Location 27° 55S, 150° 09W
Friday 12:00, 07.27.2007

At noon on July 27th, the Schooner Maggie B was at 27° 55S, 150° 09W. We are now on GMT -11. Tahiti is GMT -10, which we will switch to tomorrow. We are continuing to make good time to Raivavae, making 6.9 knots on a heading of 030 with the wind at 150 degrees at 12 knots. Our life on a broad reach! Hard to imagine why so many people consider this to be “the wrong way around.”

We have come 1998 NM from Opua and have 275 to go to Raivavae and 620 to Papeete. We should be at Raivavae about midnight tomorrow, and will stand off until dawn to enter the rather complicated pass.

Our main engine is purring along fine now, after Theresa did a third oil change to remove all the water from the crankcase.

My story yesterday brought out the following email from my friend, John Steele, owner of Covey Island Boatworks, which built the Maggie B, and former master of Marguerite, a Bristol Pilot Cutter:

“Years ago I offered to take Tom, a sailing friend - who needed it - out for a sail. I rowed him out to Marguerite and when I tried to start the engine …. damn, water locked ! I apologized and offered to take him back ashore and out for a sail another day. He said he’d rather stay and help get the motor going… a day out on a boat was as good as a sail, he needed to get out of the house.

So we did what you did last night. When the injectors were out and it was time to roll her over I put a towel over the block and turned the key….. whap !! A hot, wet towel was instantly slapped around Tom’s face as he had been above looking down. Without a second’s pause he peeled it off and proclaimed : ” Oh Yes … Yachting ! Just like I remember it ! “

John, and all at Covey have been a great support for us, all around the world. I suppose that boats a yard builds are like children: you mostly just hear from them when something is wrong.

We have a hymnal in our library. It was published in 1893 and belonged to my Great Grandmother. I was looking in it for possible tunes to be adapted for a Maggie B song. What struck me was two hymns for “Travellers by Sea”, one written in 1845 and one in 1887. One, “While o’er the deep Thy servants sail” says “Send Thou, O Lord, the prosp’rous gale.” The other “Safe upon the billowy deep” has “Mid the dark, send fav’rin gales.” We have just had a favoring gale, if not a prosperous one, which has marvelously blow us from New Zealand to the Islands. But I expect that no modern congregations raise their voices and pray for a gale. Probably not many sailors today either.

At night we are happy to see the return of well known constellations, including Orion, the Swan, the Dolphin and the Pleiades. It is a function of being a bit further north, and the time of the year. For the Maori, the first view of the Pleiades was the signal for the winter celebration. It was one of their central “sailing stars.”

All is well.