Hilo

13 December 2008

Today we went out with Jeff in his rented car for a drive along part of the coastal drive of the island.
Tim from “Karili”, a Valiant 37, joined us. When I visited the amenities block for a hot shower to prepare for the outing I met Richard and his diminutive wife Dora who had just arrived from the mainland. Richard, who has been visiting his harbour since at least 1981, said that when the weather gets rough the swell pours over the sea wall turning this bay into a cauldron. Even the large coast guard boat gets out and anchors in the large bay where Arnold and I spent the first night for safety. He also said that he had seem my fisherman's anchor and it would definitely drag along the soft mud bottom in a heavy blow. He said that he used to have a fisherman's anchor and got rid of it. For the Hawaiian islands and the NW of the USA he recommends that I use my 45-lb plow anchor which I thankfully brought along. He also pointed out something that has been a worry at the back of my mind: if you are at anchor for a few days and the wind takes the boat in a circle around the anchor the chain will foul the anchor and possibly dislodge it, whereas a plow anchor will reset itself. He accepted that the fisherman's anchor may be OK for the Australian coast line with its weed, sand and rock bottom but it would not do for this part of the world. I plan to take his advice and intend to make the anchor swap when we are under way to Maui. This will offer the advantage of much, much easier deployment. (No setup: just drop the anchor and raise it.)


Hawaii is known as the “big island” and Tim says that to drive around it completely takes about eight hours. It was good just driving down the road and seeing the terrain and housing and how people live in Hilo. We wound up at a very pleasant cafe where Arnold and I shouted the others (i.e. paid) for lunch.

Tim is a very quiet but very interesting person. He was in Mandurah, Western Australia with this boat at about the time that we left on our trip – I think that he said April, and we left in early May. By then he had rounded the Horn, stopped at the Falklands, then bypassed South Africa and sailed directly for Australia. In April his left W.A. and sailed around the south of Tasmania and wound up in Hobart. From there he went to Opua and stayed on a mooring then left very shortly before we arrived. From Opua we sailed to Tahiti then Hilo. Not Tim. He sailed from Opua eastwards toward Chile, where he wanted to go. (Note: everybody seems to like Chile.) He got east of the Marquesas and the wind changed so he went to the Marquesas and from there headed for Hilo. Tim is a minimalist sailor. He has no EPIRB, life raft, or HF radio. His anchor chain is rusty and his single set of spreaders are sagging. (He doesn't know why. He went up and had a look and the welds and joints are fine.) He seems to sail the old fashioned way: by instinct and the seat of his pants. He is thinking of sailing to the Seattle area of the US but isn't sure. Talk about a free spirit.

Jeff was in the movie business and is semi-retired. He hopes to put his boat into storage somewhere in the Hawaiian islands to attend to his affairs at home but isn't sure if he will find a vacancy. Hawaii does not have adequate facilities for transient boats.

On the way back we stopped in town and visited the market. Arnold and I bought fresh fruit and vegetables then I headed for a grocery store that Tim told me about and purchased a few bags of groceries that we would need for the next legs to Honolulu. This included two large containers of rolled oats which I've been hankering for since Tahiti.

When we returned to the anchorage we saw that another boat had arrived. The had just arrived after an 18.5 day sail from San Diego, California.

14 December 2008

It was a busy and hard morning. I started the festivities by going up the mast to loosen the upper joint of the inner forestay located between the two cross trees above the radar scanner. I managed to do the job without dropping any tools, fittings, or myself off the mast. The inner forestay is now coiled up and ready to present to a rigger for duplication. In the meantime I have dropped the two running backstays because I think that there is enough support for the mast as a sloop rather than a cutter.

Then Arnold took to the Zodiac to circle the boat to paint the area around the waterline with a strong solution of bleach. The idea was to kill the growth before we tackled it with scrapers and abrasives. I then dedicated 30 minutes to tie on the port rail spray dodger that we had been forced to remove during our passage to Hawaii because it was taking too much of a hammering from the constant port heel of the boat. I then faced the task of going into the water to free the prop shaft of the trip line rope wrapped around it. Being an asthmatic from way back I don't have the best lung capacity in the world so I had to make many short dives with at various times a Stanly knife, screw driver, ultra sharp serrated kitchen knife, and hack saw to cut away 95% of the rope. A small fragment of rope remained wrapped tight to the support and I saw no harm in leaving it in place. With time it will drop off. After that I cleaned the rear of the hull where Arnold could not reach from the dinghy. The area around the engine exhaust was particularly bad because it was covered in soot after many hours of engine runs. Arnold did his cleanup circuit of the hull while I cleaned the algae growth along the gunwales and at the end we had an amazingly good looking hull that had not been cleaned since Australia and has been cruising for more than 7 months. The antifouling below the waterline looks amazingly good – probably because of the fast boat speeds we were reaching to get to Hawaii – and I am hopeful that we will arrive in Seattle with the hull surface in reasonable shape.

By then it was afternoon and we went ashore with me wearing nothing but wet underpants (“Ladies, it is the latest in Australian bathing suits, called 'budgie smugglers'.” I had a how shower while Arnold went ahead to the store for lunch. I soon joined him (Chilli beans and rice) and then Arnold went in and bought matches and a cigarette lighters. Our last remaining gas lighter had failed and the matches on board were a bit too soggy to use. Anyway, cheap gas cigarette lighters seem like the way to go for a reliable means to light our gas stove so we plan to sail out with about 10 lighters in our supplies.

I spent the mid afternoon looking at a very useful Hawaiian cruising guide that Dieter had loaned to us. We now will probably bypass Maui and head for Ala Wai harbor (I'm in America, so American English from now on, hence “harbor” instead of “harbour”) west of Waikiki and east of Pearl Harbor and Honolulu Harbor on Oahu. We will attempt to get a berth via reciprocal club privileges at either the Hawaii or Waikiki yacht clubs. Failing that our fallback will be to lay at anchor some distance off Waikiki beach in 6 m of water. Ala Wai harbour is within walking distance of just about every facility that we need, so we are hoping for success. Our fellow yachties have confirmed what the books have stated: Hawaii has extremely poor facilities for transient yachts and pens, moorings, and hard stand storage are extremely difficult to find. Dieter said that some owners are charging $50.00 per night for their moorings.

Dieter came by and we returned his books with our thanks and then Jeff visited with a big tumbler of whiskey and ice. By then I was nursing a neat Napoleon brandy so the timing was perfect. After giving Jeff a tour of the boat I attended to his request of the morning: show him how to bake bread. He had tried several times with various recipes with no success. After verifying that his oven was similar to mine I went through the process step by step. (“It is like mixing cement” I said.) He took that in then I wrote down the procedure step by step. After that Arnold showed him what he had on the GRIB file weather services via satellite telephone. Jeff has an Iridim satellite telephone but has not managed to get good weather information from it. Tomorrow Arnold will help him get set up with the GRIB file weather system. After that it was just three sailors shooting the breeze.

I learned that Tim lived in a cabin in the mountains of – Oregon, I think – for 17 years when he decided to realize his other dream of sailing. He then sold his property and bought his boat and started sailing. We agreed that although he is on a shoe string budget and has cut all sorts of corners on equipment it is he who has done the serious sailing, e.g. round the Horn and the world. Earlier today we saw Tim and I suggested that the only way out of here was to head for the NW of North America. Nope, not Tim. He'd be quite happy to sail from Hawaii to Chile even though it is not the done thing. (But who are we to talk? The official in Papeete was very polite in stating that basically we were highly unusual (i.e. “nuts”) to be sailing from NZ to Tahiti to Hawaii. And how orthodox is crossing the Bight, Bass Strait, and the Tasman Sea in winter?)

Jeff is very interesting. He was in the movie industry doing camera work (e.g. chase scenes) and has worked with Francis Ford Coppola, Spielberg, etc – not to mention commercial work with various well known artists such as Keith Richards. As I escorted Jeff off the boat I asked him to tell me more about Francis Ford Coppola, whom I admire greatly for “Apocalypse Now” and other movies. He said that in the industry he worked with really great people and some real jerks. He had special good words for Sean Connery whom he described as a courteous down-to-earth gentleman.

I love cruising. Yes, it can be cold, wet, dangerous and terrifying. But then you get to see great places, great boats, and most of all meet interesting people from the entire spectrum of human existence.

15 December 2008

It rained pretty heavily all night. It turns out that Hilo has a reputation of being a rainy island and some yachties avoid it for that reason. I had been concerned about Richard's warning about fisherman's anchors not holding well in this mud ground and also the prospect of fouling the anchor if the wind blew me around the anchor, so I had set up the 45-lb Manson “plow” anchor the night before, complete with 10 m of 3/8” (10 mm) chain and about 60 m of rope. The anchor is on the roller and if we drag I will motor forward to position myself then drop the plow anchor.

In the morning the wind was all over the place as the various squalls passed and I elected to stay with the boat while Arnold went ashore to get the laundry done and have a hair cut. I saw him off on the Zodiac then set to work doing a complete cleanup of the head (toilet), food cupboards, and floors. I also sponged out the water in the port side lockers. The cleanups included wiping walls and ceilings with a solution of bleach to get rid of the mold.

Arnold returned at about 2 PM and I decided to go out shopping. The trick was to use the shuttle bus service associated with a cruise liner that was in port to get transport to and from the shopping mall. I managed to get to the departure place minutes before the bus arrived and I was soon on my way; I spent $160.00 at Safeway on groceries then used their trolley to get the heavy supplies back to the departure point. There I transferred the groceries to my two $5.00 carrier bags and was soon on the last shuttle (4.45 PM) returning to the harbor. On the way back I struck up conversations with the various cruise passengers and they seemed mesmerized by my story of our sail so far. I told them that from the liner they would be able to see Pachuca in the middle of the bay with her blue mainsail cover and the name “Pachuca” on the cover. Shortly after I arrived at the boat I cracked a beer and stood tall on the cockpit coaming and hoisted the beer to the ship. A few people waved back. Shortly after nightfall the ship was gone, due in Honolulu on the following night.
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Jeff arrived shortly before night fall and he and Arnold had a good session working out the problems with Jeff's access to the Internet. Jeff left the laptop and his other electronic gizmos in the care of Arnold,who persevered with his quest – ultimately successful – to access the internet on Jeff's PC via the satellite telephone.

Jeff presented the Pilot charts for the NE Pacific Ocean and passed on dire warnings from friends of his in the fishing industry to not venture into those waters during the winter. Jeff spoke darkly of passage time of more than 40 days and a cold, wet, and dangerous experience. However, examination of Jeff's own pilot charts for November does not show significantly bad winds; The storm tracks are generally to the north, toward Alaska. “Ocean Passages of the World” gives instructions on the passage from Hawaii the Seattle in November without any reservations about doing the passage at that time of year. It is all about probabilities and risk. If I thought that there were significant enough I would not hesitate to winter over in Hawaii and do the Horn a year later than I had planned. However, at the moment the objective information does not seem to warrant a postponement of out trip. I am fairly confident that our good access to weather information and the equipment on our boat (e.g. parachute drogue as a last resort) will see us through.

16 December 2008

The first thing we did this morning was to spend over one hour packing away the groceries that I had purchased the previous day. We carefully assessed what we already had, packed everything as as sensibly as possible, documented it in the inventory book that Brenda has left us, and did some cleaning of the starboard locker along the way. While we were doing this Jeff came by with his copy of Jimmy Cornell's “World Cruising Routes” so that we can get more information on sailing to Seattle.

We were having a hot drink on deck after our packing effort and saw Dieter cranking in his anchor chain by hand in order to depart. His wife had returned home a few days previously and he was moving on to another bay with plans (and permit) to visit Palmyra Island which is 1000 nm to the SW. He told Arnold that he then plans to beat his way back to Hawaii. (Better him than me!)

The Arnold and I took the courtesy shuttle bus of the day's cruise ship, “Pride of America”, to Wal Mart next to the shopping center. The bus driver dropped me off at “Best” hardware along the way where I purchased a hack saw and two extra blades, turpentine, two gallons of denatured alcohol for the metho cooking stove, two buckets, some electrical tape, and two cartridges of silicone sealant. The walk to Wal Mart was not easy – about two miles lugging the material by hand. I got there just as the shuttle was about to leave for the dock and joined Arnold who was already on board after having done some more shopping.

We were planning to depart the following day, Wed the 17th, if possible. Now that the shopping had been done our tasks were to: have an Internet session to update this blog and check our emails for the first time since Papeete, fill up the port water tank (starboard one was full) and spare water containers, and make a phone call or two. Also, Jeff was returning in the evening to get more help with his computer system. He entrusted Arnold with his laptop and Iridium phone over night and Arnold was able to get on the via the Iridium phone which Jeff had never been able to do. If all went well we would depart the next morning for Oahu, possibly stopping at Maui for the night.