Blogs from Pacific, Oceans and Seas - page 26

March, 25th, 2010 Location: 28 54.30N 114 27.44W Surfing El Cordon At anchor Crew: Cyrus, Brett & Colby surfing, Jonny fishing, Brooke writing Comments: After a fabulous downwind sail we find ourselves at El Cordon. This sand-dune and cliff sculpted bay is a stomping ground to 2 pods of spinner & bottle nose dolphins, fishing sea lions and a wrapping point break that on good days makes grown surfers weep. Yesterday, however, was not one of those days. Worth surfing, true, but not the glassy large peeling waves that we had last time. Long story short, after a sunset surf and three different anchorages, we could not find a location that was not uncomfortable and extremely rolly... so we woke this morning to move once again near the surf spot, red-eyed and a bit off kilter. ... read more

MARCH 24th to MARCH 26th--- The last 2 days have been absolutely miserable! We went through a storm that turned out to be really bad. The waves were crashing down really hard. Our ship would literally go on top of a wave and then crash back down. We had to barricade some of the safety doors. All the stuff in my room fell everywhere. I couldn’t sleep the entire time and almost everyone was sea-sick. The first night back on the ship from Vietnam, I was laying in bed trying to fall asleep until a huge wave came and literally by entire body left the mattress. I know we’re completely safe, but I got really scared. Going to class was a struggle and doing homework was even worse. I think only 5 people showed up to ... read more

5pm Tuesday March 22nd. Winds 20 knots Seas: 3-5 feet Crew: Extremely frustrated. After dealing with the harbor master on our "rock" issue (Which was filmed by Jonny with our large camera... good stuff), we had divers check the damage along with Brett as our additional scraped-keel assessor.. They all found a nice scrape but no big damage. After Brett removed himself from the lovely olive green harbor water, he tried to hose off on the dock only to douse himself with water that smelled like "@#$@!!" The gagging & spitting Brett climbed aboard, to rush to our clean shower at the aft deck. He scrubbed down with Dr. Bronners peppermint soap like a hazmat trained safety team would.. (even the inside of his mouth) and poured hydrogen peroxide in his ears to kill any creepies ... read more

Tonight they made an announcement that the entire shipboard community should come to the Union at 7 to hear where we are going instead of Japan. We are now going to Taiwan! The Philippines and South Korea were the other options, but because of radiation and political/religious unrest, SAS thought the safest place to go would be Taiwan. We were all sort of bummed because I think we were all looking forward to Japan. But I keep telling myself that this is a natural disaster and there is nothing I can do about it. I’m happy that they are just letting us go somewhere else in Asia that is safe. So I will be going there after Shanghai for four days. The only real negative problem with going to Taiwan is that we all need visas. ... read more

Our trip started in New York. We took flight to Phoenix and then to Honolulu. I worried how it can be for me. The flight is about 10 hours, too long for me. But all turned very good. We were met in airport in Honolulu and transferred to hotel. The name of our tour gay was Ivan, very pleasant Chinese young man. He took care for all out businesses. He organized all our tours and the price was really very reasonable. ... read more