Suva

June 17, 2007 Suva

Today is a relaxing day, before the work begins to ship shape the boat tomorrow to get ready to head out on Wednesday. I hope I get to email this out before we leave, I think the email facilities will be getting progressively slower connections as we head to Vanuatu and PNG (Papua New Guinea). Today Agate (from France) and I were briefed on the culture of the ship and how things run smoothly around here. There are several activities during the week that everyone participates in. Dinners, acting class, multimedia night, and lab for example. We have “lab” two mornings a week..don’t really know what to expect with that one, I think its like morning mediation (it’s the study of attention with your body as the laboratory, controlling your breathing, your thoughts, etc. etc). Ya I don’t know, we’ll see though. I went into town in the afternoon to post my blogs, and then came back for dinner on the ship. I’m getting off the boat a lot I feel like, but Paul said to get off the boat as much as possible when you’re at port, as life gets pretty monotonous otherwise. Dinner tonight was toast night. Pretty different as usual (that’s an oxymoron for sure). We had 2 bottles of champagne during dinner and whenever someone wanted to, they would give a toast to anything and everything. I hardly had a chance to eat with all the toasting, it was quite ridiculous. The food has been pretty good by the way. Everybody has there night to cook and then cook breakfast and lunch on different days too. Oh well back to dinner tonight…after all the toasting we had to give 2 minute speeches on anything but it had to have a point. I talked about my sister and my parents and us living on our boat before and now living here bringing back memories (def not for 2 minutes though). I slept on the deck and slept okay, it was a little uncomfortable, but cool, almost cold which was nice.


June 18, 2007 Suva

Today was a work day. We all woke up and got our assignments of boat projects we needed to work on for the day. I greased the shackles and turn buckles, vacuumed out the bilge (sucked!), washed the cockpit area, oiled the wood planking on the ladder up this lookout area (with a harness mom), and Matt and I were deck officers today, which means we had to keep a lot of the wind, the ship’s voltage, outside temp, make sure the dinghys were okay, clean bathrooms and showeres, etc. It was a lot of work today, but it wasn’t too bad, I’m just tired. After all the work, there was a quick chance to go in and shower at the yacht club. I got my things together so fast! So great to have a hot shower and not worry about the water usage or anything. For dinner tonight we had wahoo in flour and paprika, and sweet taro potatoes..good dinner again. After dinner we had a presentation on Immersive Media, a company that we are going to start working with to test their 360 degree view camera out underwater. Its kind of like Google Earth, but smaller scale where you can see people on the street and signs and turn around, zoom in, and stop the picture. Pretty cutting edge stuff mixing GIS with Google Earth. If the camera works well in Gau, Gaie and Laser will hopefully be able to start up “Google Ocean” with the guys from Immersive Media. Going to bed…so exhausted. Tomorrow going into town one last time to do email, phone calls, and exchange some money. It looks like we will be coming back to Suva on July 7th, July 26th, and the end of August so the internet will be fast and easily accessible during those times.