Miss Samoa Pictures

A few pictures from the Miss Samoa pageant 2012. These were some of our favorites. We do not have a good picture of Miss Samoa as our camera batteries died :(

3re place contestant

Runner up - very popular with the crowd

Traditional costume with black wrap

Coconut fibre costume

Children's dance group

Provisioning review - 6 months out

It is about 6 months since we left Mexico and I would like to put down a few thoughts about how our initial planning worked out.

We laid in a huge amount of dried goods, cans, and bottles when in Mexico - enough for 6 months of cruising. The conventional wisdom is that such things are scarce in this part of the world and very expensive in French Polynesia. Well, this is not entirely true. Some things are very expensive in French Polynesia but many are quite reasonable, especially once you reach the Society Islands. If you are following in our footsteps, I would suggest you lay in about three months worth of staples, rather than six months because you can resupply at fair prices in Papeete or on Moorea. We have heard that Raiatea is also a good spot to reprovision.

The advantages of just buying 3 months of supplies are that you are more likely to make less mistakes in your estimating, you will have more space left on the boat for other things, and there will be less spoilage if you get things wet on passage . Also, you will have less money tied up and it is quite fun to reprovision in a foreign place because of all the different things people eat - such as tinned pate and superb cheeses that we found in French Polynesia.

We over-bought in the following areas: Oatmeal, granola, and bran flakes - ingredients for my morning cereal. For various reasons we eat far less cereal now than when I was in Mexico. I put this down to really good French breads and the fact that we discovered crepes, which I now make every few days. Butter - I think we still have a few pounds of Mexican butter going rancid in the fridge. Canned butter is reasonable and plentiful in Polynesia. Cheese - We still have a couple of kilos of Mexican cheese, which I could happily have replaced in Papeete with nice Ementals, Camemberts, or Bries. Rice and lentils - available here at good prices. Canned goods - we ended up cooking mainly with long lived vegetables and have used very few cans. Beans - we have enough dried beans for another year.

There is now a general panic in the fleet because most people are worried that when they reach New Zealand in November, they will lose foods such as beans, dried fruit, canned and fresh meat, and anything that can sprout. I suspect a lot of stuff will be given away in Tonga or confiscated and destroyed by the reputedly strict quarantine officers in New Zealand - waste that could be avoided with some foresight.

Samoa

We arrived in Samoa yesterday (Friday) having crossed the international date line, lost one day, and gained an hour. That put us in in time to clear in through all the formalities by supper time and still manage to get out to see the 'Miss Samoa' pageant last night. Entrance formalities involved 6 people from 5 organizations and a walk downtown to the Immigration offices.

Ladybug is tied up in a marina for the first time since we left Mexico about 6 months ago. There are many boats here that we know, it being one of those cruising bottlenecks that is pleasant to visit and hard to leave. Gaku, our Japanese friends whom we met in the Marquesas are just across the dock and dropped over before we were even cleared in with a little bag of fresh vegetables, knowing how precious these would be after 4 weeks away from markets. 'Chapter 2' is also here - our good friends with whom we spent so much time in French Polynesia. They arrived with a loaf od fresh bread and tickets to the show. Truly it is the people you meet while cruising that make this experience so worthwhile!

The 'Miss Samoa' pageant featured six lovely Samoan women between 20 and 23 and was arranged similarly to other beauty and talent pageants, but with a very patriotic Samoan flavour and, of course, Samoan dance and music. The costumes were much more modest than those in the decadent west - Samoans are very religious (mainly Christian) people, which might explain this. Many of the dresses and outfits were of traditional materials - bark and feathers - and some were remarkably ornate and imaginative. The women were extremely beautiful and all were good dancers. One woman clearly had the crowd with her (friends, fans, and relatives I would guess) and they gave her tremendous support in the form of cheering and shouting whenever she came on stage.

That brings me to the differences between a Samoan audience and one back in Canada. The audience appeared to be unrestrained in ways that would be considered rude in Canada. People started leaving en masse before the show ended right in the middle of the crowning of the new Miss Samoa. Far fewer people clapped for the performers and the clapping was very brief. When one contestant banged her head while exiting the stage, due to poor light, instead of a few titters and a hush of empathy for the poor woman, the audience erupted in laughter that lasted for a full minute or more! Clearly slapstick would go over well with such an audience.

We plan to stay here for two weeks and rent a car to tour the islands.

All is not wine and roses

Well we had a record day on day one of our passage from Suwarrow to Samoa - 168 nautical miles in 24 hours - an average of 7 knots. To put this in perspective, our average speed over 5500 miles from Mexico has been 4.5 knots. However, such speed comes at a price - high winds and high waves make for very uncomfortable sailing and poor Rani has been green for the first couple of days. She is better now and was able to keep down a meal of fries and eggs this afternoon.

Also - back at home, the new tenant in our house had a sewage back-up as soon as she moved in. They are blasting behind our house, which may have caused a pipe to collapse, but whatever the cause, we feel bad for our tenant and also for our friends, Dave and Patrick Rife who we asked to fix the problem. They spent a messy few hours in our crawl space and for that we are very grateful and also a bit guilty-feeling! It is certainly frustrating trying to deal with issues like this from a sailboat in the middle of an ocean and I am swinging over to the camp that advocates selling the house before you leave on an extended voyage!

We are about 170 miles out of Samoa at 13 56 S 168 52 w. The seas are down from yesterday's 3+ meters but things are still rolly and we are barrelling along at 6+ knots. We look forward to making landfall at Apia on Friday morning (Thursday back at home - we cross the international date line tomorrow).

International Cross Roads

Tom Neale, the Cook Islander who lived alone for many years on the island off which we are anchored, would have been shocked if he woke up one day to the sight of 25 boats floating in his lagoon. In Neale's time on Suwarrow, one or two yachts a year might visit this isolated atoll. The fleet of cruising boats that is here now includes voyagers from Poland, Italy, Germany, Austria, Canada, US, England, Norway, New Caledonia, France, Malta, Scotland, and Australia. The yachts range in size from about 30 feet to over 120 feet!

Last night cruisers on the Australian catamaran 'Fantazia' organized a Blue Moon potluck on the beach. We feasted on an inventive selection including curries, salads, pastas, and freshly caught coconut crabs and fish. Around dusk, we walked across the island to see the full moon rise and to watch the shark feeding. Stephan from 'Charlotte' stood on the edge of the reef throwing pieces of fish into water boiling with 20 frenzied sharks ranging from 3 to 5 feet. To give the watching cruisers a thrill, Stephan reached into the melee and lifted a shark out by its tail. The poor thing was most perturbed when it found itself hoisted out of its element and tried its best to bite the hand that had been feeding it, but without success.

Tonight we were invited on a French mega yacht for another potluck. We had seen this boat when anchored off Fare in Huahine a month ago where it towered over the rest of the fleet with its five spreader rig. It is the largest boat in the anchorage at 37 meters with an 8.5 meter beam. The owner, Christian gave us a tour before dinner, explaining how engineering a boat this size presents quite a different challenge from smaller production boats. The vessel was designed and built in Holland of aluminum. It can be sailed by as few as two people, but the loads on such a huge sailing ship must be very carefully handled.

Obviously it is impossible to cope with the huge forces on a 37 meter boat without a lot of mechanical help. All the lines are controlled from an electrical panel at either of the two wheels. Hydraulics are used to to power all the winches. The primary winches for the genoa and main sheets are about 18 inches in diameter (the size of end-tables). The mast and boom are carbon fiber, the boom being much longer than a typical suburban house and wide enough that one could sleep across its width. Despite its huge size, the boom only weighs about 1000 lbs because of its ultra-light construction. The mast is held up by rod rigging with tension of many tons on each stay. The stays have no turnbuckles to tension them, but instead the mast was jacked up until it exerted 8 tons of pressure on the hydraulic jack and then wedged in place. The sails are huge and weigh hundreds of pounds each - the genoa alone is 1500 square feet - twice as large as all our sails put together.

Down below, there are two seating areas each the size of a large living room and below these, cabins for the owner and guests. The interior was designed in Italy and finished in a beautiful hardwood, mixed with panels of a white composite and laminate floors. The crew quarters and galley are separated from the owner's quarters by a watertight bulkhead and door. We were briefly shown the engine room where a caterpillar diesel provides both primary drive through a massive shaft and a bow thruster for maneuvering. The muffler for this engine is larger than our entire diesel. There are also two diesel generators that run about 4 hours a day to handle the electrical demands and two large water makers to provide on-demand fresh water.

Unusually for such a large yacht, Christian, the owner is also the captain and is always aboard the boat while underway. He usually sails with a crew of three other people, including a Swiss first mate. Christian, and his friends Pierre, and Idi, joined us and Carol and Livia from 'Estrellita' for a moonlit dinner on deck. Much of the conversation was in French, but I did my best to keep up, and was able to contribute a small amount. Christian is an affable host and made us all feel at ease. The next day he visited us for coffee on Ladybug and we were able to give him a somewhat shorter tour of our little boat.

We are underway for Samoa in 3 meter swells and 20+ knots of wind - rolling and surfing down waves at an average speed of 7 knots. At this rate it will be a fast, if uncomfortable passage. Our position now is 13 29 S 165 20 W.

Update from Suwarrow

It must be a week or so since our last post and we are still anchored in Suwarrow - a remote atoll in the Cook Islands.

We have spent the last week snorkeling on reefs around the lagoon, swimming with the giant mantas, and visiting nesting bird colonies on the motus that lie around the edge of the reef. There is also an active social life here, with potlucks on the beach about once every three days. We organized a wine tasting a few days ago and have had some great musical sessions with the island care takers and cruisers from a couple of musical boats who have recently arrived.

The snorkeling has been amazing: visibility up to 30 meters, gigantic coral formations with fantastic shapes and colours, and many fish that are new to us because they are not found as far east as French Polynesia. The corals at 7 Islands rise like three story buildings out of 10 meters of crystal clear waters and you can swim through openings in the coral and weave your way between the buildings - a feeling much like flying through a Disney-created fantasy city. On 'Perfect Reef', we swam across the top of the reef in only a foot of water - a sandy coral plain strewn with bi-valves the shape of baseballs. On the edge of this plain, the reef plummets into an abyss providing a startlingly blue backdrop to large schools of greeny blue parrot fish. At a smaller reef between 7 Islands and Entrance Island we saw a Napoleon Wrasse as large as the one we swam with at Fakarava - over a meter in length.

The mantas have a 'cleaning station' on a reef close to the anchorage and we have visited them a couple of times. One of these is entirely black, without the usual white underbelly. It is also the largest we have seen at about 3 meters - a truly imposing sight. We will post some pictures of these that our friends have taken with their underwater cameras.

The bird colony we visited lies on the Gull islands near the entrance pass. The birds were not frightened by the arrival of a dozen people and we were able to view them without binoculars. We saw a variety of frigate bird, different from the 'Magnificent Frigates' of Mexico. The young birds develop a rather handsome russet head covering as they grow older. There were also tern colonies and a handful of red-beaked tropic birds.

We had a potluck to celebrate setting a new record with 21 boats in the anchorage. Harry and Ants (Anthony), the caretaker and his assistant, played and sang Cook Islands songs as well as popular tunes that we were more familiar with. It turns out that Harry was professional musician in New Zealand. He is an excellent guitar player and has a fine voice. Ants harmonized with Harry and became more and more creative in his vocalizations as the evening went on and the drinks continued to flow.

We organized a red wine tasting and a dozen boats and more than 20 people took part. Michael and Barbara on Astarte helped by printing out scoring sheets and bar-tending. The wines were mainly French and from the duty free shop in Papeete, but strangely, the highest rated wine was from California - a Barefoot Cabernet Sauvignon. In second place was a Serame Cab from France, and in third place a Bordeaux.

We will probably be here until the middle of the week and then plan to sail for Apia in Samoa.

Arrived in Suwarrow

We are anchored in the small atoll of Suwarrow - a Cook Island administered as a national park. Position: 13 14.8 S 163 06.5 W We were the 21st boat here when we dropped the hook early this morning - some kind of record for number of cruising boats, I think.

The passage took almost exactly 6 days, with a brief wait this morning for enough light to enter the pass. Ladybug ran 720 miles to make good about 660 for an average speed of 5 knots. Not a fast passage, but given lighter following winds, we are happy with our fat little boat's performance.

We plan to stay a week or more here to snorkel the unspoiled corals and enjoy the reefs and beaches of Anchorage island. To balance all the dry, boat maintenance related posts, Rani has promised to write something interesting soon.

Motorcycle Chain Lube

Last night the wind vane pulleys were squeaking, so I reached for a can of dry lubricant that has become a staple of maintenance on board Ladybug. One squirt in the right place and I could go back to sleep while Rani watched for ships on our 5th night out from Maupiti.

I came across this product while sailing in Mexico. The marine version is called Sailkote - a Teflon-based dry lubricant that we first heard about from a sail maker in San Carlos. This costly product (about $30 for a medium sized a spray can) is excellent for lubricating sail tracks and jib head foils as well as for blocks and other areas where you do not want to use oil that will wash off or stain. The lubricant sprays on and then dries leaving a slippery waxy coat.

I bought a partially used can from the sail maker, but when it came time to replace this and lay in a couple of cans for our trip south, I balked at the price. So I did some research and found that what I believe is a similar product (possibly identical?) is used to lubricate motorcycle chains and control cables. The cans we bought are made by DuPont and are called "Teflon Chain-Saver". You can buy this in hardware stores in the US for about $6!

We should make landfall in Suwarrow tomorrow morning after heaving to tonight to wait for good light. The entry pass is coral lined and there are more cruising boats anchored here than at any time in the recorded past, so it may take a while to find a place.

Energy Consciousness

Another thing about living on a boat is that you are always conscious of your systems - energy (diesel, propane, and electric) as well as garbage waste disposal and water. In a house in town, you have utility companies and municipal services for most of these On a boat you are the head of your own multi-faceted utility company. I have written before about water use, so will talk now about electricity, which I don't think we have blogged about in any detail.

When a boat owner is trying to work out their requirements for an electrical system, there are three areas to be concerned with - storage, use, and production of electricity. Storage is a matter of selecting the correct number of suitable batteries. These are usually lead acid deep discharge batteries and the common choices are vented wet cell batteries that require periodic topping up (e.g., golf cart batteries or marine deep-discharge units) or sealed units such as AGMs or Gel Cells. We chose to install three group 27 Trojan AGM batteries because we plan to leave the boat in warm sunny areas and will not be around to top up the batteries. AGMs also typically last longer than regular wet cell batteries, although they are much more expensive ($750 US for our three batteries).

It turns out that the number and size of batteries depends on both how much electricity you consume and how much you can produce in a day. You also need enough capacity to tide you over between recharge periods, which may be when the sun shines (if you use solar panels), when the wind blows (using wind turbines) or when you run your engine or a generator to generate electricity from gas or diesel. You don't want too many batteries because they cost plenty and weigh a lot and because if you have more battery capacity than you can recharge easily, this is just wasted.

To produce electricity, we rely mainly on solar panels (250 watts total) and an 80 amp externally regulated alternator on our diesel. As a rough way to calculate how much we will generate per day, I used a rule of thumb of taking the watts and dividing by 5 to get amp hours per day (although in the tropics on sunny days you may do much better, this allows for the odd cloudy day). Amp hours are a useful common unit for dealing with production and consumption. I also assume I will run the engine on average for an hour every other day, producing about 12 amp hours per day from this. I try to treat this as a bonus, because ideally I only run the engine when we need to as part of a passage or on leaving or entering anchorages. So that gives us a total of 62 amp hours generated per day.

That leaves consumption of power. To determine this, you do an energy audit, which is simply a list of all the things that consume electricity and an estimate of how much you use each one per day. This is different when on passage versus at anchor, so I did 2 lists. Here is one list for at anchor:

Fridge: (varies with air & water temperature - measure this to calc): 6 amps for 10 minute/hour: 24 amp hours
Interior lights: 2 @ .4 amps for 4 hours + 1 fluorescent @ 2 amps for .75 hours: 4.95 amp hours
Propane Solenoid: .5 amps for 1 hour: .5 amp hours
Anchor light: .3 amps for 12 hours: 3.6 amp hours
Net-book charging: 2 amps for 3 hours: 6 amp hours
SSB transmission/reception: 2 amps for 1/2 an hour + 25 amps for 10 minutes = 5 amp hours

This list gives us a total of about 45 amp hours per day. underway, we probably consume another 12 amp hours for instruments (24 hours @ .5 amp/hour) and 4 for periodic use of the radar for a total of roughly 60 amp hours. You can see that the fridge is the main consumer of power, especially in the tropics. We actually used about 15 amp hours per day in cooler Mexican waters. Our fridge is very small and we do not have a freezer. As an aside, we have friends whose refrigeration consumes far more than 100 amp hours per day - they run a generator every day to keep things cold.

It looks like we have a slight surplus here when in port and a rough balance when underway, assuming we do not get too many days of cloudy weather. If this happens, we must either cut down on our optional consumption (mainly Net-book time) or run the engine more often. Note that I have not included the water maker consumption here as we only run this when we have a surplus of solar energy on sunny days or when we are running the engine.

One final thing - how did we determine we needed 3 Group 27 batteries? I assumed we would need to last for two days without recharging. We do not want to run the batteries below 50% charge as this reduces their lifespan, so two days is 120 amp hours, which is a little less than the 150 amp hours (300 amp hours/2) the batteries claim as their rated capacity. You want this extra room for various reasons, but mostly because you rarely charge your batteries to 100% of their rated capacity.

The sick room

I was struck today by how similar the experience during the first few days on a long passage is to that of being home from school with a cold or the flu.

You spend much of your time in a state of semi-consciousness with the thick head caused by lack of sleep. In some cases you suffer from a mild nausea caused by the rolling and pitching of the boat. You can't go anywhere and you spend way too much time lying in your berth or slouching around the cabin. Your back starts to ache and your bum gets sore.

You eat easy to prepare comfort food, read books, and watch movies because there is nothing else to do. You can't go for a walk and all your friends are playing somewhere else.

On the plus side, if you like clouds and water, there is an every changing vista of these rolling by. We spend hours in the cockpit when the weather is good. We check in to a radio net each day to hear other cruiser's voices and learn where everyone is. Oh - and the thick head usually goes away after a few days...

We are 2.5 days out of Maupiti with about 366 miles to go to Suwarrow. Position 15 22 S 157 08 S We have been averaging 125 miles a day in light SE winds and mixed swells - broad reaching.