Well, I just saw a copy of the latest sail magazine and we have a nice little blurb in there about our trip to Tonga to see the country and do the cruising regatta in VaVa’u.
Tonga
http://www.sailmagazine.com/california/better-month-mondays
There is also a photo of Dilligaf, which is own by our friends Bill and Sue from Seattle.
We also are the background image for the pacific puddle jump website for this upcoming season.
http://www.pacificpuddlejump.com/
How cool is that?
Piko took second in class for the regatta in light and trying conditions. At least the crew was having a great time. We barely made it out though since I was replacing the luff tape on our sail which we tore earlier and we hooked coral and had to dive our anchor to leave!
We then had a great party on the beach that night for the full moon, or at least one of the Lauren’s did. Cute Lauren was a little tired after dinner, so she decided to take a nap and join us later, since we knew the party was going to be going until late. I dinghy-pooled with Britannia to the party. The party itself was pretty wild, it had a good DJ on a cool beach, lots of people all dressed up and wired up with glowing costumes etc. There also was some local dancers and fire dancers there as well. The ironic part of the story is cute Lauren woke up around 11, later than she had intended to sleep. She heard one of her favorite Prince songs (I think he is Prince again) and decided to get a dressed up and to take the dingy into shore to find us. She gets about 3/4 of the way in and runs the outboat onto a shallow reef, not knowing there was a specific channel to get in. She ended up having to get out of the dinghy and drag is over the coral since she didnt want to use the engine in fear of breaking a prop. So, in her cute little black dress, was wading mid thigh deep in the water to the beach. Then she couldn’t get the engine to flip up to bring it all the way up the beach. After finally getting the dinghy tied up, she starts looking for us and can’t find us, but decided to dance a little bit and look for us in a bit. After THAT song, they come on the mike and say the music is over. Tonga is quite conservative and religious and there is basically nothing allowed on sunday, and it was now at midnight. Little did she know, we left about 20 minutes earlier and maybe even passed each other on our way back. I got dropped off, and tried to lock the dinghy up for the night, but it wasn’t there! Weird, so I looked for Lauren thinking she had and and she was gone and about 5-10 minutes later, she made it back to the boat, well, and a little irritatated at the whole situation. Oh well I guess, we did have a nice relaxing day on the boat afterwards before getting ready to race home again the next day.
We did take first in the LeMans type race on the way back. The race started at the skippers meeting on shore, so I dinghy back to the boat, raise the anchor, get sailing etc, then launch the dinghy after a mark in the race and the finish line was in a local bar… We took first and class and second overall, only behind a swan 53 that day!
We are off to the awards ceremony soon… We are both really excite as well since we book a reservation today to swim with humpback whales on thursday. Tonga is the only place in the world that allows us to actually swim with them and we have talked with several people who have said it is amazing! And we also feel well since the group we are going with in involved with conservation and the people bringing us out are marine biologists.
Well, the arch is finally done! If you read some of the earlier posts of our quest for more energy, you know that we decided to spend some serious boat dinero to make ourselves more self sufficient. We found a local stainless stainless guy here in La Cruz and commissioned him to make an arch for Piko. Primarily to hold two more 130 watt panels, but also some other minor stuff like the radar dome, dinghy engine lift and some antennae. Here you can see the workers putting it all together here in La Cruz.
As you can see, it is quite large. This was because it needed to be taller than our hydrovane (they do make a version of the hydrovane sail which is stubby for this reason, but we don’t have it). Continue reading
We had a good day today out on the race course. We decided to come out and do the Banderas Bay Regatta a month or two ago, and then decided to do the race in the Jack and Jill class, aka male/female double handed, rather than being fully crewed.
We also decided to spend a few dollers and stay in the Marina at Paradise Village for the race so we were more central too all the happenings around the regatta. Continue reading
Well, it looks like we are getting down to the bottom of what is going on with the electrical system on Piko, and gladly, it is not as bad as I had feared.
Thanks to all of you who have wrote in with suggestions, and also to Larry from Panta Rhei who is my resident EE (Electrical Engineer) whom which I have spent some time going back and forth on how to track down the issue and what we need to go forward. Continue reading
warning, this another geeky post, so if you are not interested in boat electrons, skip this one!
For those of you who have been following along, and yea, we need to post more often to e blog, you may remember the power issues we had coming down the coast from Seattle. Basically rough a combination of some corrosion on the battery terminals and a voltage regulator that went wonky (and we are not sure if one caused the other or not), we ended up frying the old house bank on Piko. Albeit this was an expense I figured we wouldn’t we wouldn’t have until later, Tyne bank was 4 years old and I knew it was going to have to be replaced at some point. Not going into details, the regulator started outing out too much voltage and fried Tyne batteries. They were replaced by Deka 8c12 batteries in the same size in San Francisco before we headed south. Continue reading
It was pretty to see the latest Latitude 38 a few days ago. Guess who is on the cover?
A great shot from a great day. This was taken in Banderas Bay, during the Banderas Bay Blasts Spinnaker run. This was a the last day of a three day regatta with all the proceeds going to local school children in the area.
These races are also pretty laid back, trying to appeal to non-racers as well as people. The start for this day was a little hectic, with no committee boat, flags or anything like that. Usually someone gets on the radio and at least gives the standard 5,4,1,go countdown, but the ‘RC’ was late getting back to the boat. I finally called on the radio, about 10 minutes after the start should have happened and they were like, just go, we just got back to the boat. Even with stating about 13 minutes late, we ended up winning the day overall, beating a bunch f boats that should have ate Piko for lunch on a mid teens downhill kite ride. Oh well, we are not complaining.
Well, I have personally seen the red dot, the newest spinnaker in our collection server both Piko and Seeker for may ocean miles. We were having a great time in about 15 kts and she decided it was time for a siesta. We were surfing down waves, maxing out at 10-12 kts for several hours and once trough must have been a little deeper than the ones before. I knew we were pushing her a little harder than we should have been, but we were running deep, around 160 degrees to the wind, which our asym kite doesn’t go and I was lazy since out 1.5 oz kite was buried in the locker.
Luckily, we only blew out a clew, pretty cleanly right at the edge of the layers of reinforcements. That also took out the entire foot tape and a little bit of the leech tape as well.
Out comes the sewing machine, repair material and both leaves of the salon table. One of my friend’s significant others runs a sail loft in Seattle (http://ballardsails.com) which we were able to get some extra material from before we left. His GF has also spent many hours at the loft learning the trade from them and was excellent help sewing her back together again. A few hours later and I think the kite has a new lease on life. We will have to see how she looks on the last leg down to Cabo which starts tomorrow morning.
After we finished the kite, we all hailed a taxi, and made it onto la playa de bahia Santa Maria. Yes, amazingly enough, there are actually some water taxis that make it down here for the event. We decided since it takes us 30 minutes to get the dinghy ready and break it down that we would use ‘public transportation’ to make it into shore. We are basically in a small cove 2/3 of the way down the peninsula. It is very barren, basically high dessert meets the beach. We grabbed some freshly made guacamole since the avocados had need a head hazard for Lindsay for the last week, some beer and some tequila for the party. A local band, well local as in about 100 miles away comes to the beach to play music for all the cruisers along with fresh food and beer which is also transported here for all of us. This is no small feat, since we are really in the middle of nowhere!
Anyway, we are back on the boat for the evening and about ready to make some dinner. More news when we make it to Cabo!
Well, we were able to get everything sorted out. Lucky for us, the people in the bay area, well minus whomever was responsible for the theft, are great. I posted an ad on craigslist looking for it, and several complete strangers came out and offered to help in various ways. I even had an editor for Latitude 38, which is the local Bay Area sailing magazine call me and offered to put a note in the daily newsletter. Never figured we were going to become famous this way!
Well, I saw the movie, and I knew you couldn’t get the wet, or feed them after midnight. Then again, I don’t think I got them wet or illegally fed them, but someone or something must have!
Luckily, we have exorcised the gremlins and just have started to get out of project mode and more into explore mode, though there are ALWAYS projects…
TOWARDS THE PACIFIC 