We have a shortwave radio receiver on board which I had been experimenting with on our long crossings. The receiver is a bit finicky and stations tend to fade in and out with the rolling of the boat. It's a little like trying to listen to the radio of the car next to you in stop and go traffic … while passing a road construction site. If the wind generator is going strong it creates interference on some channels that sound like a jackhammer. The other problem with shortwave radio stations is that they change frequency multiple times over the course of a day. This could be because they are broadcast from satellite or it could have something to do with frequency attenuation. I don't really know but not having a schedule for the changes makes it very hard to predict what you are going to find.
The first game I tried to tune into was the England vs. US game on the second day of the World Cup. One of the problems with trying to follow these games while sailing in the south pacific is that the occur in the middle of the night. I had to switch my watch with Adam to make sure I was listening at the right time. At this point in time we were crossing from French Polynesia to American Samoa. I started scanning through the AM block since at night these signals can bounce pretty far.
First hit - that "Kiss Me" song from that teen movie with Freddie Prince Jr. where they turn an arty girl into the prom queen. Nice but not what I'm looking for. Next, "Love Me Tender". Next, "I wanna know if he's thinking of me". I must have stumbled onto some late night Knuschelt rock from Hawaii AM stations. Next was some Polynesian music. I couldn't tell if it was from Tahiti or Samoa. Finally I hit on a English sports talk channel. They were talking about Football but it turned out to be the college variety with helmets and pads. Something about a scandal at USC that I didn't understand. On to basketball playoff coverage and finally baseball scores for the Brewers game. After that came car dealership ads. I changed the channel disgusted. I couldn't believe that a US sports show wasn't talking about the biggest US national soccer game going on right now. The next channel I found was a Spanish language channel. I was hopefull thinking that any station broadcasting in Spanish at that time of night had to be talking about soccer but it turned out only to be a news broadcast. I continued browsing though the night and picked up some Jeff Foxworthy standup, lots of religious stations, a call in political talk show about South Carolina local politics, and a shock jock discussing whether it should be ok for post-op transvestites to go topless on a beach in Del Marva. By this time the game was over and my watch was up anyway. No success.
We arrived in American Samoa and I got my first taste of the World Cup when we walked into McDonald's in the morning and they had a large screen TV playing the highlights of the previous nights game. The next day I was even able to catch an early morning Hondurus vs. Chili game. We stayed in Pago Pago a while and I was able to catch up on a lot of the World Cup news by watching the morning highlights but I still hadn't watched an entire game from start to finish. That is, until I found out that McDonalds was open 24 hours on Friday and Saturday. The day before we left I got took a nap mid afternoon and woke up around 3 in the morning to catch any game possible. I made friends with the night crew, ate a couple hamburgers and watched two games all the way though. It's not your usual World Cup experience but it was enough to satisfy me.