[p]kudzuu1114
[s]
pos: 13 24.718s 048 16.288e
d: 06/08/2018 1200 GMT+3
w: Warm, dry, wonderful
sp: at anchor 0.0
August 6 in Hellville, Nosy Be, Madagascar
No idea who or why they call it Hellvile, the Malagasy name of the main town on Nosy Be is actually Andoany, Robbie and I spent five or six days resting up after the short bumpy trip from Mayotte and exploring the joys of the town, well suited to the needs of cruising sailors. That's not to suggest that there are any marine services of any kind, but we no longer expect the impossible and content ourselves with a selection of nice cafes, a sufficient supermarket, an excellent local produce market (large and bustling) and, praise the lord in this land of 3m tidal range, a floating dinghy dock connected by passarelle to the concrete wharf.
A local man named Jimmy, who speaks excellent English, works full time during cruising season (May to October), self-appointed concierge to all visiting yachties. He and his assistant, Kool, are down at the town wharf from 7 or 8 each morning until the last dinghy has gone home in the evening to its respective yacht. For a modest daily fee Jimmy greets new arrivals, takes each captain on the obligatory tour of Police (Immigration), Port Captain and ATM, pointing out along the way where one might stop for a coffee, teaching a few phrases of Malagasy and answering any specific questions of immediate interest. And he stables your dinghy while you're ashore, protecting it and keeping it from inconveniencing the many other boats constantly coming and going from the small wharf. One, usually Kool, remains at the busy wharf all day long, jockeying around as many as half a dozen inflatable boats, moving them on and off the dock as water taxis and larger ferries come and go, sometimes dangling several of our floating charges from the end of a ferry while the ferry disgorges passengers, locals coming in to town or tourists dragging all their rolling luggage, and loads the next group departing Nosy Be, before herding his all the little tenders back to the wharf. This service for the rough equivalent of a US dollar a day, a great value, hugely appreciated.
We left one of our two aluminium LPG tanks with Jimmy last week, along with a cash reward for finding any way he could to have our American tanks with American fittings filled with gas. A couple of days later when we and eight others returned from the Scicilian pizza place (pretty good) our filled LPG tank awaited us in the dinghy and I was grateful Robbie didn't have to schlep the heavy thing around town as he has done in other countries, buying little fittings and new regulators that break upon initial use and trying to gravity fill the tank himself. I delivered our second tank, nearly empty, on the following morning and told Jimmy we'd be gone for a week or so, asking him to attend to tank #2 at his convenience and return it to us next time we pull up in Hellville.
Almost every country now offers the chain-link fenced LPG station with dozens of cooking fuel tanks available for easy swapping - drop off your empty tank and walk away with a different tank just for the price of the fuel, but that's not an option for us. Our solid aluminium tanks are very valuable, to begin with, and we have no desire to part with them in exchange for a rusty steel tank with a coat of new blue spray paint. Ours are fitted exactly to the locker in which they live, concealed below deck by a hinged lid near the galley, and they don't rust. We have resorted once or twice in desperation to the purchase of a local steel tank when fittings compatible with ours are completely unavailable and we have the rust rings in the bottom of our LPG locker to prove it. Would you like to buy a small grey 4.9l LPG tank that has a rusty bottom and says "Seychelles Gas SEYPEC"' Speak up soon or I'll give it to Jimmy next time we stop in Nosy Be. He'll find a good use for it and now that our own tanks are filled, I'm over it.
Three times on various errands in Hellville we walked past the Cote (caret over the o) Jardin restaurant before finally stopping there one day for lunch. Wooden tables and chairs, all painted distressed white, line the front of the building, and we'd noticed people there before at breakfast time. But the hostess who greeted us at 1PM invited us inside suggesting "you'd like to sit in the garden'" I'm not sure distressed white paint conveys quite the accurate image of Cote Jardin, and I was delighted to see snowy white linens on perfectly set tables as we walked through the indoor dining room, then was surprisingly and profoundly pleased with the garden, picturesque and tranquil with umbrellas to shade each wrought iron table, a separate outdoor building where wood-fired pizzas are prepared, tropical and old world flowers lovingly tended in beds around the few gnarled old trees that shelter the garden. My seafood salad was the most delicious composed salad I've seen since Seattle bearing a creamy honest-to-goodness French dressing, sweet baby shrimp and tender still-warm rings of squid that were perfectly cooked. Fine French dining, I want to try everything on the menu except the zebu. Already I have expressed an interest in celebrating my birthday there next month. I hope he remembers. Maybe Lisa will remind him - Lisa always reads this while His Robbiness does not.
Speaking of Lisa, she said to me the other night at the Scicilian pizza shindig, "There are PHOTOS with your postings!' I had no idea! I've always just read the text I get in the emails that tell me you've added something new!" If you've been making the same mistake, go look at the actual YIT page rather than reading the text-only messages subscribers receive when we post each entry. Those text posts are included for the benefit of cruisers, hampered by lack of Internet at sea, who receive our position reports via satellite email or SSB. If you're online, just click on the link that says www.yit.nz/yacht/mersoleil where you'll see exactly where we are and where we've been on a Google Earth image, and you'll be able to look at the pictures I've uploaded for various postings. The YIT page is prettier and much more interesting! I can only add photographs when I have Internet access, so they usually come a bit AFTER the text is published. Scroll down to review everything posted in 2018. Select a different tab to review our adventures for previous years.
[s]
pos:13 19.0S 048 09.84E
d: 07/08/2018 1200 GMT+3
August 7, Sakatia Island, Madagascar
The islands off NW Madagascar are lovely. It's dry, but not quite arid, and the waters are generally friendly and calm. We've stopped here for a couple of days while I recovered from a brief bout of not feeling well and Robbie made the social rounds at sundown, then hiked across the island (to another bay that looks exactly like this one) with Phil anf Karel (Tehani-Li) and Phil and Lesley (Pacifique).
After I came out of hiding we dined in a group of ten at a beachfront... um.... Well... Restaurant is decidedley too grand a word for the facility, but the meal was fantastic. Have you seen the steeply tilted benches that some cities install at bus stops' They offer a place to lean your derriere so long as your feet are firmly planted on terra firma below and you'll never find one of these occupied by a snoozing homeless person because they're impossible to lie upon without rolling off. Wooden tabletops perch upon wood posts planted firmly in the sand and one or two narrow rough planks, tilted a la bus stop benches, make up the seating furniture. Larger posts support a loosely thatched gabled roof and the proprietors had thrown a lace cloth over the best of their four or five banquest tables. We arrived in the dark and I never figured out whence was produced the food but it was delivered in delicious abundance, a crispy salad of tomatoes, cucumber, grated carrots; two outdoor grilled whole fish, crunchy and flavourful; marinated and grilled chicken that was tasty and piquant; tender octopus in a savory sauce; generous quantities of hot rice; a sweet dessert that Robbie says was some kind of pastry; and plenty of THB, the local Malagasy lager, placed on the table in icy cold bottles. Another wonderful evening among friends and great food and drink, one of the important rituals of cruising life.
Not far from our anchor, but far enough to go by dinghy, we snorkelled the next day with sea turtles. Two hours in the water is a long time for us, but it's mesmerizing, watching these big animals lazily munching their way through the sea grass in just 3 meters of water, swimming to the surface for a gulp of air every fifteen or twenty minutes. They're quite accustomed to humans swimming along and one didn't hesitate to surface just inches away from my face, eyeing me with mild curiosity as he approached, took a big breath and returned to the seaweed. Finally, sufficiently chilled and shivering, Robbie and I returned to Doggie, anchored nearby, for the sometimes humbling experience of hauling our wet, heavy, flippered selves up out of the water and heaving our butts over the pontoon into the boat. This is accomplished, usually on the first try, by clutching the pontoon with both hands, plunging down deep into the water, then with a great kick of both fins, propelling oneself up and high enough to flop onto the boat like a fish that's made a grave mistake. I usually end up with my hips on the pontoon, weight evenly divided between the top of the boat and 'fall-back-in,' and by rolling onto one side, I can change the balancer enough to gain victory and swing my legs over the side into the dink. Always humbling, even when successful.
One night while at Sakatia I created shrimp po' boys for us for dinner with fresh shrimp I'd discovered at the Hellville outdoor market. The nice little red plastic shrimp thing my mother gave me years ago does not seem to have made the cut, or I couldn't locate it anyway, but I found a hashi, a Japanese chopstick, proved a pretty good substitute for my slick shrimp sheller/deveiner and I had a billion small shrip peeled in ten or fifteen minutes. Fresh baguettes, shredded lettuce, sliced local tomatoes, homemade remoulade and a quick marinade and dusting with flour produced po' boys substantially equivalent to those I've had in New Orleans and they were a tasty treat for dinner that evening. I keep a list of "substitutes" in my recipe folder (how to make Bisquick when you don't have any, how to sour cream in a minute, etc.) but there was no entry for buttermilk, not too surprising I suppose since I never use buttermilk. I squeezed a half lemon into a cup of milk, it curdled right up, I called it buttermilk, threw in the spices then the shrimp, waited half an hour et voile. Po' Boys! We'll do that again! They were fantastic. All the shrimp shells and heads are now in the freezer waiting to flavour the cream in our next fish chowder. We eat well when near a good local market, and for ten days thereafter. Then it gets a little iffy and, well, I don't tell you about those meals.
[s]
pos: 12 54.199s 048 34.502e
d: 09/08/2018 1200 GMT+3
August 9th, Nosy Mitsio
Madagascar's west coast is characterized in winter by a reliable wind pattern of very light land breezes from early morning until noon followed by more robust sea breezes rushing back onto the land for the next twelve to fourteen hours as the earth heats up and draws cooler air off the sea. When we sail down the coast in early October to the point where we'll cross the Mozambique Channel to South Africa, we'll depend upon these alternating breezes to carry us south preserving fuel for the more difficult runs toward Cape Town.
Deciding to practice this balance of tack-west-in-the-morning-and-east-in-the-afternoon, we departed Sakatia at dawn yesterday and have come north about 45nm to Nosy Mitsio from where we'll begin our experiment a few days from now. Nosy Mitsio reminds us both of the lightly inhabited islands of Fiji, Vanuatu and French Polynesia. The air is dry, the sky and water both turquoise blue, and during the night a young goat somewhere on shore bemoaned with repeated mournful baa-aaa-aa-a-a-as the fact that he'd misplace his mother. We saw him this morning grazing on the hillside of dry, but still green, grass and feel confident he'll find mom one of these days soon and not go hungry in the interim. There are cattle on this island, too, as we discovered by ear last evening and confirmed visally today over coffee.
Rumor has it there are manta rays too, but it's a large bay and we're not sure where they hang out, so an exploratory dinghy survey is planned for this afternoon.
I dropped in a fishing line on the way up here, but the afternoon's effort went three for the fish, naught for me. First, we landed a nice big fish, but he was a barracuda, not esteemed as a food fish and commonly known to be ciguatoxic. I held him up by the line while Robbie rolled out the hook with a pair of pliers and he went back into the drink. The next two hits were wahoos that we never even saw, but they both took signature wahoo snaps at the lure, a black and silver squid, biting off the skirt at an angle first short, then shorter. I did not lose the lure, though, and will keep fishing with it since they seem to like it so well. I've been using a six inch piece of no. 12 electrical wire, twisted first around the lower side rail then around the line, to hold my hand reel up above the deck. I suspend the reel by passing the handline between the ends of the wire, then twisting them once or twice, just tightly enough to retain the line loosely up near the rail. When a fish strikes he snaps the reel out of the twisted wire and it bangs on the deck alerting the helmsman that dinner is at the end of the line. As the Aussies would say, it works a treat!
Every now and then at the market I buy something that I don't especially favour just for the sake of variety and to expand my culinary expertise (read play with it). I haven't yet got as far as okra, which they call lady fingers in SE Asia, and don't aspire to, but a large oval eggplant came home with me the other day so I made an Andalusian eggplant frittata for dinner last night. It seemed odd slicing the eggplant thin and boiling it for half an hour, seasoning the frittata mixture with the unfamiliar combination of cinnamon and coriander seeds, but I must say the result was pronounced a big success by both Mr. and Mrs. Collins and I will write VVG next to the recipe in my Mediterranean cookbook. It was the sauce, really, that got us excited. A mixture even stranger than the frittata itself, with olive oil, honey, a raw garlic clove, vinegar, black pepper and uncooked ap flour, the sauce is blended smooth and drizzled over the frittata. We could have eaten it with a spoon it was so lucious!
I'll happily send you the recipe if you ask, but beware that delicious sauce, making sure everyone you will see tomorrow partakes. When I woke up this morning, I thought the little lost billy goat had died overnight in my mouth. It took a strong cup of coffee and a pastry from the bakery in Hellville to set me right. Robbie and I agreed the sauce would be better than the usual olive oil with balsamic vinegar for dipping french bread before dinner. Or drizzled over steamed green beans. Or on a salad with citrus, radishes and onions. Oooh! So many choices.
Immediately after our arrival yesterday afternoon, as commonly happens at remote island anchorages, a couple of guys in dugout outrigger canoes paddled up to Mersoleil and began calling for our attention. We were tired though, after departing Sakatia in the wee hours, and did not feel like playing the game of bartering for bananas we really didn't need, so we remained inside until they finally went away disappointed at sunset. We've had lots of experience with locals approaching our boat, sometimes even banging right into it with their rustic local craft, and we much prefer to meet local people on shore or in their villages. Approaching us the minute we have arrived is just a touch too assertive for our taste, and often the individuals who have enough chutzpah to do this have come with a list of demands for rope, milk, fishing equipment and other items, even money, they think we might be persuaded to hand over. We do carry gifts, especially toys for the kids, sewing kits, fishing line, laundry soap, inexpensive sunglasses, that we enjoy sharing with others, but, having seen a few aggressive and even nutty characters closely scrutinizing Mersoleil, we prefer to entertain islanders at our boat only after we have become acquainted and invited them there ourselves.
I wish we still had reading glasses from the Lions Club to share with the people here. We became so proficient at setting up and operating our little optical dispensary in South Pacific island villages that we could refract 45 people and fit them all with reading glasses in about two and a half hours. It gave us a marvelous chance to interact with locals, to do something really valuable for them, and our 'clients' were thrilled to find after years of poor near vision that they could suddenly see to read their Bibles, or tie lines onto fish hooks, or sew again. Mizzy mentioned yesterday doing this in French Polynesia if she can connect with the Lions Club in Hawai'i. Do it, Mizzy! It's fun for everybody and a lasting contribution to the village. Even young people in their twenties came to us wanting readers - probably not needing them at all but not wanting to be left out. To these, we gave the 1.00 and 1.25 lenses*, telling them to get them out in the future when they become necessary. To those who found 2.00, 2.25 and 2.50 lenses helpful, we suggested that they would eventually want stronger corrections and could give these old glasses to somebody five years younger. To those who said, 'my sixty-eight year old mother can't see, but she is not well and couldn't come,' we promptly handed over two pair, 3.25s and 3.50s, knowing that the most elderly locals would not be able to come to us and that they'd benefit from the strongest lenses we had, sharing the extra pair with an elderly friend. No one who actually needed those strong corrections ever came directly to us, being homebound with poor health or having already learned from experience that it's safer to remain close to home when you can no longer see where you're walking.
While we don't respond very well to the begging of the boys in canoes, we clearly recognize that such possessions as the drugstore reading glasses we take for granted in developed societies are rare and precious gifts in poor, remote communities.
*We observed over and over again that neither does anyone who actually needs a correction as slight as 1.00 or 1.25 come to be fitted for readers. And concluded that either they haven't yet figured out that their near vision is beginning to deteriorate or that the old ego has still not given in to the admission that glasses are necessary. People are funny, aren't we'
[s]
pos: 13 14.960s 048 09.322e
d: 11/08/2018 1245 GMT+3
w: SW Wind 8-10kts at 26deg over the bow, sky clear as a bell, tiny ripples in the sea
h: 187T
sp: 5.0
August 11 2018
Sailing back from Nosy Mitsio to Sakatia
This has been the most fantastic sailing we have EVER enjoyed on Mersoleil! We've run nearly all the 40nm south to Sakatia with a SW 10-12kt wind just 25-30 degress off the starboard bow. Our speed through very flat water has been around 5-6kts, dropping as low as 2.5kts when the wind pinched to less than 25 degrees, then picking up again when it clocked back toward 30 degrees. In such calm constant conditions it feels as if we were at anchor, Mersoleil cutting alnog quiet as a whisper through the surface. We've never seen her do this before and it's a joy to experience such an idyllic sail!
Now, read on only if you're having trouble falling asleep....
The idle musings of a person on watch who hasn't enough to do, written early on this sail, before the wind increased to 10kts.
It's a beautiful day with perfectly clear blue sky, calm sea, and only 5-6kts of breeze gently urging Mersoleil southward from Nosy Mitsio back toward Hellville, Madagascar. We'll stop at Sakatia tonight, if we ever get there going only 2.5 over the ground.
After procrastinating on a repair for three full months since receiving new brown dacron thread in April, I've finally started the dreaded task of re-stitching the leather cover on our grab rail. Dedicating three hours to project commencement yesterday I managed only to remove the leather, pick off most of the old double-sticky tape from the back side, pull out all the old ripped stitches, re-stretch the needle holes with a very sharp awl from my sail repair kit (thank you, Hasse) and reattach the leather temporarily to the rail with a billion little black zip ties. This commentary is about the zip ties, sort of. Idle minds, as I said.
Just before we lost my camera (dang) I shot a photo of the grab rail with the leather held temporarily in place with zip ties every few inches, looking like the Statue of Liberty. Or like the third floor of Chicago City Hall, where pigeons like to roost awaiting the arrival of the lady in two hats and three raincoats who comes with a shopping bag to Daley Plaza every day around eleven and sits under the Picasso doling out stale bread crumbs to the well-behaved birds, the ones she knows and likes best.
If/when the camera turns up I'll post that photo....
Of course, all the zip ties will be nipped off one by one and discarded as I stitch across the leather, the third set of twenty zip ties that have been dedicated to this rail, for I've performed this work twice before. We purchase zip ties by the hundred and use them nearly every day on SY Mersoleil, usually for the obvious wire management applications, but also for odd and nutty purposes like this one. We simply could not get along without zip ties. Fortunately, they're available in electrical supply stores everywhere we've travelled, so while they're crucial to Mersoleil day to day operations, I'm not overly neurotic about zip ties.
Comedian Jeff Foxworthy was noted in the 1980s for his series of redneck jokes all beginning, 'You know you're a redneck if...' and including a large number that I find so amusing I've memorized them and could give you without rehearsal a thirty minute standup routine consisting of nothing but this low humor. One of my particular favourites is 'You know you're a redneck if you view duct tape as a capital improvement.' (Duct tape, not further addressed in this musing, is banned onboard Mersoleil. We do possess a roll of the stuff, but any yachtie will tell you blue tape is infinitely better for almost all uses and it doesn't leave that dreadful permanent gummy residue on everything it touches.)
But we DO value our zip ties as capital improvements, or at the very least essential equipment so important that they must be inventoried. Over the past month, with Robbie's recent Maestro Electricidad miracles, and now the grab rail repair, we've used so many of the little things, yet another brilliant invention that I wish I'd thought of first, that I reorganized our remaining supply, sorting them by size into two containers and retiring a couple of Ziploc bags that were once full of zip ties but are now available for a new use.
Ziploc bags another inconceivably precious commodity. What would we do without zippered plastic food storage bags!? American zippered freezer bags are definitely on the list of capital assets around here and if you are lucky enough to be living in that land of plenty where you can buy Hefty and Glad products any time you want them, I suggest you drop immediately to your knees and utter a prayer of gratitude. Nowhere in the world, at least nowhere I've been yet, has a product to compare to the small high quality storage bags one can buy at every supermarket in America. One of the bags retired yesterday from zip tie duty still says on its little white patch 'GREEN BEANS W/BCN AUG 9 2012' having served multiple rounds of important uses, being repeatedly washed, checked for leaks, dried and put to use again. We reuse and recycle plastic bags until they are truly too weary to continue and then, with grave misgiving, place them respectfully in the trash bin.
I've shopped for plastic bags in every single country we've visited. The generally available substitute for the American zippered plastic bag does not have a zipper, is made of such thin plastic that one can smell the contents right through the bag, and has a press-together seal that never actually closes or stays closed. It's remarkable the number of disappointing bag products one can find (I've tried dozens of imposters), and a great testament to the quality of Glad, Hefty and Ziploc was Heather Stembridge's remark, 'Oh you ordered more American zippered bags! I wish I had known. I want some American bags!' You'd think high quality food storage bags would be available in New Zealand, but sadly for Hearther, they are not. Neither in Australia, except at the Costco where they sell pinch zipped Glad bags, deprived of the tabs.
So we treasure and reuse zippered bags many many times, gradually downgrading them from 'food quality,' to 'no longer holds liquid,' to 'use for fasteners or spare parts,' to 'mini garbage bag,' at which point they finally go into the rubbish containing fish skin or chicken drippings or stinky cheese trash that we wish to segregate from the fresh air in the galley.
There's a repurposed bag circulating right now that I've seen several times in the past month, a gallon size Hefty refrigerator bag, that says 'yoga pants.' Even clothing lives in plastic bags, my silk scarves that would slide all over the place and onto the floor if I open a locker while Mersoleil is heeled over; sweaters, fleece pullovers, wool socks and whatever else I'll need again when we reach Cape Town's higher latitudes; the dozens of colorful bangles that I bought in India to wear with saris.
If it seems superfluous to write 'yoga pants' on the clear plastic bag containing guess what, consider this. The extra large bag we gather around a full canister of smelly saltwater in order to ferry it for cleaning from watermaker to the sink without spilling seawater on the rug looks exactly like the bag in which I keep fresh bakery items. After lunch when the croissants are all gone both these bags could easily be sitting on the counter next to the galley sink and I do not care to get them mixed up! We label bags not so one can tell what is ALREADY inside, something easily discerned without written clues, but so we know immediately what to return to each bag when they're sitting around EMPTY and it's time to put things away!
I have purchased zippered bags online and had them shipped to us on other continents - you can buy them by the hundreds at a nice discount from Walmart; begged my sister, Gretchen, to bring them to me when she visits (thanks, Gret); and thus far have resisted the urge to write a whinging email to Target who offers a fine selection that is 'not available for online purchase.' Obviously Target just does not understand how we live. And like Microsoft, who fails to grasp that not everyone has all-you-can-eat Internet all the time, Target apparently can't conceive of anyone living more than fifteen minutes from their nearest retail outlet.
Does this bore you' Does it seem ridiculous' I suppose maybe not if you're still reading, but I wonder if I have conveyed my point, that since leaving shore we have grown to sincerely appreciate small and surprising conveniences that seemed trivial to us in the past, things that (unless you're another cruiser reading this and nodding in agreement) you possess in abundance in your own home and for which it has never even occurred to you to be deeply thankful. Cruising the world has changed us in many ways we did not expect.
Velcro. Yep, Velcro, accept no substitutes and continue using your little Velcro straps until they disintegrate in the sun or simply die of old age. Light in weight, tiny and easy to find at one's neighborhood Home Depot, brand name Velcro is another essential, conveniently schlepped to us by visiting friends. Can't live without it and we have proven sufficiently to ourselves that the Chinese hook-and-loop wannabees are so inferior to the real thing that they're not worth buying at any price. The boat hook and landing net hang outside, strapped to our rails by two Velcro straps each, and there they remain tolerant of frequent use, long passages, high seas and the blazing sun. Velcro maintains order among Mersoleil's shore power cords, coiled and stowed when we're not in a marina; holds down long narrow flaps over the zippers on our dodger windscreen, keeping many of the big waves from filling the cockpit; fastens the little protective vinyl cover around a glossy teak table that's folded down flat when not in use. We could not get along without Velcro, definitely another prized capital asset.
The neck-straining back-breaking fun of re-stitching the grab rail leather will begin as soon as we anchor. It's difficult, time consuming and quite as unforgiving as knitting, in that if I make a mistake I won't see it until several stitches later and I'll have to rip back to the error and resume more carefully from there. It will take about 16 hours and extravagant amounts of self-discipline to keep me on task until it's completed and all those zip ties go in the rubbish with the bag of chicken skin.
The things that occupy my mind while I'm on watch. Honestly. One night I made a list on the back of the active sailing log page, the ragedy sheets we keep on a clipboard for recording position and sea conditions while sailing. I listed all the words I know ending in -ment, ornament, supplement, compliment, establishment, impediment, basement and some hundred and twenty more. Then I made a list of words ending in -mental to see how many of my -ment words could accept the further suffix 'al ornamental, sacramental, experimental. The 'mental list was shorted. I was amused. Words are fascinating.
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