Day 7 - Rolling Along...
Harmonie
Don and Anne Myers
Sun 16 Mar 2008 20:13
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06:55.281S 108:19.904W
Yes, we are rolling along. Literally. The
wind is still with us, which is good, but it is a little more behind us.
Wind a little more behind us in combination with waves building
to 6-7 feet results in a boat that tends to roll as it goes up and over the
waves sideways. This isn't so bad until you try to sleep and find yourself
rolling like a log in the back of a pickup truck whizzing fast down a very
curvy road. First you roll one way, and then you roll the other
way. The difference being that there is no immediate end to this curvy
road and we expect to be rolling along for quite some time. Like all
things at sea, this too we shall get used to given enough time.
Other than the rolling, we continue to make good
progress and are more than one-third of the way to our destination. That
would make this the Longest Sailing Leg on Earth Lite (1/3 less distance than
the Longest Sailing Leg on Earth).
We have two flying fish incidents to report.
The first happened on my watch two nights ago (why do flying fish incidents
always happen at night??). I was diligently conducting my night watch when
splash, flop, a flying fish hit the deck and proceeded to flip flop around in a
panicked state. I grabbed the flashlight to take a look and saw a fairly
large (bigger than the Atlantic variety), blueish flying fish staring at me
while it flopped around. I could distinctly hear it crying, 'Help!
Help! I can't breathe!' I thought to myself, 'I can do this!' and
went to grab it by the tail and flip it overboard. Nope, couldn't do
it. I just couldn't bring myself to touch that fishy tail with my bare
hands. Down into the kitchen I scrambled, and came running back up into
the cockpit armed with a pair of tongs. I tonged the flying fish over the
side hopefully in time to save its life (it was pretty docile by the time I
got it back in the water...).
The second flying fish incident involved Don, night
watch, a flying fish and no tongs. Last night a fish flipped out of the
ocean and landed, splat, right in the cockpit. Don, being the manly man
that he is, tried to grab the flopping fish by the tail to flip it back into the
water, but the fish would have none of it (stupid fish). Don then grabbed
the fin/wing and flipped the fish back to safety.
Somehow I think Don's fish faired better than
mine. However, if both fish did survive, they are probably sitting in a
fish pub right now telling their human stories and how they got away. Of course
all the other fish think the tongs version is much more interesting. So in
the end I guess my fish is better off because he has a better story to
tell.
Now it's time for...
Marquesas Semi-Useless Factoid #6:
Yup, you guessed it. Contact with the English and European explorers
in the eighteenth century brought some violence and lots of disease that
decimated the Polynesian population of the Marquesas Islands from a high of
100,000 people at its peak to the ~8,000 people that live there
now. Not a happy thing.
Anne
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