Opua: last night
Opua: last night
A few minutes after I posted yesterday’s entry at around 4:00 p.m., the rain unexpectedly stopped and an hour later the sky had partially cleared. I ate dinner on deck--freeze dry sweet and sour lamb--and then started to watch a movie called BESIEGED, which is set in Africa but has too many maimed children in wheelchairs: I have seen them for myself in Senegal, even now crippled by diseases like polio that are preventable; and I did not want more human suffering just then; so I went back on deck with a cup of tea and listened to Loreena McKennitt, watched a thin layer of high cloud drift across the almost full moon, and reflections of lights from the shore.
To the east is almost completely dark. Only five or six lights in that entire half circle. And only a few hundred people live in Opua. The brightest lights are at the marina.
The wind had died and the water was smooth. I could see the running lights of the ferry moving back and forth between the shores a half mile north, and I could hear voices from the deck of the Opua Cruising Club four hundred yards away.
The night was so pleasant that when I did come down below I turned on the handheld VHF to see if the weather report had changed. It hasn’t.
Monday, September 24, 2007