December 7, 2007

Moored in Majuro
It continued to be "interesting" sailing after I wrote this morning's note. I couldn't make a solid radio contact with the sailmail station for a couple of hours after I wrote, because of a combination of bad radio propagation, torrential rain, and too much to do. After Karen got up I did get a few minutes before we got to the pass into the lagoon. Once inside it would have been an easy reach back up into the anchorage, except that every few minutes we caught another short but wicked squall. Couldn't sail between them without adding more sail, and wouldn't have kept the mast in the boat if we didn't get back to very small area as soon as things started to darken again. But we finally made the mooring field. Several tries on the VHF radio failed to raise Majuro Harbor Control, but it did bring up Cary, who met us with his dinghy to show us to a mooring. We sure didn't want to put our anchor down here....it's 85 feet to the bottom, a VERY long recovery when it's time to move.
It was an interesting trip in a couple of ways, primarily in that we finally saw dolphins. Two evenings we were visited by a pod of a rather small variety. Watching them play around the boat we noticed that several of them had what appeared to be lesions or wounds on their skin in various places. We wondered whether it was trauma or disease. At least one adult had a half grown calf swimming with her, staying very close. After they left us yesterday evening I went to the bunk for an hour of sleep before I would take the first night watch. When I woke, I noticed a new sound, an irregular squeak that could have come from a tight line, knotted to a fitting and squeaking when the boat pitched. But it was too frequent for that, and I was soon walking around the boat, listening to everything. In the cockpit and on deck it was almost inaudible, but I put that down to the wind and sea roar. For a while I thought it was some small leak in the gasket of the centerboard trunk, breathing when the boat surged over waves. But then I noticed it wasn't connected to the motion. I had a notion then, and went to the cockpit, where I watched the silhouettes of the waves for a minute. Then I saw it, the profile of a dolphin breaking at a wave crest in the faded light. We were hearing the dolphins communicating as they crossed under, in front of and behind us and each other at speed in the dark. It was their collision avoidance sonar. A fine beginning for a night watch. We averaged pretty close to 6 knots for the trip, reef pass to reef pass, which is not bad. We managed to get here on a Marshall Islands national holiday, which nobody knew about. The consensus among those we've met so far is that the officials would rather we don't bother them, just check in Monday morning. Good enough for us. We're going to bed. Ted