Reunion

Approaching Reunion Island from the Northeast

Our passage from Rodrigues to Reunion had pretty light winds most of the way and we had to motor for about 16 hours to keep moving along.  We arrived in Reunion on Saturday, 12/6 on a lovely, sunny day.  Reunion is a roughly circular island with a diameter of about 36 miles.  It is part of France and has been since the late 16th century.  Being part of France allows the island to have first world infrastructure so they have great roads and lots of traffic.  The current population is around 900,000.  There is an active volcano in the Southeast so that area is not very populated.  The larger cities are around the coastal areas with many smaller villages scattered through the interior.  They seem to have some tourism, mostly from France but it's not a particularly easy island to get to.  Most of the tourist area is along the west coast.  The island is volcanic and at one time had a large number of volcanoes that have collapsed over the centuries, leaving a unique and remarkable landscape.  I've tried to get some photos but, once again, the pictures don't come close to the reality.  I have really enjoyed our week here and I'll be leaving tomorrow thinking that I will need to come back one day and finish exploring this amazing place.

From the sea you can get an idea of the mountainous nature of the island.  These raviens and hills are the defining features of the island and this is a very small example of one.  The towns are usually on the high ground with reviens on each side.

At the base of these cliffs is the highway that leads from Le Port to St Denni, which is the capitol.  It's a lovely drive and I imagine the homes on top have a great view.

This is the other end of that 8-10 kilometer long cliff on the East side of Le Port.  There are 2 ports here and we tied up in Port O'est (West).  There are no good natural harbors on the island so all of them are very nice man made ports that are very well protected from storms and high seas.

I went in with some shipmates and we rented 2 cars and drove up to a village in the interior called Cilaos.  As the crow flies the distance from the coast to Cilaos is about 8-10 kilometers but the road up the mountain is 36 kilometers and you can't go more than about 20 due to hairpin turns.  It took us a couple of hours to get there but we stopped a few times and took pictures.  Fortunately they drive on the right side of the road, which is good since I did all the driving.

Here is where we started to climb into the mountains.  The valley is very wide with a flat rocky bottom and there is a very small stream, maybe 10 feet wide, in the center.  We pretty much followed this valley all the way up.  The highest point on the island is a little over 3,000 meters, so a little over 10,000 feet.  That's quite a bit of altitude to cover from sea level at the cost to 3,000 meters in about 10 kilometers.

This should give you a sense of the road.  It was in excellent condition and quite steep.  The red sign you see is actually a bus stop.  Yes, they run busses up and down to all of the towns in the interior.  It costs 1.5 Euros to take the bus from the coast to Cilao.  Just to the right and on the outer edge of the turn you can see 2 posts.  This is a marked hicking trail that descends into the valley.  Reunion has hundreds of kilometers of improved hicking trails all over the island, many with cottages spaced a day's hike apart.  One trail makes a complete circle for over 100 kilometers and takes about 17 days to hike.

This is more than half way up the mountain at another bus stop.  Unfortunately the higher elevations are frequently shrouded in clouds but, if it were clear we would be able to see the sea in the center.

Steep, beautiful country.

This tunnel is about 300 meters long.  You're running along on the nice two lane mountain road and you turn into the tunnel enterence to find that the tunnel is only one lane wide and the inside of the tunnel is unfinished, bare rock.  They did put a wide spot in the middle so cars could get around each other if they meet.  There were a few tunnels like this but this one was the longest.

Near the top is the very French village of Cilaos

This is the view back from that church above.  The mountains are kind of lost in the haze, but they're there.  The village was pretty much closed by the time we arrived so we just walked through and admired how beautiful it is.

I have made a point of stopping and smelling all the new flowers that I see.  I was able to smell these flowers before I got anywhere near the trees.  There were namy of these trees and they were very fragarent, with a sweet scent similar to lilacs.  This bridge crossed a water run off canal, which was empty except that the flowers were falling from the trees like snow and the canal was coated with them.  Below the bridge, beside the canal was a littly grassy park.

There is one more interesting tidbit about Reunion.  There is a great deal of shark activity along the west coast.  Yes, I did say above that the west coast is the tourist area.  The beach that I stayed at had and area that had reef of on two sides and a shark net along the seaward side.  This area was also patrolled by jet-ski.  Swimming was only allowed in that small section.  The rest of the beach was posted as a No Swimming area, due to sharks.

Phosphorescence

There is an organism, in most of the world’s oceans, that, when disturbed, briefly emit a greenish-yellow glow; very similar to fire-flies or lightening bugs.  I don’t know if they are algae, plankton or some more simple organism but they are very small and one really only sees them when they phosphoresce.   The phosphorescent glow only lasts a few seconds; however, when there is a large concentration of these organisms it can be a spectacular sight.  My first experience with this phenomenon was in the Atlantic when Lugnuts did the Newport-Bermuda Race.  There were large quantities of them so that, at night, the wake glowed with thousands of points of light.  It is a beautiful and mesmerizing sight.  I have been quite surprised by the lack of phosphorescence that in the Indian Ocean.  I had assumed that it would be the same everywhere as I had seen in the Atlantic.  In the Indian Ocean most nights we only see the occasional glimmer of phosphorescence.  The most we’ve seen was on the first couple of nights after leaving Bali, which brings me to my story.

One of the really great things about sailing, whether it be on Lake Michigan or in the ocean, is that it puts one in places where there is great potential to see wonderful and amazing sights.  As anyone on the Lugnuts crew can confirm, we have seen the most remarkable sunsets and sunrises, storm clouds, lightning, calms, stars and falling stars, among many other beautiful sights.  We often remark, while in awe of some remarkable sight, that many of these sights can only be seen from the deck of a boat.  I was pretty confident that, during 8 months at sea, I would be seeing some more amazing sights.  Little did I know that one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen would present itself on my very first night watch at sea.

We left Bali at about 1400 on Sunday, October 26^th.  When we went to sea the crew was divided from 2 shore watches into 3 night watches and I was placed on the 12 to 4 watch.  Leaving port we were “all hands” until around 1800 so my first official watch was from midnight until 0400 on 10/27.  During the night watches, one of the duties we share is forward lookout, where for one hour shifts a crew member stands at the bow and keeps a sharp eye out of any hazards or other traffic.  I had my first turn on lookout from 0200-0300.  The moon was either new or waning very small that night so it was pretty dark and the stars were amazing and there was a moderate amount of phosphorescence in the water.  I was trying to remember to keep looking around for hazards and not just gaze at the stars when I noticed a strange light in the water near the bow.  When I looked for it I thought that it must have been a whitecap that I saw glowing a little but then I realized it was turned in the wrong direction so I started watching more closely nearer to the bow.  I saw another long slash of phosphorescence going at an angle to the wake of the ship but this time I was watching and it turned out that I had a small pod of 5 dolphins swimming in and around the bow wave of the ship.  It was so dark that I would not have been able to seem them at all if not for the phosphorescence but the darkness made the phosphorescence that much brighter to my eye and make the whole scene truly amazing.  The phosphorescence glowed from the nose of each dolphin and all around their bodies and then left a glowing wake behind each one for about another length of its body, so that a 4 foot long dolphin swam in the front half of an 8 foot long torpedo of green light.  The phosphorescence was bright enough that I could clearly see the entire length of each dolphin, in detail, as they swam in and out of the bow wave.  It appeared to me that they were taking turns getting into the best part of the bow wave and then veering off to circle back up from behind the bow and wait until the spot was open again.  I had the privilege of being able to watch them for about 10 minutes before they swam off.  I was absolutely spellbound the entire time and my turn on lookout ended just a few minutes after they left.  They came back (or more showed up) about 10 minutes into the next watch and I was told they stayed and played for about 20 minutes that time.

When I was relieved at lookout I excitedly told my relief about the dolphins.  My relief was Emile, a 21 year old Dane who sailed previously on the Denmark, and he was not impressed at all.  He said, “You’ll see so many dolphins on this trip that you began not to notice.”  I found I had to go find Turi, our watch’s other new trainee, just to find someone to share my excitement with.  Since that first night, I’ve seen dolphins one other time in the daylight and that was very brief.  There have been a couple of times that crewmates have seen whales breathing but I have not seen that yet myself.  I can’t imagine that I will ever find seeing these animals in their natural habitat to be a mundane sight.  I would love to be able to show you pictures, although I doubt pictures would do the sight justice, but there was no way I was going to walk away to get my camera while the dolphins were there.  That day I started my journal entry with the statement, “I will probably repeat this phrase many time here but, I saw the most amazing thing today!”