Sunday, April 12, 2015

Notes from Shannon -

We are doing great out here.  The seas are flat and calm with almost no wind. The other two relief vessels had left Fiji and returned due to the formation of Cyclone Solo out there, which is likely to hit the Loyalty islands and part of it maybe the island we are heading to Aneityum.  Our weather router told us to continue to travel in "stand by mode" waiting out the storm.  Little does he know we are traveling at full speed with all the canvas out that we can muster!!  We seem to be peaking at 6 knots of wind and moving from 1-3 knots.  That is all we can do without the motors.  Of course using to motors to speed ahead and burn all our fuel stores only to then wait out a storm doesn't make much sense either, so we drift . . . (at full speed).  Fortunately it made for nice swimming twice today!  We have great sunshine and calm seas, so we did a load of laundry, we felt well enough to do school this morning, Courage unplugged our final plugged toilet, so all 3 are back in action, and now the kids are playing with balloons and bubbles on the front bow.  We decided to try trolling for a fish since we weren't speeding along, but no bites yet.

Oh yes, and to top it all off, we had ICE CREAM for dessert tonight.  That was awesome.  Usually a rare treat only eaten in port with stores that supply it, and usually we devour an entire 1/2 gallon carton since it won't keep and we didn't have a freezer, but now, we have the whole bottom shelf stocked with ice cream in our brand NEW freezer!!!  We are LOVING it!  Keeping our fruits and veggies lasting longer, drinks cool, ice cream cold, and we are able to make Jello and ice pops!!!  What a revelation indeed!!!  Feeling very spoiled.  We are still fine tuning it.  It drained our batteries at first, but now we turn it to super freeze (-20) during the day when we are wasting power, then at night we turn it to 10 or 20 degrees with hopes that it never gets that "warm" and therefore doesn't use any power at night.  It certainly seems to be improving the situation.  Mid day we are still flush with power, but our batteries can only hold so much (and there sure isn't any wind the past few days to be boosting us with wind power).

I thought of some funny thing the kids said in American Samoa that I never got around to sharing, so here it is:

We borrowed a friend's truck to do laundry and shopping. I was driving and it began to pour rain, Innocence asks me "Can you close the hatch 'cause it's getting wet in here."  We don't know about windows apparently.

Same truck two days later an EMS vehicle was coming with lights and sirens, so I slowed down and pulled over.  Innocence (again) informed me that we were "off course."

Her vocabulary is a bit strange for land life.

Valiant walked up to Courage who was sitting in a chair.  Courage scooted the chair forward and it squished Valiant's little foot.  Valiant cried and said, "I'm bleeding."  When he looked down there was a mark on his foot, but no blood.  So he changed his statement, "I'm bleeding on the inside."  It was really cute.  He's used that more than once now to express pain with no signs of external blood source.

I can already tell that however brief our stay in American Samoa was that we are sooo going to miss the variety of fresh fruits and veggies . . . But so be it, the price you pay to travel to remote places in the world.

Shannon

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