Rodrigues Landfall!
Our motoring last evening was short-lived, and the perfect breeze struck up to carry us through the night, and into the lagoon at Rodrigues. We are safe in Rodrigues! I didn’t want to jinx it, but I can now safely say that we had THE ideal passage from Cocos Keeling to Rodrigues. Boats in the previous weeks ahead of us reported horrendous conditions, and behind us several nasty lows filled in, stalling out the next wave of boats. With luck from the smiling weather gods, we were in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, all the way across the Indian ocean. It was a “good angel” passage as I call it, with a few little “demons” thrown in there in the middle to spice it up a bit.
I will leave the description of Rodrigues for another post at a later time. The place is incredible! Turns out that if you drill a hole through the center of the earth from Oakland, CA, you will find many things the same, but different. It’s funny how the young men here dress just like the gang-bangers in Oakland, but here they will greet you with a polite “bonjour monseuir” and a shy smile. The hills are arid like much of CA, and the whole island used to be teeming with hundreds of thousands of giant tortoises… a very special place.
Many of you are wondering about the absence of posts in the past few weeks. We are in a dead-zone area for SSB propagation and can’t connect to the Africa station right now to send out our messages. As we sail closer to Mauritius, we should have improved reception. We are in a very unfrequented corner of the world… We do ping our exact location via a tracker device every ten minutes, which our family closely follows. So even if these e-mails stop for several weeks, they can see that Privateer has made it safely to the anchorage and can text-message with us. Please, no need to worry! 🙂
