Pago Pago, American Samoa -- 29 July 2007
When we went through the pass at Taapuna in Tahiti, we got the wind on the nose immediately. Also, it rained all the time and was quite cold. Soon the wind turned into a "Maramu", which lasted for a couple of days. The heavy-duty hinge on our freezer door broke in all this rattling chaos, but after two days Maiao Island lay astern. When the wind got lighter I tightened my shrouds by three turns each, as I didn't like the way the leeward one was swinging about. The wind continued to lessen, so that we only made 41 miles on the seventh day.
The lack of wind didn't bother us one bit, we didn't use the engine, but concentrated on good food like wonderful Shuijiao, which reminded us of our life in Taiwan. From LADY JANE III, we finally know that we definitely fall into the category of "foodies". I guess there are worse categories to fall into.
Rather unpleasant was the steadily growing list of things to repair or replace. The preheat on our port engine didn't work anymore, so I took the whole shebang out, deposited it in strategic places in the cockpit and rewired it all. After I put it back in, everything worked just fine again. At least one of my batteries must have died on me, but I wasn't all that keen on dealing with battery acid while being thrown all over the place. So I decided to leave things alone until we were in port. There were leaks from the cooling water, the topping lift had almost chafed through at one of the sail batten flaps and two of the battens continued to work themselves loose. One of my V-belts couldn't be tightened anymore and so we never were in danger of boredom.
On the ninth day we experienced a gale, which had me sitting in winter clothes and raingear at the helm trying to make sure that we took the seas from behind. Maximum windspeed was 46 knots while our maximum boat speed was 11,2 knots, which is actually rather slow for these conditions. After about three days things returned to normal and we set our watches to UTC - 11 hours, the time in American Samoa. It coincided exactly with our position as noon was at 12:00 o'clock.
On 16 July a particularly heavy squall with lots of rain came upon us, when I noticed big greenish shapes in the water near us. They were about twice as long as our boat, perhaps 24 meters and they could definitely move faster than us although we were moving at a good clip. I shouted "Thar she blows!" when the first one surfaced and I immediately noticed a comparatively small sickle-shaped dorsal fin on the grayish black body. This was one of the biggest whales I had ever seen. When I later checked with the help of various books and an encyclopedia, I came to the conclusion that we were dealing with a pod of Fin Whales (Balaenoptera Physalus), the second biggest beings on our planet. The biggest ones ever are the Blue Whales, which weren't even surpassed by the dinosaurs.
Unfortunately we couldn't continue watching these amazing creatures as the weather worsened and I had to give full attention to my boat. My favorite big rum and tonic glass jumped out of the kitchen shelf and shattered on the galley floor. Two sail battens came loose and three mast sliders disintegrated, so when the weather got better I took down all sail and sewed on new ones with thick straps. So much for not reefing when the weather gets worse.
After I had inspected my new bruises, cuts et cetera I continued to sleep in a twenty-minute rhythm. I was just too tired to stay awake continuously, but the cellphone didn't only serve very well as a mini torchlight, but as an egg-timer, stopwatch, calculator, computer game and so on as well. If we ever come back to Trinidad, we'll spend another ten bucks and buy two more.
On the eleventh day we finally got what Bernard Moitessier in "Sailing To The Reefs" called one of the essentials of a sailor's paradise. A steady four Beaufort and blue skies. Years ago, I considered Force four as barely enough for real sailing. These days it suits me just fine. Interestingly enough, I leave up a lot more sail than I used to. On this trip I hadn't reefed even once, gale or no gale. I simply cannot imagine capsizing this boat without the help of a massive sea. First all kinds of things would break (see above) and then I would imagine the stick to go overboard. Not that I want to experience that! I guess the essential difference to the Prout Snowgoose 35 DHARMA BUM I catamaran and the Ed Horstman Tri-Star 38 DHARMA BUM II trimaran is the seven meters of beam and the resulting ratio on our boat. It makes it so much more stable and as the storm of Colombia showed, so much safer in really heavy weather as well.
The next day we had a delicious cabbage-lasagna and Aurora Ulani asked us: "How could the GPS and the autopilot possibly communicate with each other?!? After all they have neither a mouth nor ears!"
The last few days were characterized by confused seas and unpleasant motion, but finally American Samoa came into sight and just before midnight we took down all sail to wait for daylight. The next morning we motored into the harbor, avoiding three canoes and getting circled by the big Police-RIB. We anchored in ten meters of fish soup and waited until Monday to clear in. Otherwise we would have to pay hefty overtime fees.
We soon realized that Pago Pago is a lot better than its reputation. Sure, the fish factories dominate the harbor, pollute the water and the smell is sometimes quite strong. But the Samoans are very friendly and where we expected a small city of some kind, we only found one very long village which stretches from one end of the island to the other. Buses are inexpensive, so are the goods and the hospital. We all went to the dentist to have our teeth checked and cleaned. For the whole exercise we paid all in all only US$ 60 and got tooth brushes, a dentist's mirror, plenty of dental floss and dental floss threaders for free. As the dentist was so nice, we invited him on board.
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Unfortunately the weather continued to be not good at all and when we came back on a particularly rainy day, we noticed that another boat had drifted into a derelict. When we arrived at DHARMA BUM III, we noticed that we had dragged as well. We started our engines and as soon as the anchor was up, the wind started blowing in earnest. This was decidedly not fun, as none of our GPS systems could get a fix - we are in a volcanic caldera after all - and daylight was fading fast. On the VHF we heard that at least two other boats were adrift as well and when I looked at our anchor, I found it fouled with plastic bags and clay-like mud. I tried to anchor twice more, but we weren't successful. Apart from the other boats, mooring balls, the coastline and a reef, we also had to contend with submerged buoys, which were threatening to foul our prop. Rain was pouring down, we were totally drenched and shivering in the cold.
When two boats advised us to pick up a mooring ball further up the harbor, we finally gave up on anchoring and risked the 100 dollar fine for moving our boat without prior written permission by the port authorities. Better to get fined than to smash into something.
In this wind it proved spectacularly difficult to pick up the mooring and we had to try numerous times. The ball was so heavy that I lost it repeatedly in the water before I could secure our boat. Then the boathook fell overboard which I could only save through a risky acrobatic maneuver. When finally all was set, I was quite ready to sell my boat to the first bidder.
It continued blowing all night and since I don't trust moorings, I slept badly. Having a mooring disintegrate once tends to seriously undermine the faith in those things.
The next few days were spent with various repairs and tests. I replaced two float switches and acid-tested my batteries. Sure enough, one of them was bad. I also checked cables and cleaned connections, but unfortunately I still can't start the starboard engine unless the port engine is already running. This holds true even when I connect the starter motor directly to the battery. So, either the starter batteries are seriously damaged from the short circuit in Papeete or the starter motor is. We'll have to sort that out.
Because of the passport issue and Liping's need for a visa, our original plan of going through the Torres Strait this season can not be realized any more. We will have to spend a longer time somewhere, preferably in a place where we can haul the boat and repair all the damage properly and inexpensively. Maybe that will happen in Fiji, but more likely we will be forced to sail into the cold and to New Zealand. There are only two months left before the cyclone season starts, so we'd better organize things in a hurry. Maybe we do that in Western Samoa or in Fiji. We might even make a little side trip to Tonga, but we haven't decided anything yet.
