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!

Dedicated

Alisa trying to nap on our recent passage from Penrhyn to Pago Pago.  You can tell how quiet the kids are being!  Alisa and I were splitting the night into four watches and each getting five hours of sleep.  The days dragged as we adult sleepy-heads tried to shepherd the boys through the everday business of life without too many dramas.  The nightwatches, in comparison, were a piece of cake.

After the first two rowdy days it turned into a quiet, quiet passage.  Look at how calm things are here at breakfast - a full cup of coffee sitting placidly on the table, the banana fritters that Alisa has made behaving themselves and staying on the plate.

It was stinking hot, and bucket showers were very popular as a result.  Elias loved having bucket after bucket of cool ocean water dumped over him.

Alisa baked every other day.

Elias with an old halibut jig that we souped up to catch tuna.  It lasted about four hours in the water, and then disappeared with the first hit.

Dawn on the last day of the passage.  The wind was well below ten knots for four days straight.  We were quite pleased with how Galactic sailed in such light air, but on the last day we fired up the engine to reach Pago Pago before nightfall - the allure of a sound sleep at anchor was too much to resist.

Sailing into Pago Pago Harbor.  We've been very businesslike here, just concentrating on getting errands and boat jobs done so that we can get back to sea.

One of the errands on my list was running out to DHL to pick up advance copies of South From Alaska.  It was great fun to surprise Alisa with a copy (she didn't know they'd be here) and to show her the dedication page, which has her name on it.  She hadn't known that the book was dedicated to her.  Giving her the first copy, and telling her that the book was, in the larger sense, for her, was a moment that lived up to everything I had expected it would be.

The end.