We pretty much motor-sailed the entire 18 hours to Rota from Guam at a steady 3 knots. Ack. That's not to say it wasn't exciting, though. For example, it's exciting when a 250+ foot stationary Coast Guard boat of some sort has a helicopter land on it at sea and then decide it wants to rev the engines to full speed shortly after you pass it and lay on its burly tanker horn with zero radio contact and when you hail it on VHF, it tells you to get out of the way. Yep. It's also exciting when, after you move, the boat speeds past you, you resume course, it stays a bit ahead of you all night until it wants to turn, moves right in front of you, then come to a complete stop. Yep. What a donkey. Rob released some passive aggression on the VHF to no response. I told him to call the guy a 'banana', but Rob keeps his cool better than that. Good thing I'm not captain.

Absolutely gorgeous water in the west harbor, better than many places I snorkel in Hawaii. You could see individual coral heads from the deck at 50 feet of depth in the channel. The rental car on Rota had much better A/C than it's Guam counterpart and she took us on a circumnavigation yesterday including the cliffside Bird Sanctuary (cool), a Japanese cannon, a Japanese gravesite, a Japanese tomb, a Japanese sugar mill ruin and complementary rusted sugar cane locomotive, a uhh seeing a pattern here? Guam certainly had remnants of Japanese occupation, but the small area in which all of this was contained on Rota made it seem more Japanese? The right word never came to me there. For all the urbanity this island lacked it did have an awesome Japanese (!!!) lunch joint called Tokyo-en ('en' from 'yen', an homage to the origin of this island's long-since-gone boom money, it seemed). Mahimahi sashimi bento! We found a great swimming hole called Swimming Hole and a makeshift pull-up bar then we left. We're on the sea again sailing towards Tinian now. GRIBs say some southerlies, but I've learned to hope for the accuracy of the GRIBs, not count on it.