Cambridge: racing myself; Cocos
Cambridge: racing myself; Cocos
I am due to fly back to the THE HAWKE OF TUONELA on September 3, arriving in Raiatea the following day, and putting the green sloop back in the water as soon thereafter as possible. Then I will sail the twenty-five miles over to Bora-Bora, where I will spend a few weeks, some of the time at the beautiful anchorage where the photograph on the home page of this site was taken five years ago.
Toward the end of September I will sail for New Zealand.
The exact distance from THE HAWKE OF TUONELA’s present location on the hard at Raiatea Carenage to my mooring off Opua is 2153 nautical miles.
As of now, my total sailing time since leaving New Zealand on April 21 last year is 168 days and 14 hours.
I would like to complete the voyage New Zealand to New Zealand in less than eighteen months, which means reaching Opua by October 20, and I would like to beat my once world record time in EGREGIOUS, which means taking less than thirty-three days to do so. This is an average of only sixty-six miles a day. Baring disaster I should make it.
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The photograph is of Costa Rica’s Cocos Island, about two hundred miles off the mainland, and which I passed on my sixth day out of Panama.
Once I was clear of the Gulf of Panama, It was the only speck of land between me and the Marquesas Islands, and it remained obstinately in my way for most of one afternoon.
In the dying light, you cannot sea that the water is full of bits of plastic. Water bottles. Pieces of styrofoam. Bags. Medicine bottles. Cups. Boxes.
Except for the Mediterranean and off big cities, I have not found the world’s seas and oceans to be polluted; but most of my sailing has been in the less populated Southern Hemisphere.
Cocos is inhabited only by a few park rangers, whose primary duty I have been told is to prohibit illegal fishing, which makes the dense concentration of plastic in the waters around it all the more difficult to understand.
Saturday, July 11, 2009