Day 5 (Tuesday, June 17) by Mike

Sailing with Dummies (Hawaii to Alaska Edition)

It was cloudy and rainy as we continued heading toward Midway. We got a view of Necker Island as we passed about four miles north of it on our way westward. There were a lot of birds but otherwise it was not very interesting.

Well after dark we passed about nine miles north of French Frigate Shoals. This is a bunch of small islands in shallow water and probably would not have been worth looking at during the day. But there is a lot of interesting history here. Such as (1) WWII Japanese float planes landed here and were refueled by submarines and (2) WWII US forces blew up a bunch of coral and then dredged it to build an aircraft-carrier-sized island.

How do I know this? Bob made “Travel Guides” for our trip. Part one is 350+ pages of information on all the islands and stuff from Hawaii to Midway. It has natural history, unnatural (human) history, wildlife, and other interesting stuff on the area. Every day we all read about the next island areas coming up. This is the kind of stuff that would normally be dry and boring to read – unless you are there. Well, we’re here. It’s interesting.

Part Two of his guide is about the Aleutian Islands and Alaska. There is also a wildlife guide. Altogether I’d guess there are more than 1000 pages of information tailor-made for our journey. Pretty handy.

We had another MOB (man over board) practice today. It was windy and rainy during this one. But we won anyway and recovered the seat cushion again!

Daily Cuisine:

Another banana bread baked (only a few bananas left!). Not much else of note.

Fishing Report:

Fishing is not allowed in this national monument.

Arts and Entertainment:

The most entertaining part of the day for me started with a text message to our satphone. It read “Celtics 9, Lakers 9, with 9 minutes left in first quarter…”

Patty continued to send updated scores throughout the game. Nineteen messages later the Celtics had won the NBA championship.

My favorite? “Celtics 116, Lakers 81, 4^th quarter, 4 minutes.” Yay Celtics.