Ahoy Matey's
So to catch up on the rest of our trip about 2000 kms from Tahiti to Tonga!
My new shipmates turned out to be Eli, also known as "Manimal" and Marina the 40 something Scot who is not afraid to tell you she is always right!
She's also enjoys to party a lot and reminisce about her days in the Caribbean on a party yacht which sold shirts saying "I came I saw I jumped of the Willy T naked!". Which you had to do to get the free t-shirt, one season they gave 22,000 of these away. And then you have me of course and our Cap'n who upon my arrival told me that some of his previous crew think that "the sun shines out his ass" while others regard him as a "anal prick"! So far he's not proved too popular with the crew who like to imitate his cries of "asshole" and so on in his nasally and annoying voice. So he definitely suffers from a case of Grumpy ol man syndrome which can put a damper on things. He's also a nudist which can be a little shocking in the mornings to wake up to and has a swollen foot to contend with from an old infection, but that's another story.
Life on a sailboat. I was intrigued by it, I came I saw and on the first day aboard got into the engine room in just my boxers to clean all the goopy oil and water out of the engine getting nicely coated in it aswell in the process.
This then led of course to the question of showers. "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" in the words of Dave. The shower on the boat is used for storage and since the boat can't make fresh water from the sea we are limited to the water supply of about 150 gallons on board. Joy! that's the dishwashing liquid that Dave uses, and so you jump in the water, get out add joy! and then jump back in to wash off, get out to rinse off with a little of the ships fresh water. At sea we go about 3-4 days before the showers are really needed. Dave seems to smell again after a couple of hours though!
From Tahiti we dashed across to the neighbouring ilse of Moorea which had great snorkelling and we managed to dive down and pick up a couple of big conk shells. The interesting part was trying to etract the conk who would keep trying to get away with it's on arm. In the end we boiled them and they slid out. Unfortunately Marina's conk had been dead a while and when it came out we looked up to hear gagging sounds coming from the galley and a super strong odor the cause of which was quickly ushered off the ship!
It was 600 miles to Rarotonga the capital of the Cook Islands and we set off after a sleepless night in windy conditions. My first sea passage! Woohooo! I was soon feeling the exact opposite as we hit a rainstorm and tough seas making me rather seasick! The reality of sea passage soon sunk in with each person doing 2 three hour shifts to watch the wheel and for other boats etc. I was given the 12-3 watch. At night you look over the side at the phopherescent plankton wake which glow when disturbed by the ship. Above the mooon is in a sideways position like a big smile of a chesire cat. Meanwhile you scan the horizon for any lights of ships or approaching squalls and try to steer the course without letting the forward sail called the jib to flap too much. Otherwise an angry naked man will appear to demand what your course is.
After 5 days in the twilight zone of eat, sleep, watch we sighted the peaks of rarotonga in the distance to cheers from the crew. None of us had yet succumbed to agrophobia- the opposite of claustophobia and none had yet fufilled Cap'n Dave's prophecy that by the end of the trip we would all be nudists!
