4-1-01 Happy April. Busy working on boat projects here in Peros Banhos. Spent the majority of our day working on our friends' WINGS OF TIME diesel generator. They use it to charge batteries to run refrigerator, lights, fans, radio, etc.... but it stopped running. A great community effort and after taking it apart and re-lapping the valves, it was running again by 4:00pm. Big celebration party tomorrow on WINGS. They have an 8 month old baby, Nicholas. He's officially the youngest "inhabitant" of Chagos and a real cutie. It's been allot of fun watching him get his sea legs. We've been in Chagos for 3 weeks now, and have been moving around the lagoon quite a bit. We move around to see various islands and to get the best protection from the varying winds. Today we had a squall line pass by with winds up to 30 kts from the NNW due to a low pressure system and we collected lots of rain to fill up our tanks. While we've been here, the wind has been less than 10 kts, except for odd cloud lines that brings higher wind strength and precipitation. Right now there are about 10 boats anchored close by. It's a nice group of people and we've gotten to know just about everyone from the various social activities - fishing contests, beach barbecues, trash burning, happy hours and radio chatter. We're all part of the "temporary Peros Banhos community". We share chores, such as gathering firewood and fishing. Also we share our ship's stores - for instance, one boat did not provision enough toilet paper (something we over-provisioned), so we gave them some. Our yeast for baking bread all died, so they gave us some of theirs. It's a very sharing environment, especially since we can't get the things we need anywhere else here in Chagos. Not like you can just jump in a car and run down to the local supermarket.
4-13-00 It's Friday the 13th, and Good Friday - the Friday before Easter. Our first attempt at brewing our own beer onboard was ready to bottle today. This morning we bottled "SIMMER's Friday the 13th Chagos Stout". It bubbled away in the fermenter for the last 4 days and now it will rest in the plastic bottles (soda bottles) for 14 days or so. We'll let you know how it tastes. We plan to have an Easter barbecue on the beach with a group of yachties here at Peros Banhos, probably 20-24 boats. Our friends WINGS OF TIME are right next to us, and they've had a bit of bad luck in the last week. We had fixed their generator earlier this month, but now their refrigeration system developed a leak and lost all it's freon. They have a huge, well-stocked freezer, so now we have all of their meat, butter, cheese, etc in our fridge and we've been eating lots of ground beef, lamb and chicken. They also borrowed our pressure cooker to can some meat into glass mason jars to save for later - that way, they don't need refrigeration. One other boat had even worse bad luck. A French singlehander dragged onto the reef in the northern end of the atoll. He had come in at night and anchored closer to the reef than he thought, so when the 30 knot squall line came through and his anchor didn't hold. It took 2 days, but with a bit of luck, calm weather, good engineering, and just a few scratches, the community here was able to get the 27 ft. boat off the reef. He was very lucky in the end. On a happier note, a couple yachties discovered a brick oven in the old settlement on Īle de Coin. They cleaned it up a bit, collected firewood, and we baked bread in it, maybe even pizzas in the next few days. Fun.
4-15-00 Happy Easter. We had a huge pot luck dinner tonight on the beach at Fouquet Island in the southern end of the atoll. Good food, good drink, lovely scenery and friendly people. There were 20 boats that shared the Easter meal. Main course: grilled fish (snapper, tuna, grouper) and lots of side dishes and desserts. Pot luck dinners with so many people are wonderful. You only have to prepare one or two things, and you get to sample everything in the smorgasbord. Nice night. A Sri Lankan fishing boat went up on the reef yesterday up at the northern end of the atoll. No one was onboard, we think a sister ship picked up the crew who had abandoned ship. The Sri Lankan boat was probably illegally fishing in Chagos, since it is outside of the commercial fishing season here. Lots of diesel still onboard in the tanks, so many yachties sailed up to fill up empty diesel jugs. (We'll go in the next day or so if the weather cooperates). The wreck is a 50 foot long wooden boat, and is supposedly very accessible by dinghy from a close by anchorage. Hopefully we can get some digital pictures as well as the diesel. With the 24 or so boats here, we should be able to take off quite a bit of the fuel, hopefully before the boat breaks up and spills it into the sea. We've been waiting to see if a British vessel from Diego Garcia will come up to tend to the wreck, maybe burn it to the waterline and destroy it before it destroys the reef and sea life. A British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) vessel was here earlier in the week to collect $80 US from each of the yachts. That's the mooring fee for a 3 month stay in Chagos. But they haven't been back, since the wreck was discovered.
4-21-00 We did manage to get 20 gallons (80 liters) of diesel for SIMMER from the wreck a couple days ago. So now we are topped up again. Didn't imagine that we'd get diesel in Chagos! The day we visited the fishing boat, 3 other yachts went up with us to get fuel and "plunder" the wreck. As a team, we pumped out over 600 liters from one of the tanks. It was a messy, time-consuming job, but everyone pitched in. Not much else of interest left onboard. The first few yachties did manage to get some food supplies, such as fresh veggies, sugar, flour and fishing equipment. We did take some of the fishing equipment - polypropylene line and swivels. We figured we can at least pass them on to other fishermen we met along the way either in Madagascar or East Africa. We also wanted to remove as much as possible so that the debris was minimal once the boats breaks up. But the engine compartment was partially underwater, so we couldn't get many things from below deck. Everyone was taking various mementos and we took a pair of rosary beads. There were a couple pairs as well as other Catholic religious symbols. Hopefully the rosary beads will keep SIMMER safer than they did for the unfortunate Sri Lankan boat. The winds have been building out of the south in the last week, so the tradewinds (southeasterlies), may be starting to evolve. In another 2 weeks or so, we'll leave Chagos and sail westward to Madagascar and Africa. Before we leave Chagos, we hope to see two other atolls - Saloman and Egmont. Saloman is only 30 miles to the east of us and Egmont is 80 miles to the southwest.
