A Three Hour Tour

We're living on a sailboat this week!  The Mamenchi Saurus https://abnb.me/FTrFXAs0MO is a 41-footer docked in Kewalo Basin Harbor, Ala Moana, Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii.  It's an AirBnB run by Josh and Carly, although they're new owners since the start of the year and all my initial planning was done with Jason and Rhea, who are in the process of wrapping up Jason's military career and moving to Florida.  Jason and Rhea had themselves lived on the boat for 2 years of the 6 or so they owned it; farther back it was owned by a Japanese dentist who named it. BTW, Mamenchisaurus is a Japanese dinosaur.

We are loving sailboat life, especially the waves rocking you to sleep.  With three bedrooms below it's surprisingly spacious. There are some limitations, though, chief among them the head.  Definitely missing the convenience of a regular flush toilet. And my shins are a not-lovely purple from forgetting that there are steps up and down into all the rooms, which in some cases don't line up with the raised doors.  Still, loving this and 10/10 would do again.

Sunday night we were able to hire the owners to take us on what is billed as a 3.5h sunset cruise to Diamond Head.  Big Frog and I persist in calling it a three-hour tour. Our cousin Dom & Uncle Steve (different branches of the family) were able to join us, too.  In a perfect world we'd’ve sailed gloriously into the sunset. Dom has pretty extensive college sailing experience, and I am enthusiastic but untrained, having been on a 25-footer twice (The Hebe, our friends’ boat on the Chesapeake Bay.).  So in my mind it was going to be a reasonably hands-on sail.

God had other plans.  (Fortunately not of the three-hour tour type.  https://youtu.be/Q8jhb5NnADM)  Try as we might, winds never allowed us to more than motor around.  (There were other tourist boats out, mostly catamarans, with the sails unfurled but tied tight.  Evidently such are promoted that if you don't sail you get a redo, so they as a matter of course always have the sails out.)  And yet God gave us a blood wolf moon lunar eclipse. To be on the ocean I count as a win in any case, so compounding that with on a sailboat, in Hawaii, with family, during a lunar eclipse is rather an abundance of blessings.

I know many of my East-coast friends posted beautiful images taken under duress -- telescope, camera, thermal blankets, frozen feet and hands.  Our experience was a little different.
Hawaii, like Arizona, doesn't observe daylight savings time.  So in winter it's 5h later than eastern standard time. For us, the sun set at 6:12p and the moon rose in an impish Cheshire cat smile.  As it got darker out and the moon ascended, it went from very white to strawberry blonde and then outright red in color, and as we pulled back into port, white began to appear again, giving the moon a curiously peach peachlike appearance, two-toned with a seam.  

My photos (in 2nd post) are phone photos, no filter, adjusted for light at the time of the snap.  Some of them I've cropped down or adjusted the tilt, but as far as a stable platform, please remember I was on a boat.