We are often surprised by tropical Islands. Always expecting low sandy atolls with palm trees we were often correct in the South Pacific but not elsewhere. Tropical islands are almost invariably volcanic in origin - a consequence of plate tectonics and lava flows at the plate boundaries. These flows, often large and violent can give rise to ongoing volcanic activity - Iceland is a current example. Even coral atolls started out as volcanic islands and it was Darwin who worked out that as the original island sinks, coral grows around the margins, sinking with the island (maybe causing or enhancing the sinking as the coral builds up). The coral keeps growing in the shallow water created as everything sinks and eventually as the remains of the volcanos submerge, you are just left with the coral growing on top. It is the coral that gives rise to the gleaming white sand and why volcanic islands without coral have black or brown sandy beaches.

So, when we arrived this morning in the grey and gloom of heavy rain clouds it was almost like arriving in the Marquesas. Tall cliffs and verdant green slopes, craggy serrated skylines and the most wonderful phallus (volcanic plug) dominating the island making those in the Bay of Virgins on Fatu Hiva (originally the Bay of Penises but the name was changed by the Jesuits) positively pubescent by comparison.

In yesterdays post I was desperately trying not to say anything that might tempt fate in the way of equipment failure or whatever. As I was cooking supper the pin holding the cooker in the gimbal bracket on the right hand side broke and the cooker fell on that side, wedging at an angle within the cooker space. Another 6000 miles without a gimballed cooker?! The same thing happened in Indonesia on the left side but we were saved by Jon and Colin who, minutes after we arrived at the same anchorage, had the cooker out and the broken pin replaced with a threaded bolt. I will attempt the same tomorrow. I mentioned this to Emily on EmilyLuna when she swam over to say hello after anchoring next to us.  She shrugged her shoulders and said that the same thing had happened to their cooker back in the Marquesas and they had sailed half way around the world with their cooker wedged at an angle. They cook using just one burner and holding the pan horizontal while doing so. Hmmmm.

The Duogen repair held up all the way here and it is now whirring away in wind mode. I’ll order the new arm and bearing for delivery to Antigua. The steering worked flawlessly both by hand and with the autopilot set on a low sensitivity setting. I’ll run further checks to see if the fault is somewhere in the steering linkages, within the binnacle or is to do with the autopilot.

On our last night of the passage the moon was as lovely as hoped for but it clouded over in the early hours and we had showers with intermittent moonlight. Annie’s two new stars reappeared in the same place, at the same time, with red and green flashing lights. Creepy.

I may have mentioned previously that timekeeping can be flexible on board. We choose the time zone so that we eat supper just before sunset and the start of our evening watches. In the tropics this is fairly straightforward - it gets dark at 1800 and light at 0600 so you are likely to coincide with the actual local time. Keeping track with the time in other parts of the world or local time away from the tropics can be more tricky. This is why we reference everything to Greenwich Mean Time which is now the universal constant known as UTC. Ships will usually keep a clock set on GMT and always did when Harrison invented a clock that would keep accurate GMT so that longitude could easily be calculated by comparing local time with GMT. These days our electronic devices do it all for us so we have never actually set our ships clock in the saloon to GMT. We have two iPhones and two iPads but without a wifi connection we were getting different time zones on each - even GMT was different. The situation worsened when the UK put the clocks forward recently. Our devices seemed to anticipate this but we weren’t sure if they had made the adjustment and if they had whether to the correct time! We resolved things for life on board by knowing that South Africa is GMT plus 2. St Helena was GMT and we had chosen GMT minus 1 after leaving. I thought it was about time we set the ships clock to GMT and left it there for all future reference so this is what we did. Until one evening I saw the time was 2000 and turned in for my evening sleep. Of course boat time was GMT-1 ie 1900, when Annie has an hours rest, and I had forgotten this. 

When we arrived here we found good cellphone coverage. We weren’t sure what the actual local time was but all the devices automatically updated to GMT-3 which is what it is in Recife and São Paulo so it seemed plausible and we were happy to gain two hours. We arranged to go to immigration tomorrow morning with Keith and Emily and then thought to check we were all on the same local time. Good job we did because it turned out that our automatic local time was wrong. You need to select Fernando de Noronha (it is there if you look hard enough) which is GMT-2. We instantly lost one of our two bonus hours!

Confused? Beam me up Scotty.