Day 22 and 23 - April 28 and 29, Thursday and Friday

Judy, Dominique and I spent part of the day in Mary Jo’s car for hire taking her $200 half-day tour of some highlights. We saw some old ruins at Taaoa, the Smiling Tiki after a muddy hike, some interesting petroglyphs, and Hana Iapa, commonly known by cruisers as William’s Bay, which has a big rock in the bay called Cabeza Negro, a bay on the other side of the mountain. A lot of interesting scenery, beautiful flowers, wild fruit trees, vanilla, flowers, wild hot peppers, wild lime trees, and tons of beautiful trees. All in all, it was a very worthwhile tour. It let us see parts of the island we couldn’t see from the water. It is always fun how the altitude and vegetation changes as you go up in altitude.

The population of Hiva Oa is only about 2,600 people. There were 20,000 to 30,000 people on Hiva Oa before Europeans came with their diseases. I got a strong sense, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully, that to a certain extent the people on Hiva Oa are caretaking the past. I suspect but don’t know that the kids, who are required to go to Tahiti for high school and college, may not all come back. Our guide, Mary Jo, said families are very small these days. There was a lot of land and not very many people. There almost was a feeling of being in a park. Also, there were so many new cars and almost no old cars. I can’t figure out where the money comes from. The sailboaters can’t really bring in that much in the few months they are there. Copra? Does France somehow fund or partially fund the life style on the island? The island was so neat and clean and well groomed and landscaped. I liked it and the people a lot. We didn’t encounter any speeding teenagers on the road – either they are in school in Tahiti or they are afraid that one of their hundreds of aunts or uncles would see them and bust them. Also, where do they find spouses, what about the gene pool? With only 2,600 people on the island they have to be related to a lot of each other. The people are very handsome and very friendly. Everybody speaks French or maybe Marquesan, with a few people speaking some English. There is a good cash machine right in the middle of the tiny little town. It cost 1,000 XPF for a ride to the Pearl from downtown, and about 600 XPF for a ride to the anchorage. A lot of the shellback (I just have to throw that word in) sailors were walking the couple of miles back and forth between the anchorage and the town, carrying groceries and umbrellas, dealing with the rain and the sun and heat and getting some exercise. We would just call Mary Jo, using the world phone that Verizon gave Judy for free for this trip, and she would come and get us for the above said prices. The Marquesas Islands are very Yang, Tahiti very yin. Hiva Oa, at least the wet windward side we spent most of our time on, is dominated by sharp and dark and brooding rocky ridges. The ridges are tall and vertical, and the shadows are heavy in the valleys. It rained several times a day, nice and warm and no big deal. It is the rainy season. I didn’t see any fishing fleets, or much sign that fishing is a big deal on Hiva Oa. There were only a few boats in the harbor and none of them really looked like fishing pangas or the trailer launched fishing boats in Hawaii, or like any other style of serious subsistence or commercial fishing platforms.

We spent another night in the Pearl. Ahhhh it felt so good. What a great friendly, comfortable place, and, yes, with a wonderful continental breakfast and very Marquesan feeling in the lobby, with art and carvings and cool stuff. Friday night there was a local group including guitar, ukulele, drums and a singer performing Marquesan music the lobby. It is a bit expensive, but what the hell, I just sailed across 2,900 miles of open ocean. There were a lot of chickens running around the island. We saw some cocks fighting along the path to the restaurant. One of the workers for the hotel came out, grabbed a wild free range hen that had been running around and took her to the kitchen. Our tour guide had told us earlier that people just grab a chicken when they want one.


Day 24 and 25 - April 30 May 1, Saturday and Sunday

We left Atuona today around noon and headed for the next island south, Tahuata. We anchored in Hanamoenoa Bay and jumped in to the clear beautiful warm turquoise water. I promptly dropped my nice new snorkel in 40 feet of water, and it was gone. I’d forgotten to hook up that little do-hickey that holds the snorkel to the mask. The water was great, the beach was great, and it felt great to take a nap in the cockpit afterwards. Emil went up the mast in this calm anchorage to retrieve the halyard that got lost up there, and when done with that he made a mighty, and very impressive, Tarzan leap off the lower spreaders into the water. I was chicken or something, so didn’t copy him. He’s my age, too.

We spent Saturday night in Hanamoenoa Bay along with 6 or 7 other boats. I spent a peaceful but slightly windy night sleeping in the cockpit. The Aranui 3, the big freighter that was in Atuona Bay when we first got there, showed up and dropped anchor. They shut down the engine but kept their big bright lights on all night, like a bright little city. About dawn they pulled their anchor and left.

Just after first light we realized we were surrounded by manta rays, about 3 to 5 feet across, filter feeding around our boat. They were swimming slowly along, with their enormous mouths wide open, eating their breakfast of little organisms. Since they had no teeth and short tails, maybe only a foot long, it seemed that it would be safe to swim with them, which we did. Dom got some great close up video with his camera in its underwater box. That kept us busy for hours. Then we had breakfast and coffee and swam some more. Then we had lunch and swam some more. Emil’s inflatable sea kayak is a wonderful thing to have, it stows in a little package, but really paddles well. There was some beach walking and shell gathering, too, today, but the shore bugs were ferocious. Sunday night a bunch of us boaters went into shore at dark and had a beachwood bon fire and BBQ. We all talked and swapped stories for hours. Our passage was one of the easier passages. A lot of the other boats had more weather or more serious problems. There was a Passport 47 with a modified stern – it had had a sugar scoop stern added on. The owner had lived in Fall City, my home town, for 10 years but we had never met! We spent Sunday night in the anchorage and did some more manta ray swimming the next morning. We saw Barracuda leaping through the air, too. The snorkeling was great, but not yet the crystal clear water we’re searching for.


Day 26 and 27 - May 2 and 3, Monday and Tuesday

We spent Sunday night in the anchorage and did some more manta ray swimming Monday morning. The mantas are cute and cuddly looking, sort of intelligent in a weird cartoon like way. You want to adopt one, take him home, show him to mom and beg to keep him as a pet so he could follow you around with his wing tips up and his big mouth open. We saw 3 foot long Barracuda leaping through the air, too, covering 6 to 8 feet from takeoff to landing point. The snorkeling here was great, better than Mexico, I guess mainly because the water is clearer. It still isn’t really transparent, like a bottle of vodka or something, but a lot closer. The vis is maybe 30 or 40 feet at this anchorage.

We rolled out the headsail a bit and headed south down the coast a couple of miles to Vaitahu. We wandered around the village a bit, shopped the two grocery stores but didn’t come out with much besides Hinano beer, and were quite impressed by the church. It is very nicely done in term of fitting the site and being appropriate for a Marquesan Island, made from beautiful wood and stone. Everybody is friendly and speaks French but not much English. We had to physically lift the dingy up onto the concrete parking lot area to get it out of the surge around the quay, but the landing itself was only mildly tricky – just no place to leave the dingy in the water without it getting rubbed apart on the concrete, hence the hoisting. The things that I’m calling quays are basically massively enormous concrete structures that rise up well out of the water. They are old and rough and possibly abrasive. Maybe they were made in WWII, I don’t really know but they look at least that old.

We headed south again to the next little bays, passing the most beautiful, stunning, verdant vertical cliffs which had big groves of coconut trees on the lower slopes. We went to Hapatoni first, then to Hanatefau. After anchoring in Hapatoni, Emil and Dom went into town to shop for carvings and art. Dom went wild and bought a bunch of cool warrior wear type of carved necklaces. Supposedly in these remote villages they are still carved out of human bones from some long ago battles, so they are pretty authentic. We upped anchor and moved a mile or so north to Hanatefau, where we settled down for the night about 100 feet off the beach, with another boat, Two Amigos, anchored 80 yards away. Emil climbed a coconut tree and got three nice nuts, we swam and snorkeled in the boulder and coral. Another boat come in, anchoring in between us and Two Amigos instead of south of us in the open half mile of perfect anchorage. The new boat’s crew (it’s been bow to all evening, so I don’t know the name yet) went up the mast to drop the tangled and ripped head sail. The poor guy on the manual mast mounted winch got quite a work out, quickly being reduced to quarter turns of the winch handle, then resting, then another quarter turn. We had a beautiful dinner, wine, conversation, and went off to read and sleep.

Anchoring in Hanamoenoa was pretty straight forward, sand at 40 feet or so, some coral/rocks. While snorkeling later we could see somebody’s anchor chain abandoned on the bottom, presumably with the anchor attached. I suppose that if I was doing it again I would have gone in to 25 feet or so, so the swim to shore wouldn’t have been a half mile long and so I could see where to drop the anchor on a sandy patch. Anchoring in shallower water also gives you a better shot at unsnagging it if it gets snagged. Anchoring at Hanatefau and Hapatoni is riskier, though, as there are a lot of boulders and giant rocks (boat size) on which to snag your anchor. The water isn’t quite clear enough to see the bottom at the 45 or 50 feet depth at which we anchored. My sense is that it would be really smart to have scuba on board so that you can free your anchor. Or else, carry about 10 anchors and a couple extra drums of chain, eh? Hmmmmm.

Judy and I had been out snorkeling and came back to the boat about an hour or so before dark. As I climbed back onto the boat I looked up and saw a guy in a military uniform looking down at me. I said “bonjour”, of course. We had seen a French Navy ship motoring by an hour or so ago, heading south. They turned north and went out of sight, then snuck back down the coast to hide just behind the closest point to the north, where they launched their RIB and snuck up on us. Turns out they were at least nominally customs dudes, on a tour out of Tahiti, patrolling the islands in a very military looking 60 foot mini battleship. We showed them our passports and check in documents, they were friendly, smiled, chit chatted a bit and left. No searching of the boat, no bribes, no bad vibes. And, while they were decked out in uniforms with cool arm patches and those big heavy cop belts full of mean looking junk, they were barefoot! We hope our Italian friend from the bonfire, Roberto, is okay. He is 2 and a half years into a very low budget around the world journey that he started in Bali and is close to completing. He never checks in to any countries, he says. (A week or so later we ran into Aseolius, a boat that had been in the anchorage with us and Roberto, and they told us that somehow Roberto was boarded but left alone and not busted.)

At dinner we decided that this was pretty much a Perfect Monday, in a sort of ultimate sense. Not just a Perfect Monday like you went to work, got a raise, had a great lunch date and then got the project done on time for the boss. No, a Perfect Monday as in how many times in your life do you swim with manta rays and tropical fish off the leeward shore of a beautiful Marquesan Island that you sailed across the Pacific ocean to get to?

Tuesday morning we upped anchor and motor sailed back to Hiva Oa. The plan had been to make it to Paumau, to look at the largest tiki in the Marquesas, but the wind didn’t cooperate. As expected, the east wind in the channel between Tahuata and Hiva Oa gave us some good speed as we crossed the channel from southish to northish. Once behind Hiva Oa the wind died until we reached the north end of the west end, when the trade winds hit us head on, slowing our progress and raising the seas into which we were bashing under motor alone. It became obvious that we weren’t going to make it to Puamau, so we pulled into Hana Iapa, commonly known by cruisers as William’s Bay, and dropped anchor in about 40 feet, can’t see the bottom. Dolphins guided us in. We are anchored at 09.42.871 S and 139.00.851 W. My charting program’s basic world chart shows us up on land, about 250 yards from our actual position. I don’t have the actual charts for this area. Emil’s Raymarine C80 with the Navionics chip shows us right where we actually are, properly out in the harbor.

After what I said yesterday about anchoring shallow, I was given cause to rethink that advice or at least some tension was injected into it. After we jumped in with our snorkels and swam towards shore, we came to a shelf where the bay quickly shallowed up to around 25 feet. The vis was good enough to let us see that the bottom was quite covered with the most beautiful complex large coral structures. Anchoring in 25 feet would have torn the hell out of this coral. It may be that even in 40 feet we are killing coral. For a boat casually passing through these islands, it is hard to know which harbors have coral structures and which just have anchor grabbing rocks. We had a great time snorkeling here, though every time a cloud came over the sun the vis and color diminished considerably. This would be a good place for some shallow scuba puttering around, if the day was sunny. I like this anchorage, on the leeward side of the island. We have little to no swell and hardly any flies. It is marked out in the entrance to the bay by a big rock known as the Black Head. Looking out at it from the anchorage it really does look like a head, not so much on the way in. There are very interesting geological structures around here. Layer after built up layer of lava, the cool, ropey stuff, is exposed in the cliffs along the edge of the island. It lays horizontally, with each layer on top of the previous one, with vertical tubes or pipes visible every so often where one (that is, one who last paid attention to geology in college forty years ago) imagines lava ran up and out to create a new layer, but then which maybe drained out when the underlying reservoir of lava drained away. Even though this is more the dry leeward side of the island, there was a nice waterfall leaping out into the ocean just a few miles west of this anchorage, with green vegetation visible along its route down the cliff, watered by the wind caused spray.

Judy and Emil went for a walk in town. Dom went kayaking and snorkeling, I snorkeled and blogged. They returned with a couple of bags of vegetables and William. William is the same guy that greeted us here on the side of the road when we were on the car tour last week, with Mary Jo driving. He is a real character, about 60 years old, Marquesan, no tattoos, lives here, has a small fruit orchard and vegetable garden, and works copra. Also, he runs William Yacht Club and actively seeks out and befriends cruisers – a cruiserphile, you could say. He has a wall with boat cards and a log book to sign into. He came aboard and we traded him a half bottle of whiskey and a big handful of ibuprofen for the bags of fruit and vegetables. He was intelligent, fun to talk to, had pretty good English and is happy to talk about Marquesan life and culture. I kept filling his glass with more whiskey as we talked, and, of course, to be sociable, mine too. William mentioned that the government (France) pays him a pension of 14,000 XPF per month (about $150 US a month). He wants us to take him fishing or to Puamau, or to Ua Pao, or just about anywhere we are going. In different circumstances I’d take him up on it, but it isn’t my boat and ……



Day 28 and 29 - May 4 and 5, Wednesday and Thursday

Today the plan is to up anchor and beat our way up to Puamau for some tiki inspection work. Charlie’s Charts says that the anchorage is very rolly and exposed, so after inspecting the site and conditions we may head for the next island, Ua Pau, or come back here, depending on the timing, the wind, etc. It’s about 75 miles to Ua Pao, probably relatively downwind.

“There is no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet – except in dreams. The wings of the rushing wind seem to be bearing you onward, you know not where. You are no longer the slow, plodding, puny thing of clay, creeping tortuously upon the ground, you are part of Nature! Your heart is throbbing against hers! Her glorious arms are around you, raising you up against her heart! Your spirit is at one with hers; your limbs grow light! The voices of the air are singing to you. The earth seems far away and little; and the clouds, so close above your head, are brothers, and you stretch your arms to them.” Thanks for that to Jerome K. Jerome when he was talking about three men in a boat.

The weather is still mixed fluffy, low, cumulus clouds and sun. As we sail along the leeward side of the island we can see the tops of the rain clouds stacked up on its windward side as they slowly, drained of most of their moisture, creep over the tops of the mountains, free again to speed on their way across the Pacific gathering moisture until perchance meeting another island.

We beat our way upwind to Paumau. Rounding the first big cape was an interesting study in cape effect, which works the same way here as in the states or Mexico. The cape concentrates and focuses and accelerates the wind, and if you are beating your way into it, you pay the price. We anchored over towards the jetty. Gigi was anchored out in the middle of the bay. After observation, we felt we were much less affected by the swell than Gigi, an Island Packet 440. We hooked up with Paul and Karen on Gigi and all went to shore in Emi’s dingy, The Pudknocker, as Gigi’s outboard was not working. It took two trips to get us all offloaded at the jetty, as The Pudknocker is only 7 or 8 feet long. It is smallish, with a 3.5 HP engine, but that paid off when it came time to bodily lift it out of the water up onto the jetty. There was no way to leave it in the water, as the surge would have torn it up along the concrete jetty. It is light and small enough that a couple or three people can just lift it up and put it on the jetty, which we have done several times on this trip. Deciding on the best dingy size is tough. The Pudknocker is tiny and underpowered, but very light, easy to stow, easy to get onto a jetty, and doesn’t take up so much room on deck. Freyja’s 10’ 6”, 15 HP, dingy is so much nicer except when it comes to stowing on the deck and lifting it out of the water and keeping its thirsty engine supplied with gas. So far on this trip, I’d rather have Emil’s. Mine is better for Mexico, and maybe better in big lagoons downwind from here where you might need some speed and power. We’ll see.

The ruins at Paumau were an easy walk, about 20 to 30 minutes, from the jetty, slightly uphill. We paid our 300 XFP admission fee apiece at a little tiny store. The ruins are smaller and more peaceful and feminine than the ruins we saw out of Atuona. Very pretty, well worth the walk. The tiki’s all seemed very old and were covered with moss and lichen. We picked some star fruit on the walk back from a tree on the side of the road, a tree which had dropped most of its fruit on the ground to rot. There so many different varieties of ripe fruit on the trees we were walking by. We had very tasty breadfruit fries for breakfast. The people are so very friendly everywhere we have gone, happy to stop, talk, smile, interact. We saw 4 subsistence, 2 man, fishing boats head out around dark, all bigger than canoes, all with outboards, all with an outrigger, all seeming to be deploying handlines as they went. I think that if you showed up here with a Mexican panga that they’d have an outrigger on it in about 15 minutes.

We spent the night on the hook at Paumau, and had the anchor up by 4:45 am. I think Gigi left earlier that night, to beat their way around the eastern tip of Hiva Oa, on their way south and thus upwind to Fata Hiva. We’re having a nice downwind sail to the north at 6+ knots to the island of Ua Pao (sounds like WaPow), the four of us standing nice easy 2 hour watches, hand steering. Hand steering seems to be a lot easier on our rudder. The autopilot (when it was working) would hit the rudder really hard and fast to correct the course, while the helmsman lets the boat sort of have its way and correct itself, which is a lot softer on the rudder. I suppose for a long ocean cruise one should set the autopilot’s sensitivity to slow and low, or cruise mode, instead of highly sensitive and fast reacting as one might have it for racing.

So far, in talking to the boats we have met here, autopilot failure is the most common serious problem. We were in the Atuona anchorage with 19 boats and 4 had failed autopilots. We have subsequently run into a couple more boats suffering from autopilot failures. One boat, Endorphine, actually re-soldered a failed connection on an autopilot circuit board successfully while underway! I noticed that the webbing holding Shanti’s mainsail headboard to the slugs that fit into the mast slot was about 90% chaffed through, so Emil repaired that yesterday with some new sail webbing I had brought along in my sail repair travel kit. The Catalina headboard was not very impressive – the slots that the webbing fits through were stamped out of the aluminum and Catalina hadn’t rounded the resulting knifelike edges. Many of the other mainsail mast slugs were suffering from failing webbing connections, too, but not bad enough to repair yesterday. Several do need repairs fairly urgently.

Gigi reported that they got hit by several 40 knot squalls in the Zone, and that generally they had a rough trip. Other boats also report trips with considerably more wind and weather than we had. I think we got lucky for the puddle jump – sort of like Goldilocks getting the just right porridge. I hope our luck holds. And that we get to tonight’s anchorage before dark. We did leave an hour before dawn so there was a bit of compromise there. I’m reminded of the saying that airplane pilots have – “There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots.”

Gigi reported that they had good luck fishing on the puddle jump, and, that like Shanti, they had decided fishing poles were worthless and that a dragline or two was the only way to go while on a passage. There might be some fishing poles that are heavy duty enough to haul in the fish while sailing at 6 knots, or some sailors nerdy enough to want to take down their sails and let the boat dance in the swells so they can play the fish on their pole, but if you want to haul in the meat while gently making way, and avoid a Chinese fire drill getting the sails down and the boat slowed, get or make a couple of drag lines.

To make a drag line you need 150 feet or so of 200 pound test tuna cord, three b-i-g swivels, some beefy strong big surgical tubing, maybe 10 to 20 feet of 100 pound test or so, and 4 feet or so of 200 pound test, nylon leader. If the surgical tubing is say 4 feet long, cram maybe 6 or 7 feet of tuna cord into it, tie each end of that internal tuna cord to a swivel, zip tie the tubing to each swivel with strong beefy zip ties, so the tuna cord is sandwiched inside of it. Then tie the long tuna cord to one of the swivels sticking out of the tubing, and on the other end of the tubing tie about three or six feet of 200 pound leader to the swivel and then make a loop in the other end for putting over a cleat. The tubing should be able to stretch out quite a bit but it won’t break because the internal tuna cord gets tight - this acts as a shock absorber when your fish hits; so figure out how much of a shock absorber you want and build the tubing thing accordingly. Likewise, the loop of leader that you flip over the cleat should be sized for your boat’s cleat. You don’t want to catch too big of a fish, so your leader shouldn’t be too strong, but on the other hand lures are expensive. I really like fish in the 10 to 20 pound range, not bigger unless it is just before you come into an anchorage and you want fish to share…..

Gunkholing around the Marquesas is pretty nice. There are good anchorages for the weather we have had, which has been your basic trade wind weather, no storms or weather events so far. There are plenty of places to drop the anchor and be comfortable and out of the swell, plenty of little places to buy beer, dried pasta, fruits and vegetables, juice, wine, etc., some good walks or hikes on land, nice swimming, good shelling, pleasant temperatures, beautiful geology and vegetation, and nice people. A couple of places on shore had mosquitos and nonos, so bring bug spray. We’ve had a few pesky but not biting black flies on board at several anchorages. All in all, it is very benign and pleasant sailing. So far, we haven’t seen anything like the bright lights of the city, though – the opportunities for fine dining and shopping for designer fashions and nightlife and cosmopolitan culture are non-existent here. For the most part local life seems to be up at first light or first rooster crow, whichever is earlier, and to sleep by dark or soon after.

Part way to Ua Pao a short dozen of dolphins came up to our bow to play, sticking around for maybe half an hour. We all spent some time on the bow watching them, and Dom getting video. They were brown backed, and dark underneath, no signs of any white, black or gray. A couple looked like juveniles, as they were a good bit smaller than the main group.

Hopefully, nobody was watching us anchor in Ua Pao at around 4:45 pm. We entered the main harbor and dropped the bow anchor just fine. The stern anchor, however, was determined to fight its own deployment. Emil jumped into his dingy with the stern anchor and started to row it out, not attached to the boat yet. Then he noticed that Shanti was drifting away from the desired location, so he came back and had us hold the dingy painter while he rowed furiously trying to pull all 26,000 pounds of Shanti towards the desired location, against the wind and current, assisted only by the little tiny plastic oars of the Pudknocker. It wasn’t working very well, we decided after 5 or 10 minutes of observation, so we put Shanti into gear and tried to nudge her back and forth into alignment. It sort of worked despite the prop walk cooperating with the wind and current in opposition to our desires. Then, Emil prepared to deploy the stern anchor after which he would row the anchor rode to Shanti and affix it to a cleat. Shockingly, the anchor rode wasn’t affixed to the anchor! And the shackles were the wrong size, despite just having used the stern anchor a couple of anchorages ago. And the shackles were frozen shut. So Shanti drifted out of position again while Emil fought to shackle the rode to the anchor. Finally we handed him some pliers and he was able to make one of the shackles work. He tried to tow Shanti back into position and we used the engine and rudder again to help. He tossed the anchor out of the dingy and started rowing madly back to Shanti to give us the bitter end of his rode. We were all stunned when all of a sudden he stopped about 20 feet away from Shanti and said “The anchor rode is too short to reach the boat. It is only 50 feet long.” Dom was in his swimming suit ready to go, so I said, “Dom, go get the dingy painter and bring it back here.” which he did, despite Emil wacking him accidently with the oar a couple of times. I then pulled Shanti to the dingy by the painter and then grabbed the anchor rode and pulled Shanti closer to the anchor. Whew. What a circus. But, like all circuses, it was fun and exciting and we all had a good laugh at our own expense!

It is a decent anchorage, not much swell when we were there. You have to park behind the wharf in case the freighter, the Aranui 3, comes in.

We stayed aboard and had chicken fajitas for dinner (frozen chicken from Costco in Mexico), then went to sleep as it had been a very long day after getting up at 4:45 am. I’ve been sleeping in the cockpit to take advantage of the slight breeze, the fresh air and the stars. About midnight I heard some sharp cracking noises from the rudder, like it makes when we are sailing. It turned out that the floating anchor rode used on Shanti for stern anchoring had wrapped around the rudder and was jerking on it when the boat moved in the small swells. I was going to wake Emil and suggest that he dive to free the rudder, but Dom came up and just jumped right into the dark waters. 10 minutes of work and we had it free. I pulled some more of the floating line in, until we were tight between the bow and stern anchors. We were pretty up and down on the stern anchor, but I figured we would be okay until morning and that then Emil could get a longer non-floating rode and re-deploy the stern anchor. I hadn’t felt like jumping into the dark opaque waters and was pretty impressed with Dom’s fortitude and gung ho attitude. More than once on this trip, actually.