21 May - Land Ho!

0600 position 15-10S 171-12W. Day's run 131 miles

Fresh foods like cheese, meats, and eggs will be confiscated if there are
any left aboard when we reach Niuatoputapu, so at 1130 this morning I cut
up some of our remaining cheese and took it and some crackers on deck to
share with Rocky. We were sitting there enjoying our snack and I glanced
at the horizon to the north. "Huh, that looks like…. Holy Cow (not the
exact word used)! It's an island!" I could clearly see the outline of a
high island. It looked like a single volcanic cone. Navigators aren't
supposed to be surprised by stuff like land, so I took a bearing, rushed
below, and fired up the laptop and navigation software (we have been
shutting it down to conserve energy). Sure enough, it was Tau Island, one
of the easternmost Samoan islands. And sure enough it is a 3100 foot high
volcanic cone. It was twenty six miles away. Tau Island was right where
it was supposed to be, but I hadn't anticipated that we'd be able to see
it from that far away.

This afternoon I was entertained by little aku jumping all around the
boat for a number of hours. We were also accompanied by three tropic
birds that were diving for fish from about 100 feet up. I suppose the
tropic birds and aku were feeding on the same thing, but I never did see
the bait fish. Just after sunset a boobie decided that Moku pe'a would be
a good place to rest for the evening. Rocky was doing a wind check and
found him perched on the windex on top of the mast. We yelled and shined
our flashlights on him and he took off. Next he tried to land on the wind
generator. Lucky for him the blades weren't turning. We had to yell and
shine our flashlights on him a number of times to scare him away. The
bastard even crapped all over the bimini and dodger before he was
finished.

Rocky was able to see the loom of Pago Pago, American Samoa which was
about forty miles to the north during his evening watch but the moon had
risen by the time I came up at midnight providing too much ambient light
for me to see it. I did see a ship on my early morning watch though. It
was heading north, perhaps for Pago Pago, and passed astern of us.

The wind has slowly backed around to the north, just like the gribs
predicted, but we have had to live with squalls every hour or so that
produced dramatic changes in wind direction and strength, and rain. It is
keeping us busy on watch.

We receive our weather information by email over the sat phone. A free
Internet service called "Saildocs" extracts whatever weather data we
request from NOAA's world wide weather model, attaches it to an email, and
sends it to us daily. This is all done by a computer based on a coded
request that I submitted. After we are done messing with the satellite
phone for the day, I'll extract the weather, or "grib" file, from the
email we received and import it into our navigation software on the
computer. I can then see the weather forecast for whatever interval I
requested from Saildocs. For this passage I requested a 1, 2, 3, 5 and 7
day forecast for the part of the ocean we are interested in. Each
forecast looks like a bunch of arrows on the chart that indicate wind
speed and direction over the area between our starting point and
destination. We have to deal with whatever comes our way, but knowing
what kind of weather we are going to have in the future allows us to
optimize our routing to take us to our destination as quickly,
comfortably, and safely as possible