Paradise

There are places that you hear about from other cruisers, special places. Perhaps the first time will be over sundowners in someone’s cockpit, and then again online, or through the coconut telegraph. After a while, a few of these places rise to the top, they become legendary. We have had the incredible good fortune of having visited many of them, but this one, we almost missed. We had originally planned to take the North Indian Ocean route, which would have shown us Sri Lanka, Maldives, Chagos (another storied cruiser destination) and possibly Seychelles. The wind died early for that route, this year, and we missed our chance. Then we decided to go from Padang, Sumatra, directly to Madagascar, but the winds weren’t really blowing that way and we didn’t have the fuel to motor to the wind. So we lucked out. ...

As we made our way across the Pacific we were perpetually asking “can we spend a little more time here?” After ~10 years of putting off today’s desires in favor of tomorrow’s dream it was finally time to say “Yes, why not!” The down side to this was that we knew that every extra day we spent in today’s paradise would be borrowed from tomorrow’s. You can only defer for so long before the cyclone threat starts making your choices for you. ...

We have looked at the gribs (graphical weather predictions), the surface analisys, and read the tea leaves. All data clearly shows that tomorrow morning would be the best possible time to leave if we wanted a quick and comfortable passage to Samoa. Normally that would be all we needed to know to set us on our merry way. But we aren’t going. Not yet anyway. Suwarrow is all of those things that I said it was in the previous post. It’s also something more. None of us have tried to articulate what it is, but there is something deeply special about this place and the way our family has reacted to it. ...