February 28, 2008

Update from Majuro
Having received a little encouragement from friends and family, I just sat down to put together another chapter in the travels of Sequester. I knew it had been a while since I wrote, because I couldn’t really recall what the last letter contained, so I did some checking. Looks like I have a five week selection of events and impressions to work with! Everybody talks about the weather, and that goes double for sailors, so we’ll do that first.
Just after the last letter I wrote, a boat called Chameleon arrived. Dave & Patricia are old radio friends of ours, and I knew Dave was good with weather, but didn’t realize that he was a professional meteorologist. He soon agreed to present all the yachties with a seminar on Pacific weather, and we all spent a Saturday morning learning what drives the wind and rain in this part of the world. It’s a particularly interesting area, because so close to the equator it receives quite a bit of influence from both southern and northern hemisphere systems, and being so far from any continent, it has no major “weathermaker” region, like Antarctia is for New Zealand, or like Northwest Canada is for North America. The final upshot of hours of discussion was that it’s great fun to dissect what just happened here, but no professional weather forecaster would place a large bet on their own forecast here in Majuro. Too many variables, so what you see is what you get, with the one major positive that cyclone strength winds are virtually unknown here. That said, we experienced a two and a half week “drought” here last month. On a piece of real estate this narrow, the fresh water “lens” (a shallow aquifer common to atolls) is pretty small, as is the reservoir, so the rain doesn’t have to stop for long before the 30,000 souls depending on it need a refill. Fortunately, (although at times inconvenient) it’s back to pretty frequent downpours here, as the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone has settled in over us. Now we need to figure out how to send some of this water down to Kiribati, where it hasn’t rained hard and long for a year now. Nobody remembers that ever happening before, and it’s making things difficult on the outer atolls.
Karen’s volunteer work at the Rita School kindergarden has had some ups and downs. The kids are pretty much always an up, while the uneven performance of the staff can be quite frustrating. But especially in the last two weeks she has felt that the teachers are looking forward to having her come in, and are relying on her for ideas as well as routine help. She’s trying to introduce some teaching strategies she learned from our friend Linda, a retired (but actively volunteering) teacher. The trick is to apply enough pressure to get some movement without pushing enough to stir up resentment. So far she seems to be walking the line quite well, and this week a newspaper photographer showed up to get pictures of her with the students, playing with the big set of wood blocks she made and donated to the school. The long term yacht dwellers here are anxious to widen the connections between us and the local people, and Karen’s actively making progress, and friends, in that sphere. My turn comes up next week, when a class of 8th graders will visit the Shoreline shop where a set of moorings is being made up. The moorings will be set at all the popular dive spots, to allow boats to visit without damaging the coral reef with their anchors, and the aim of the visit is to acquaint students with reef conservation. I’ve volunteered to do a short teaching session on line splicing, to help keep their attention focused while they’re at the shop.
Speaking of shops, I had mentioned that I had been hired to help refit a local fellow’s power boat. It’s a pretty long term project, and a unique one. This is a 32 foot high speed sport boat, and like many performance boats the construction consists of a “sandwich” of fiberglass/resin skins over panel cores of balsa wood. Balsa is both light weight and structurally stiff, so it adds a great deal to the stiffness of the hull. Unfortunately, it’s also prone to rot if it isn’t kept dry, so it’s important to seal up any holes where fasteners or fittings enter the fiberglass skins. I’ve repaired rotten balsa core before. This is a new wrinkle, though. Somehow the local tropical termites got into the core, and virtually ate the whole thing. It still looked like a boat, but it felt like an aldente noodle. Doug had taken on the repair job, and had gotten it stripped out, and started replacing the balsa with structural foam (termites don’t eat PVC plastic) but it was taking forever. He’d built a tent to work under, but had no tool security, so had to set up all his tools every day, eating up about 30% of his time. We talked the owner into letting us set up a shipping container next to the tent, and after an intensive week of work on it, I have outfitted it with a work bench, shelves, a window, lights, and a fan, as well as a big padlock. Most of my tools are now off the boat, and the project is moving nicely. We can’t seem to get in 40 hours a week on it, but it keeps us out of trouble and pays for food, as well as providing a place for our personal projects. Both Doug and I do a few small jobs for the anchorage dwellers, and allow some “hobby shop” activity for the other boaters.
Another plus of the shop is that the tools there amount to several hundred pounds no longer stowed on board. Most of the time that makes no difference, but last week was our second racing event with Sequester. Two of our crew of Worldteach teachers didn’t show, (may have succumbed to the epidemic of pinkeye rampant last month) but the other two brought friends, so we still had 4 on board for the race. The boat sails noticeably better without excessive weight on board, so with the addition of 4 crew, the loss of the tools is a good thing. The race day was pleasant, if a bit gusty, and two of the girls had a little experience for this one, so we had them doing a lot of the sailing while we supervised. Our time around the course was pretty close to what we did the first race, but a smaller field and some breakage on other entries moved us up to second place this time. Prized are awarded to finishers, not by place, but according to what each captain pulls out of the hat at the awards dinner. We drew the grand prize, a 55 gallon drum of diesel fuel. We don’t even have a diesel, but it won’t be hard to sell at a slight discount!
And now a word (or several) from Karen!!!
The last week has been pretty busy. We had our cruise ship visit on Saturday. The locals went to a lot of trouble to clean up the island and put on a good market for the visitors. Unfortunately, it POURED rain for the 5 hours that the ship was here. And that was after not a drop of rain for the previous month. Our drought seems to be over, as it has rained quite a bit this week.
On Tuesday we had the annual general meeting of the Yacht Club and I was elected as Membership Director. There are 7 of us on the Board, so I will attend board meetings and be a voting member. There are 2 more yacht races for the season, one in March and another in April. Most of the boats that are moving on this year will leave by the end of April, and then it will get pretty quiet for the summer.
Wednesday is my Kindy day, and I’m developing a good relationship with the teachers and, of course, the kids. A photographer from the local paper came and took a picture of the class with the building blocks I had made. The kids loved having their picture taken and will be thrilled to see it in the paper next week. My friend Linda, who is a yachtie and retired kindy teacher, has been a great help in giving me ideas to pass on to the local teachers. She came up to the school on Thursday and donated some puzzles, books and baskets for organizing materials. I started attending a handicrafts class this week to learn how to weave. I’ve already made some necklaces, bracelets, anklets and earrings. I want to learn how to weave baskets and the wonderful hanging ornaments they make here. The Marshallese women are known for their handicrafts and Lucia who owns the shop here buys most of the crafts from the outer islands and sells them in her store. The same photographer who took the picture of the kindy class came to the shop to take of picture of the handicraft class. Guess I’ll be in the paper twice next week!