In my last blog entry (#39) I forgot to include the following picture:
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It shows Sans Souci anchored at Hamajima, with a full-moon in the background. It was one of my favorite pictures of the trip, and I can’t imagine how I let it fall through the cracks. Oops!
A couple things to point out from this picture…
1) The barbecue is open. That’s a sure-fire indicator that I’m enjoying life.
2) The lower deck lights are on. We were anchored in front of a busy fishing port. When lots of other boats are around, we try to keep the boat well lit. I don’t want a fisherman leaving the port in the dark to be bouncing off our boat.
Thank you,
Ken Williams
Nordhavn 68, Sans Souci
13 Responses
Myra:
Check out:
http://www.xtratufboots.com/ (http://www.xtratufboots.com/)
Enjoy!
-Ken W
Quick question – what brand are those rubber boots you wore on your adventure? I am crusing to SE Alaska and need a pair!
Paige:
I’m sorry to report that I won’t be seeing any more beaches this year. The anchor has dropped for the last time. We’re currently in a marina, about 32 miles from our final port.
Next year will be a completely different year. We’ll do some exploring (Korea, China, Taiwan), but I also want to do some serious ‘enjoying’. I’d like to do fewer miles and find some nice places just to sit at anchor for a few days.
Thank you,
Ken W
Thanks for your reply Ken. Here in the UK we have our fair share of storm force winds, though seldom are they anything like a hurricane or typhoon. Even given our coast line with lots of places to hide in, most (not all) boaters seldom do more than day trips and return to their slip the same day so I suppose it’s common the world over.
I’ve just looked at your spot position. It looks like you’ve found your beach 🙂
Take care
Paige
Greetings Paige. You may be right, although it seems to me that the typhoon season here is no different than the hurricane season in Florida and the Caribbean, and east coasters do plenty of anchoring. We just arrived in the wrong month. The cruising season here is from April to July. August and September have too many typhoons.
It might be that the boaters here are no different than the boaters in the United States. I remember that prior to our Nordhavn we rarely went more than about 75 miles from our marina. My sense is that most boat owners never really go very far.
I’ll be much smarter about all of this after we’ve spent more time here. For now, we’re just starting to learn about Japan.
Thank you!
-Ken W
Hi Ken,
Looking at the photographs that showed a large number of Japanese pleasure boats, it looked to me that they are built for speed rather than range. Given your own needs to avoid typhoons, I wonder if the Japanese boating scene is more centred on Marinas rather than anchoring out, precisely because of the need to always have a typhoon safe refuge. I can imagine that I’d be a little conservative if there was a likelihood of serious storms every couple of weeks for a good part of the year.
John S:
The AIS is working, but the sites that pick up AIS tend to only pick up the signals that are very close to their receivers. My guess is that about four hours from now, as we approach Osaka, we’ll start showing up on the AIS tracking website.
In the picture above, that is fishing gear in the water. I was closer to it than I liked to be. It was a good anchorage, but too tight for my taste.
Smooth seas today! And, the typhoon passed by harmlessly.
Having fun!
-Ken W
Oh, I forgot to ask….now that you’re back in range of an AIS stations again, I notice your AIS doesn’t appear to be working again….good thing SPOT still works!!
Stay safe and keep avoiding those pesky typhoons! 🙂
– John S.
Beautiful picture Ken. Is that fishing gear floating off your starboard bow?
– John S.
Ron:
Thank you! And, especially to Steven Argosy who took the picture.
It is 8:25pm zulu and we start engines in 10 mins!
-Ken W
Exquisite picture! Nordhavn will want and you will become rich! Congratulations!
Ron
Tom:
Roberta and I live half to two thirds of our lives outside the U.S. We have a home in Cabo, and have been going in and out of Mexico as much as five to ten times a year, every year, for decades. We also have been crossing into Europe, usually France, Italy and Spain, virtually every year for decades. Prior to this trip I had to add pages to my passport because there was nowhere else to put stamps, and that was on my NEW passport. Over the past few years we’ve been to dozens of countries, including countries like: Taiwan, China, Croatia, England, Bermuda, Honduras, the Bahamas, Mexico, Chile, Spain, Italy, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Japan, Russia, Australia, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.
I mention this only to say that what Christie and Eric suffered through, was very unusual. I guess we have been lucky, but through all of the hundreds of times we have encountered immigration and customs officials, we’ve had only one negative experience, and even that wasn’t particularly horrible. 99.9% of the time, the customs and immigration people, in every country, have been friendly and helpful. There have been plenty of times when there has been more paperwork than I’d like, but that’s just how it is. We are legal residents of Mexico, and consider it our home, but it is amongst the worst we’ve ever dealt with.
I do think that sooner or later we’ll catch an immigration official on a bad day, and we’ll get the ‘full treatment.’ But, I don’t spend a lot of time agonizing over it. Thus far, I can only say good things about the immigration and customs personnel, in the U.S., and also in the other countries we have visited.
My last book, summarizing our cruising last year, in central america, does have quite a bit of the bureaucracy we had to deal with. It was frustrating and time consuming, but that’s just how it is. You can worry about it, or just relax, smile, and put up with it. I do believe that countries should ‘do what they need to do’ to protect their borders.
There is one part of this I do worry about …
In some third world countries, the police, the military and the coast guards, are more dangerous than the crooks. There are parts of the world, where if you see a boat load of the local military arriving, heavily armed, while you are deep at sea, in the middle of nowhere, you need to think about whether to stop or not. And, sometimes, the boats which contact you, claiming to be military, actually aren’t.
So…
I will feel much differently on this topic once I am the victim of harrassment while crossing a border, but at least for now, it’s something I can smile about…
-Ken W
Have enjoyed your blog for almost a year and thru you have learned of others.(kosmos ) although they have completed there circumnavigation back in spring there blog continued until it caught up two days ago 09-7-09.guestion when they arrived in san diego they described being seperated and guestioned by border patrol or immagration.all the places you & san succi have traveled even your atlantic crossing and back. and now your GSSR run I never hear you write or say you and your wife being guestioned seperatly. is this because of mexico, just a bad day,you just don’t discuss it. tom