If it's Friday it must be time to fly back to Ta'u. I was getting good at this. The weather in Pago wasn't great, but the nice thing about any rain there was that it was warm unlike at home in New Mexico.
Airplane travel in the tropics can be a little different. Because of the extreme humidity the cabin will sometimes fill up with fog when the air-conditioning is turned on. It gives new meaning to local IFR conditions. I've run into this in several places over the years. I guess it's OK as long as the pilots can see. Of course by the time they turn the air-conditioning on you're in the air, so there isn't a lot to run into. It clears up after a couple of minutes.
I took the picture below just as we were about to land on Ta'u. The arrow is pointing at the cistern behind Leoso's house where the station was installed. Leoso's house was the one with the blue roof.
About five minutes after the plane landed it started to pour rain. That figures.
Open up the station box, check things over, download the data collected so far, fix any other problems, button things back up, kick back and relax until my flight back to Pago in the morning. That would have been about 45 minutes worth of work. It took about three and a half hours of dodging the rain with a little travel umbrella to get it all done.
Everything having to do with the site looked very good.
About an hour after I finished. Oh well. It made for a nice evening.
That was IT!! I was officially finished working. Everything that could be installed and checked had been installed and checked from one end of the Samoan Island chain to the other. In a simple celebration I rinsed out my work clothes, my bath towel that I had used on trips since my project to China in 2002, my sweat rag, and left them hanging on the clothes line behind Leoso's house. They had all earned their retirement in the South Pacific.
2018-04-05