Pago Pago

It's funny - we spent a week in Penrhyn, and it seemed like a really timeless (though too short) part of our trip.  And now we've spent a week in American Samoa, and it's just seemed like an ordinary week.

Pago Pago Harbor is notorious among yachties for being filthy and a very difficult place to find a secure anchorage.  As often happens when our expectations are very low, we found things not to be all that bad.  The harbor is certainly dirty, but we were able to set our anchor on the first try, and the stay hasn't been bad from that perspective.  We've got our fingers crossed for the experience of pulling the anchor this afternoon.  Our biggest reason for coming here was to get the new windlass motor that the manufacturer in New Zealand swore would be here by October 4th.  When we arrived, all that was waiting for us was an email saying that the motor would take another two weeks to ship.  So we'll be pulling the hook by hand for the rest of the Pacific crossing.

We did get a couple of other parts sent to us, and we ran various errands to keep the boat going.

We heard a lot of horror stories about the water quality here, so we bought 150 gallons of purified water to fill our tanks.  It was the first time we've ever bought water.

We made a bus/taxi expedition to the local US-style warehouse store for a big resupply.

And we visited the local market almost every day.

Alisa and the boys ventured to church yesterday.  The first Sunday of every month is "White Sunday".

The one-time commercial fisherman in me loved checking out the tuna purse seiners in the harbor.  That's a helicopter on the wheelhouse of the closer one.

If you're used to Alaskan salmon seiners, the scale of these boats was pretty mindblowing.  Check out the size of the net on the back deck in this shot.

And well, that's all we have to report from American Samoa.  As always, getting things done for the boat while also caring for the kids has taken much longer than expected -  but we expect that now!  Assuming we can get the boat packed up today and the anchor retrieved, we're setting out for the French colony of Futuna this afternoon.  More from there!