It's now Tuesday the 11th in Fiji, and it has been a grueling 10 days of non-stop work on the boat. For the first week it was baking hot, over 100 degrees inside in the afternoons and very little wind. It's like working in a 36' oven, only this one has mosquitoes and is a lot more complicated than an oven.
Jen and I together used to take between 6 weeks and 2 months to get Sojourner back in the water after a 6 month haul-out. In Tahiti, we took almost 3 months doing repairs, bottom painting and upgrades. But now the boat has been out of the water for an entire year, and there was a huge amount of work to be done - including bottom sanding and painting. Before storage I had stripped all equipment from the outside of the boat to reduce windage in the event of a hurricane (cyclone). No canvas, running rigging, main solar panels, or even the wind generator was left up. Inside all the electronics were removed to prevent theft, and the engine cylinders were filled with oil the injectors removed and the whole engine covered with oil. The water-maker was pickled, and the inflatable outboard motor and dive compressor were wintered. Plus a million other tiny "wintering" jobs were done.
All of this work had to be reversed, plus anything that seized, corroded, died or broke had to be repaired. Only this time it all had to be done in less than 8 days since I only have a total of 1 month's vacation to launch, sail to NZ and wrap the boat up. This is definitely been the antithesis of a vacation, in fact my office cube in Denver is quite appealing right now…. It has been a case of working until I dropped each day, usually well into the night under mosquito nets in the thick, still hot air. When not in the water, Sojourner retains a lot of heat and doesn't really cool until 1 or 2 in the morning.
I arrived with a pre-planned list of jobs which I knew had to be done, yet for the first 5 days the list just increased in size until it had more than doubled. My frustration, stress and heat exhaustion increased proportionately until eventually Mother Nature kicked in and put the brakes on. I came down with the flu. Perhaps something that I had incubated since the flight, who knows, but it stopped me in my tracks.
The only help I was able to get was someone to sand the bottom and another guy to paint it. Everything inside and anything technical was pretty much beyond the scope of the average Fijian boat yard worker - in fact even bottom painting was beyond the capability of the first guy. I had to fire him since I couldn't explain to him that a roller should "roll". He was "sliding" the roller all over the bottom, leaving huge unpainted patches. Then when I convinced him to use less pressure and actually "roll" the roller, he would only put paint on one side of it, and the resultant paint job would end up looking like a chess board. At US$140 per gallon and only 8 days to do everything, my patience was running thin. I tried to draw on my Raytheon "supervisor's training" but it was lost in a mental void. All the time I was trying to explain the mechanics of a paint roller to this guy he'd look at me with this blank stare which basically said "You know, I could be drinking Kava right now…why don't you just pay me, heck at least I showed up".
So for 8 days I slogged through this monstrous list: I re-rigged the sails and canvas, re-installed the solar panels, re-mounted the wind generator, re-configured the wind-vane, emptied the engine cylinders of oil (managed to coat the entire cockpit), cleaned and re-installed the injectors, replaced the seized 110amp alternator, bled and started the engine, bypassed the rusted and leaking hot water heater, replaced the floor support which collapsed and nearly caused me to break my leg as I fell into the bilge, re-installed the VHF and HF radios, replaced several sections of copper ground plane which had rotted, tried to restore the Compaq computer which died yet again, setup the email and weatherfax software on my old steam-powered (reliable!) IBM ThinkPad, cleaned crud out from all the thru-hull fittings, taught a Fijian how to paint (partially), installed new red lighting in the navigation station and galley, fixed corroded light connections, spent ½ a day up the mast re-installing the previously repaired Raytheon radar, setup new jacklines, re-installed the lifelines, made a seatbelt for our lucky mascot St Patrick's Beanie Baby who sits on the cabin heater, repaired the seized refrigerator compressor, installed new tie-downs in aft cabin and stowed all gear, jury-rig an engine cutoff to replace snapped Morse cable, put new seals and retainer system on main cabin hatch, replace corroded GPS and autopilot connections, and so on and so on.
The big launch day came on Friday the 6th - only 6 days after arriving. Sojourner was hoisted off her stands and gently lowered into the water. Sven, our 75hp Volvo diesel, purred happily and we motored to the fuel dock, filled every orifice with diesel and then tied up at a berth. I was physically and mentally exhausted, and at this stage the thought of sailing to New Zealand was as about as appealing as going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. But with some rest and the right weather window, all should be well. So I went to pay my marina bill and was told by the manager, Milli, "there's a cyclone heading our way".
"Ridiculous, it's June and the season ends in April" I said, indignant that nature should dare to screw with my mission. So I dropped everything and went to the internet "computer" at the marina which had been down (deep) since I arrived. This "thing" has an SVGA card and 8MB RAM and should be in the Smithsonian. It's barely enough to see a satellite picture of a cyclone. But sure enough, Cyclone Gina was tracking north of Fiji toward Vanuatu, and if history was anything to go by, it could recurve to the SE toward us at any time. I was totally unprepared for this loop. A cyclone in June; even the thought of being on a 35' boat in the same hemisphere as a cyclone was enough to send me packing. So what to do now? Hawaii weather faxes were showing a series of tropical disturbances behind this cyclone like a string of pearls, even when Gina is gone there seems to be so much activity that another is likely. Although I had met my deadline of getting Sojourner into the water, I had not accounted for that one major uncontrollable variable - Mother Nature.