June 17
While we've been sailing I've been giving away books as we're finished with them. Many books have gone to the other World ARC crews and some books, magazines... I leave at the various book exchanges (typically at marinas). While in American Samoa there were no book exchanges that I was aware of so I took a bag of books and a bag of clothes we no longer needed to the market and put the items out on a bench - I told the woman sitting nearby that we were giving the items away as we no longer needed them. She was very excited about the books - she wanted to see them right away. It was a good reminder (especially since the girls were right there) of how very lucky we are to have access to so many books. We've decided we'll try to gather books and contact a school in American Samoa that we can send them to when we return to the US. Boxes can be shipped at US postal rates and I'm sure the schools and people will appreciate the books. The area is very poor.
A boat left this harbor (Port of Refuge) on Thursday afternoon, around 1am or so they hit a reef off an island to the west. They triggered an EPIRB...... Once the sun came up on Friday the search was on, they have found the boat, sunk (in about 30 ft), dived to ensure no one was on, and found a large trail of debris from the boat. They have been searching by air (New Zealand) and boat (boats from this harbor) and so far they have not found the two men who were on board. The life raft was found but I don't think it was deployed. It's been a "hit in the gut" as one other sailor put it. Today the search continues.
We've been doing school work, and went to the botanical garden the other day. We hadn't seen any of the vanilla plantations in the Society Islands so it was really nice to see how the vanilla bean grows. The girls have gone to shore this morning to play with a new friend, the daughter of a family that moved here from Australia to start a whale watching boat business. Unfortunately we're a little early to see the humpback whales here - they usually arrive end of June/early July but we are due to be in Fiji by July 4 - we'll probably leave here later this week. We want to have time to explore Fiji too.
The weather hasn't been good for the past two days so we haven't gotten to explore the other anchorages and snorkel - we've heard some really good things from the other boats and can't wait to see some of the other areas.
Pauline