| Botany Bay Spends A Week At Midway | |||
1 |
Midway Island, a wonderful place to change out crew, fix up Botany Bay a bit, and enjoy a nice frozen drink or two! | ||
| We worked on Botany Bay in the morning and then about 3 in the afternoon we headed off to the bar for a frozen concoction to help us hang on. | 2 |
||
3 |
The beach at Midway is very soft coral sand. | ||
| The water is warm and the drinks are cold! | 4 |
||
| In the evenings we had wonderful meals prepared just for us. It turned out that all of the tourists left Midway right after 9/11 leaving just us and the support staff and the new chef! | 9 |
||
10 |
They enjoyed opening the restaurant for us because it meant that the island staff could come down for a nice dinner out. Every afternoon we would call over on the radio to find out what was being served for dinner and make our selections. There was often fresh fish and other delicacies. | ||
| Rick rented an Iridium Sat Phone with the connection for his laptop computer. He spent quite a bit of time trying to get the connection to work consistently. It was not until we had been at sea for a couple of weeks that he really had all of the bugs worked out of it. | 11 |
||
13 |
14 |
||
15 |
Lagoon side swimming is wonderful | ||
18 |
Tani finds the necessary substance to help her wake up in the morning! | ||
| We all spent a considerable amount of time with a sail palm in our hands putting patches on sails, reinforcing stitching which was showing signs of wear. The 3 days of severe storms and 10 days of wind on the nose had taken their toll on the sails. | 19 |
||
25 |
The masthead windpoint had lost its "arms" and so I had Rick bring out replacements. However, when we took the indicator down off the masthead the plastic components had significant UV damage. Should have had Rick bring a whole new one. So, out comes the fiberglass, resin, and a bit of ingenuity. I really doubt that it will ever fail again! | ||
30 |
Botany Bay burned significantly more fuel in the passage from Kwajalein to Midway than I had intended. We were running on the last 5 gallons of fuel from a jug when we came into port. Luckily Midway has a supply of JP5 AND I had talked to Perkins in England before setting out from Kwajalein and found that it was an acceptable fuel with some cautions. | ||
| Botany Bay tied to the tug. We were lucky that they did not insist on putting us on a mooring. Normally this would be required to keep animals on the vessel from invading Midway. However, the park service representative looked at Botany Bay and decided we were not a risk. | 33 |
||
34 |
Walking around Midway is a wonderful experience, the weather is pleasant, the grounds well kept, and no significant traffic! | ||
| This is the "Mall" there is a barber shop, a convince store, the bar, and community rooms. | 35 |
||
37 |
This is an absolutely huge statue of a goony bird. Sadly, the real goony birds were due to arrive a couple of weeks after we departed. | ||
38 |
|||
39 |
I rented a golf cart for the duration of our stay at Midway. It was perfect and felt right at home as this is what I could normally rent at Kwajalein! | ||
| Tani gets to look around the tug. | 45 |
||
49 |
Tani's ride back to Honolulu on American Islander. She had planned on flying back to Hono and then onward to LA but the events of September 11, 2001 resulted in flights to Midway being canceled for a month. This ship is contracted by the park service to carry the nets and other materials collected on the outer islands back to Honolulu for cataloging and destruction. | ||
| Rick really gets into his Bingo game! | 59 |
||
61 |
The memorial at Midway was even more poignant in the
aftermath of 9/11:
Dedicated to the Preservation Of The Day When The American Spirit |
||
| This young bird decided to sit on the wind generator for a while, I think it thought that the generator looked like it's mother! | 70 |
||
73
|
We almost have everything ready to leave for Los Angeles! | ||