April 18, 2008

Back in the big city;
The return trip from Aur to Majuro was pretty much as rough as the trip up, and to my mind a bit less pleasant because of heavy cloud cover. I like to see the sky on night watches, and although the moon was near enough full to provide a general glow to help visibility a bit, the cloud never cleared enough to see a star. We sailed through several squalls, but stayed a little dryer than the trip up, because we remembered to snap on the port side cockpit spray curtain. I got the windvane to steer pretty well for my first watch, but about 2 hours into Karens next watch conditions got too irregular and she switched to the electronic autopilot. It's good to have options. When I came back on deck about 2 AM I decided to just leave it on the autopilot. I slowed the boat some more, but we still arrived at the Majuro pass 40 minutes before sunrise. The moon had set about 4:00, so it was pretty dark, but there was enought predawn light for me to see the outline of Kalalin Island, and the other side of the pass had navigation lights. For a shallow boat like Sequester there's about 3 quarters of a mile of usable width in the pass, so I felt safe enough to make the run into the lagoon without waking Karen. When she got up, we were just inside, and I was changing the sail to start the 11 mile upwind beat to the anchorage. With rain showers and variable winds, that took 4 hours, but by late morning we were on the mooring, and after basically securing the boat we visited with Russ (his boat is named Hyglig, a Danish name, pronounced "hyooglie") and went over to see Richard and Chris on Windswept. Russ had left last week, and was in Tarawa, 400 miles south of us when he heard about Windswept on the radio. Being a good friend to them, he turned around and sailed back to see that they were OK. They are dealing remarkably well with the loss of the rig, and I may be able to help Richard build a new mast here. The system that clouded things up for our run south intensified after we got here, and today it rained pretty much continuously. So, no water shortage, and I had time to read more of the report on the Marshall Islands socio-economic conditions over the last 15 years. Not really compelling reading, but important if I'm going to try to do anything of substance here. Karen got a bunch of errands run, and spent the afternoon cleaning out the dead paper from the file cabinet. A rainy day well spent. Life is OK. Ted