Anchor Well and Weather Fax

I expected to have a quiet New Years Day.

After my usual light breakfast of coffee and toast I decided to tidy up some financial lose ends. After visiting my bank accounts to confirm that I hadn't been ripped off during my passage to Hawaii I got into my Paypal account and completed verification of my bank account. I then went into my Skype account and put another 10 Euros into it to cover calls that I expect to make from Hawaii. Given that Paypal and Skype are new to me since Tahiti, visiting the accounts was a worthwhile exercise of confirmation and re enforcement.

In the late morning I started to do some preliminary work on removing the inspection hatch from the bulkhead of the anchor well. It is a plastic hatch firmly bedded down with Sikaflex, a tough, sticky, rubbery compound. I first went to the back of the shop and found a piece of ordinary ply board, 17mm thick, which would do to fill in the hatch opening. John saw this and pointed me to a nice piece of treated ply which would make it resistant to moisture and rot. Now that I had the filler wood on hand I got into the job full-pelt. I decided that it was easier and safer to destroy the plastic hatch rather than risking damage to the bulkhead. After removing the hatch I spent over an hour of patiently scraping off the Sikaflex from the bulkhead. Once this was done I cleaned the entire area with turpentine. By then everything was out of the V-berth area with the cushions on the deck and the other contents scattered about the boat. It was going to be more efficient to finish the sanding today rather than to replace everything and then take it out again in the morning. I put on my protective costume starting with the talcum powder and started sanding the rim around the hatch opening. I then remembered that I'd better get ice and something to eat before the store closed in 10 minutes so I rushed over hoping that there were no customers to be startled by my appearance. Wally was there and soon he was at Pachuca giving much-appreciated advice. He can lend me a good jig saw and produced some fiberglass matting for the floor and sides of the anchor well. It must be pretty obvious that Wally had been a godsend to this project. I worked until sundown finishing the sanding then finished the cleanup and restoration of the V-berth area just after dark.

In the evening I dedicated some time to getting weather faxes out of Hawaii. I had a choice of three frequencies which I had keyed into channels B1, B2, and B3 of the shortwave radio. There is a fairly wide selection of weather charts and satellite images covering different parts of the Pacific Ocean. Attached are screen photos of two of them.

The second one is a 24-hour forecast produced by the Honolulu Forecasting Office covering most of the Pacific Ocean. New Guinea and Australia are at the bottom left corner. The heavy lines in the middle represent the equator and the 180 degree meridian. Northeast of that intersection are the Hawaiian Islands. Further to the north and east at the top-right corner is the Puget Sound area. You can see that there is a nasty Low in the NW Pacific and it is heading east. The little squares on the chart have the word "gale" in them.

The first one is a 48-hour surface forecast produced by the Ocean Prediction Center covering from the latitude of Hawaii on up. To me it looks like a sailing nightmare: 4 lows, two of them huge; the word "gale" appearing all over the place; a "dvlpg storm" west of Puget Sound; many wind arrows showing strengths of 35 and 40 knots. (Each full barb on the wind tail represents 10 knots, and each half bar represents 5 knots.) Had we proceeded to Puget Sound a few days after arriving in Honolulu as we had planned we would have been in that stretch of strong SW winds just south of that developing storm, or maybe east of it perfectly positioned to have the storm pass right over us.

You can see these charts very clearly if you enlarge them by placing the cursor on them and double clicking the left mouse buton.