making a splash and a sound heard for miles around by the biggest sharks around. How do I know this? Because shortly thereafter two 5 to 6 foot black tipped sharks showed up, and one 5 to 6 foot gray shark arrived. Both of these different types of sharks are more curious and will swim in closer to us because of their size. One of them did so so aggressively that Joel had to swim at it to force it to turn away. Once I got in the water I could see the black tipped circle us during the whole snorkel. We had anchored the dingy in 15 feet of water, with a reef in front of us that had 2 feet of water over it. The stern of the dingy was sitting over a slope that extended down to 150. Deep water to shallow water. The perfect hunting location for sharks. For the first time I'd forgotten my Go Pro camera so I couldn't get any video of the sharks in the 2 feet of water circling us.

Snorkeling out of a dingy in deep water is more difficult than snorkeling from shore because you have to be able to climb back into the dingy from the water. Since the inner tubes of the dingy are 15 inches in diameter, and elevated above the water by the floor of the dingy, this is no easy task for the unknowing. To make it possible to do so, we have a stirrup to use to put one leg into, and then a rope across the width of the dingy with knots on it so we can pull ourselves up, across and into the dingy. In all fairness Joel doesn't use the stirrup. I do. He just uses his arms and pulls himself into the dingy. Other dinghies use a rope ladder in place of the stirrup, but I find that that's actually more difficult to use because the rope ladder just ends up under the dingy.

Frigate birds were flying around us, male and female. The male frigate bird has a red breast that he blows up to gigantic proportions when he's interested in getting the attention of a female. Is that why 'business people' like to wear red power ties, to attract the attention of females? We actually saw a rare site in that one male frigate bird actually flew down to the surface of the water and grabbed a small fish.

Back on the boat at 1:30 PM we did laundry until 3:30 PM. Do do laundry, I first separate the whites from the colored, and put them into a 2 gallon bucket at the rear of the cockpit where I use a special washing plunger to pre-wash the clothes. Then I put the clothes in our manual washing machine set up in the galley. This device holds 4.5 pounds of clothes. I fill it with 6 quarts of water, add 4 tablespoons of Tide and maybe some bleach if its just whites, then crank the handle for 2 minutes. Then I take the clothes out, spin the dirty water out of them in our centrifugal dryer, then put them back in the washing machine for a rinse. Once done, they go back in the centrifugal dryer, and then are hung up on the life lines to dry.

At 6:00 PM most of the crews on the boats headed to the beach for a Tom Neale sundowner party. Tom Neale was a hermit who lived on Suwarrow for 6 years back in the 50's or 60's. After the party we headed back to the boat for supper. Spaghetti with butter and garlic powder, peas and carrots followed by chilled pear halves for dessert.

From 10 PM to midnight I wrote emails and sent them out over the air waves via our SSB. I had a hard time sending them to Manihi and Niue, even though they are both relatively close (500 miles). I finally connected to a SSB server in Honolulu, over 2,000 miles away. I spent a lot of time answering emails to crew coming in to do a leg in Fiji, Vanuatu, MacKay, Darwin and Bali. Its important that crew fly into the right location, on the right date; and leave the boat at the right location on the right date.

346 days until home.

Brian Fox


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