Nemo On The Rocks, Scuba, and The Sky

We spend a lot of time provisioning and finding boat parts. As we don’t have a car and taxis can be hard to find, we have been hitch-hikking and it works really well in Raiatea. On April 15 we were picked up by 3 French people and found that they were from the boat Nemo. Two days earlier, the crew at Raiatea Carenage had rescued them from running the boat onto the reef at the eastern pass by Taha’a. They had been entering the pass and were struggling to get a jib under control when the end of the jib sheet (line that controls the jib) went in the water and got wrapped around the propeller. So no jib, no engine, the mainsail was down and the wind and waves pushed them onto the reef. A real nightmare! Everyone was fortunate to escape with only minor injuries.

They were amazingly upbeat despite their problems. And, to be honest, they were really lucky. Nemo was up on blocks in the boat yard so we checked it out and we found very little damage. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed with some fiberglass and some paint.

Two days after this disaster, the crew stops in their rented car to give a ride to two random hitch-hikers. Time after time we have seen boaters go out of their way to help others. Whether it is ‘beach cleanup days’ in La Cruz, taking emergency supplies to an island hit by a cyclone or helping another boater fix their engine, people are ready to help. Part of it is probably that each person knows that sometime they will need someone to help them, but I think it is more than that. Boat people are good people!

But we don’t spend all our time on boat jobs and provisioning.

We have LOVED the snorkeling we have been doing on our travels but occasionally there are scuba opportunities that would be great to take advantage of. Peggy has done a few ‘intro dives’ but we decided it was time for her to get fully scuba certified. There is a lot to learn, but as Peggy has a medical certification dealing with how the body handles high and low pressure (aerospace medicine) she already knew all the principles behind most of the things scuba divers need to know. She found a scuba class that she could get to by dinghy and got her certification in a few days. Now we are ready when the opportunity arises. I do have one complete set of scuba gear on board, including a pressurized tank, but I think of it as mostly emergency gear, in case I need to do work under the boat or get our anchor unstuck from the bottom.

We also try to take time to appreciate the beauty around us. That includes watching the sunsets and the full moon rising over the water.

One of the great things about cruising is being able to look up at the night sky and see something very different from what we know from high population (high light pollution) California. You can often see the Milky Way quite clearly. In the southern hemisphere, you don’t see the North Star. You can see the Southern Cross, and while it does not contain an equivalent ‘South Star,’ you can still use it to find the Celstial South Pole. See the pic below. The Southern Cross is shown by the crossing green lines. The other green line is between the ‘pointer stars’ in Centarus.

If you draw a line perpendicular to the line between the pointer stars, and another extending from the ‘axis’ of the Southern Cross (the two white lines), they cross at the Celestial South Pole. This crossing point should be 4.5 times the distance between the ‘head’ and ‘foot’ stars that define the axis of the Southern Cross. Not as easy as finding the North Star, but it works and was a critical navigation tool for mariners in the southern hemisphere.