24 hours at anchor

May 22 - A typical 24 hours at anchor AKA 4 am when the front comes through till 4 am the next day 

A (wee part) of the view from our second anchorage...

 We have been sitting anchored around the wrong side of the island for a couple of days waiting for a front to go through because the current wind makes it impossible to anchor elsewhere. (It is the wrong side of the island in the sense that it’s a wee isolated bay far from anywhere - the right side of the island being beside the one and only town, the place you can land your dingy and set off exploring from.) About thirty sailboats visit Easter Island every year and all three that are here right now are anchored in the same bay as us waiting for the weather. One, owned by a Canadian who single-handed from Panama, has checked out already and is just waiting for weather to sail on west, the other, owned by an Australian who single-handed from Costa Rica, is, like us, waiting for a chance to go to the harbour by the town and so to visit the island. (Yesterday evening we had the other two over for a drink, a totally enjoyable time.) 

 My ‘day’ began at 4 am when the cold front we had been waiting for went through. Holy shit batman! The commotion woke me up and I went up to sit in the pilot house so I could have a good view in all round (I could see blackness in every direction for anyone who cares), listen to the wind and the rain, and, of course, worry a bit. I expected the captain to get up and check on the situation too but apparently he was chilling in his bunk less worried than me. Mostly, I can tell you, I am thrilled that we were not at sea. The front was like a wall. BAM. Three things happened at once: the wind changed direction, its speed went UP, and the hammering rain arrived. Since we are at anchor and all the weather instruments are turned off I can’t tell you exactly what the wind speed was but I can say this, it was howling - a technical term which means freakishly fast – and the rain was beating down as if being ejected from a high pressure hose. Sven’s custom rig, as one calls a made-to-order boat, cost about 3 million to have built (yeah, wow) but for some reason, although he has a large wonderfully enclosed pilot house and a large well-protected cockpit, he didn’t get the halyards and reefing lines led back so every time you want to adjust the main sail, put it up, take in a reef, take it down, etc, you have to do up along the exposed deck at the side of the boat to where the mast is and do the work right there being, if it is very windy, blown about by gusts and drenched in waves sea water, and, if it is raining, rained on. (Even the wee boat Geoff and I bought had lines led back so you could do work safely from the cockpit.) So at 4 am I was listening to the crashing of the waves, the clanging of the rigging, the drumming of the rain, and frankly, as I mentioned above, was thinking how thrilled I was that we were not out at sea. What kind of sailor am I anyway? 

Eventually the others got up and the weather settled down to more gentle winds, low nondescript grey clouds, and that steady sort of rain that gives the impression it will go on all day. It felt like a Saturday. We lingered over breakfast, had a second cup of coffee, and then slowly, without any undue stress, started a couple of inside chores. (The captain repaired the grey water pump, Lisa pulled out her sewing machine and made a new clothes peg bag to replace the one that I had let fall over board the day before, and I emptied and cleaned a couple of lockers we had somehow missed before we left whose back walls were growing mold.) Lisa prepared squid for lunch. The Australian, who had left his jacket last night by mistake, came by in his dingy. In the afternoon the captain and I both downloaded our photos to our computers and worked on our respective journals then sat in the pilot house reading for a bit. I had a nap, we all sat together and sipped a glass of wine and watched the sunset, I made supper, we ate, we watched a movie and, finally, we all moseyed off to bed. 

At some point in the late afternoon the coast guard had phoned on the VHF radio saying that it was still no good at the anchorage by the town but recommending that we move to a third different anchorage even further round the island. Sven decided not to go so 4 am finds me up again, sitting in the pilot house, and worrying, wondering if we ought to have moved. The winds shifted when the front came through and then calmed down during the day but, now, 24 hours later, have picked up again and big, very big, waves are coming straight at us from out at sea and so the bay, which protected us before, no longer does. The boat’s motion resembles more than anything else a bucking bronco. It is restrained by its anchor and feels it. As each wave hits, WHAM, the bow of the boat seems to hesitate for a second before shuddering violently and then lifting way up, and I mean WAY UP, causing the anchor chain to rattle with a loud clattering that is deep enough it resembles thunder, then plunging back down again, then THUD swhish, the wave passes below and the boat fishtails and rocks dramatically from side to side and finally, WOOOOOSH SPLASH crash, the stern itself splashes spectacularly through the end of the wave. Over this plays the sharp thwang of stays being stresses and released as they restrain the mast which is whipping over and back as the boat rocks, a deep deep BOOM like a Buddhist gong from who knows what, the constant wash splash rush of water past the hull, and a gazillion random loud clanks and rattles and other assorted noises from shackles that have worked their way a little loose or things not lashed down tightly enough or the contents of cupboards not quite full. So I’d crawled out of my bunk and gone up to the pilot house to see what I could see (stars flung across the sky above and the moon rising to the east and the old volcano landscape behind the boat, very dark against the less dark sky, looking like the Little Prince’s snake who had swallowed an elephant) and all the motions of the boat and their associated noises were louder and more dramatic and I found myself thinking exactly the same thing I’d been thinking exactly 24 hours ago, “Man, I’m glad we’re not out to sea (and what kind of sissy sailor ever thinks that)!” 

Yep, just another day at anchor.

Kyboshed

May 20th - On how my anticipated tourist activities are kyboshed, for the second time in a row, by the captain’s misinterpretation of upcoming weather conditions. 

I have to preface this entry by stating that we are currently at Easter Island, which one might think is in the South Pacific, but, weatherwise at any rate, is still much more like Patagonia, where the saying, ‘If you don’t like the weather wait five minutes,’ is too close to the truth to be funny. 

We climbed to Alexander Selkirk (AKA Robinson Crusoe) lookout,
he climbed there everyday to see the other side of the island to look for ships.

 So… my story starts exactly two weeks ago, on a Monday, the day before we left Robinson Crusoe Island. The airport on RCI, as I will call it for short, is on the far side of the island, and, since there are no roads that go there, there is a ferry, well a wee fishing boat actually, that coordinates with the weekly flight from the mainland by doing a two hour run around the coast taking any outgoing passengers to the airport and then returning with the incoming ones. This happens on a Tuesday. If the seas are too rough for the small boat to make the trip then the airplane doesn’t fly. The ferry is supposed to be for air passengers only, but since I was there on RCI and it seemed like it might be an interesting thing to do, I went into town on Monday to try and find out if there was any way I could sweet talk my way into a ride on the ferry, there and back, just so I could see the other side of the island. I had no idea who to see to set this up but as I passed by the park ranger’s office I decided to stop in and ask if they could tell me. As luck would have it the wasp experts, Rodrigo and Pillar, were there, talking to the head park ranger. They were going to fly out the next day but rather than taking the regular ferry the ranger was going to take them out so he could give them a guided tour of some of the different ecosystems on the far side of the island. Then, after dropping them off, he was going to go to the fur seal colony and do something park rangery there. And, miracle of miracles, when I expressed an interest in the airport ferry he said it was unfortunately not an option, but, instead, he would take me with him for the day! Wow. I was on cloud nine, it sounded like a fantastic once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Obviously, however, from the title of this entry, you will have perceived that this is not how things turned out. I got back to our boat and Sven stated that he was planning to leave at noon the next day, Tuesday, to catch a good weather window that would allow us to get away before a coming high set in. I told him of my planned trip to the other side of the island and asked if he could delay our departure by just a few hours so I could take advantage of it and his answer was an unequivocal NO. I was, needless to say, slightly disappointed (read totally crushed) but, well, what is a lowly crew to do? I’d asked, he had replied, and his reasons almost made sense; he said that the winds were going to be perfect for a short time only and if I got stranded on the other side of the island (something that seemed highly unlikely to me) then it would put off his chance of leaving and, windwise, we’d be totally screwed. So. I didn’t get to go with the park ranger, didn’t get to see the other side of the island, didn’t get to visit the fur seal colony, and, of course, to add insult to injury, rub salt in the wound, or, if you prefer, to make me feel as if I were kicked when I was down, though we did leave at noon the next day as planned, the captain had apparently misinterpreted the weather forecast, or maybe it had merely been wrong, and we ended up stuck in the middle of the high with no wind at all to speak of and, hence, merely motored, instead of sailing, for three whole days. Aargh. 

Part two of this story occurs exactly two weeks later. We got to Easter Island on a Monday, anchored, and had the authorities come aboard to check out our paperwork, our passports and visa, our supply of fresh fruit, our garbage, etc., etc.. Then we put the dingy in the water and went into town for lunch. While there I went to the tourist office to inquire about guided tours. Easter Island is such an amazing place anthropologically that I had decided I had to spring for a real guide to take me round and tell me about stuff. (For those who are not familiar with its story - which is perhaps overused today as an ecological parable for what might happen to the world as a whole if we don’t look after our resources a little better – it goes like this… Easter Island was a south pacific paradise when first colonized by Polynesians over 1000 years ago. There were no native animals but the vegetation was amazingly lush. On the geographically isolated Galapagos Islands the turtles had grown to be huge; on the similarly isolated Easter Island the palm trees were 7 feet in diameter! Because they had plenty of food, chickens and vegetable species they had brought with them supplemented by local fish and birds, and were too far away from other islands to expend energy trading or fighting with them, the inhabitants developed a very rich co-operative society composed of 12 tribes, each of whose land had different resources, and proceeded to build the huge (up to 270 ton!) now iconic statues. One day, however, the last tree was cut down. They lost not only the wood they needed to transport and erect any new statues but also fuel for cooking food and for cremating their dead, material for building boats and hence fishing at sea, habitat for land birds and hence that source of food as well, controlled drainage for their fields, and the list goes on. By the time the island had was encountered in the 1700’s by the Europeans the civilization had crashed into complete anarchy with cannibalism rampant.) But, back to my story. On Monday I discovered that there was a guided tour, in English, leaving from the tourist center at 9 am the very next morning. With my experience from Robinson Crusoe Island still relatively fresh in my memory, and, given my knowledge that the wind was due to come up and that we might have to switch to a different anchorage, I was tempted to stay on the island overnight, just get a room in a hostel, grab the iron while it was hot and do this tour right immediately before the opportunity slipped away. We’d only come in to the Island for lunch, so I didn’t have anything with me (no clean underwear or toothbrush for example, and, more importantly to my mind, no extra camera battery) but it seemed like the best, if somewhat dramatic, plan to me. I was stressing more about my camera dying and having to live the Easter Island experience there in the moment without being able to record it on film than anything else. When we all met up at the dingy at the designated time to go back to the sailboat I talked to Sven about my staying on the Island overnight so I could do the tour the next day but he said that that was absolutely unnecessary, that the weather conditions were fantastic, that he’d be happy to run me into town the next morning. By 9 am? Certainly. No problem. No doubt about it at all. So I believed him and went back to the boat for the night. Yes. Well. That evening a call came in from the coast guard recommending that we move to a different anchorage at first light, and, by morning, it was, as my kids would have said when they were younger, a ‘no brainer’. The wind was up to 30 knots, the waves were huge, and we were totally unprotected. There was no discussion at all about going into town, about my lovely English language tour, about anything. Right after breakfast we pulled anchor and sailed – a fantastic day sail as a matter of fact – round to the other side of the island where we proceeded to re-anchor in a picturesque protected spot far from any possible dingy landing. We can see several volcanic cinder cones from where we are anchored, and 15 of the stone statues lined up along the shore, but, but, but… Man, I knew I ought to have stayed on land. I hope I come to really like all the sailing, because, let’s face it, the fates are not interested, at all, in letting me fulfill any of my current touristic aspirations!