10-12 knots of wind mixed with days of 5 knots or less, that is all the wind we could get to fill our largest sails and push this boat the last 1,500 miles from the Galapagos to the Tuamotu Atolls in French Polynesia. But now we have arrived! 25 days after leaving the Galapagos.
30 years ago Patrick’s little Catalina 27, Juggernaut, took 25 days to cross the same body of water but his arrival was far to the north of us in the tall green Marquesas Islands. All the other cruisers we have been talking to on the SSB seem to think this has been an unusual season of calms and slow passages.
It was a slow passage but at least nothing on the boat broke. The calm sailing can actually be harder on the rigging and sails than storms. When the wind drops but the seas don’t, the boat sits and rocks uncomfortably and sometimes vigorously. The jib and main have their own inertia quite different from the rest of the boat. The sails snap and pop violently with each roll of the boat under them. To help ease the shock loading Patrick sets up heavy rubber snubbers on the jib and main sheet. A running pole is used to pole out the jib to keep it from chaffing on the spreader and shrouds. There are times when a snubber is added to slow the upward snap of the pole. These old sails took a beating on this slow passage. We are trying to make them last till we reach Samoa or New Zealand where replacements will be an option.
In the trade winds, one running pole is not enough. We have two poles of different diameters and lengths but still could use one more very long pole. Collapsible poles unfortunately are not strong enough and eventually collapse in the wrong direction. This happened to one other yacht making the passage with us and has also been Patricks’ past experience with collapsible poles. There is a solution for this need of multi length poles, an adjustable pole that is strong and easy to work with. Patrick is contacting Hall Spars in Bristol, R.I. to see about tooling the fix. Top secret stuff
First we stopped at Tatakoto Atoll in the far eastern Tuomotus. There is no pass through the dense coconut palms to the inner lagoon so we sailed to the south west corner of the atoll where a concrete town dock is located.
Guided by some local fishermen just returning from the far horizon in their small aluminum open boat with a 25 horsepower Yamaha outboard, they pointed where there would be a shallow spot for our anchor. A mere 300 feet from shore the water depth is 600 feet. The men spoke their local language and French so all of us resorted to speaking sign language. We dropped the Bruce anchor in what appeared to be 20 feet of water but 40 feet of chain ran out before touching bottom. There are few plankton in this 80 degree water so it is deceivingly clear. I just imagined that heavy anchor burying itself deeply in to some coral jungle with no chance of ever retrieving it. As long as the trade wind blew us away from shore we would be fine. If the wind should shift, we would quickly be in the churning, turbulent area where our keel and rudder would be ground to the shoal draft configuration. Where we were the gentle swells were manageable but the coral shoal frothing like rabbis just in front of us kept us looking up, over our shoulder, out of the widow, in the middle of a conversation we turned our necks .. We know of only a few other cruisers who would anchor in this not so choice spot.
But we did stay a bit to have a conversation with the fishermen, in very broken French if one can call it that. Patrick spent many hours, day after day on this passage with a French CD program. It appears we need to make several more long passages or those men need to study the CD. The two men offered us a tuna from their boat bottom full of fish, but we declined since our freezer was filled with tuna! Later a local policeman came to the boat with a 32 year old man who learned English, French and Spanish in school in Tahiti. He did well with English and Spanish but his French was rather off. After looking at our boat documentation and zarpe from Panama, the policeman welcomed us and invited us ashore. We told them we were a little nervous of leaving the boat with the roaring surf 150 feet away. Our eyes followed their 14′ aluminum boat as they motored in to the calmer side of the small concrete break water and the concrete dock. While they sat in the boat, which rose and fell with the water within the little basin, a front end loader lowered its bucket over their heads. Timing the rise of the next surge, they reached up and hooked lifting straps to the bucket then fell back to their seats. A well coordinated movement of the operator lifted the boat and men from the water and carried them down the short pier to a boat trailer where they were gently cradled. The fishermen I spoke of before had a boat trailer hooked to a truck waiting for them on the ramp. Timed with an upsurge, the men punched the engine landing the boat onto the trailer where a man waiting with rope and hook fastened the boat to the trailer and immediately the driver pulled the boat to high dry land. Well practiced, well coordinated. If someone mistimed a move they would get severely pinched.
I could not imagine anything on shore in this out of the way island we needed unless we were already headed in the direction of death, which we were not. No tierra firma for us, yet!
While at anchor we did clean the gooseneck barnacles off of the boat, marveling at the hundreds of beautiful fish far below us in the coral. Equally amazing was that abundance of healthy shell fish which had been growing a fiberglass layer from our feet. It is incredible how these barnacles could attach and grow on a new coat of bottom paint while the boat is always moving. And this was supposed to be the Best bottom paint.
There were schools of fish of every color and size in greater abundance than we ever saw before. There were many we did not recognize time for the fish ID book! No big spearable fish though.
Despite the pounding surf so nearby, we were comfortable enough to stay past dark and have a nice dinner. Calculating our distance, speed, arrival time, we picked up anchor in the darkness of 3AM. The atoll of Amanu is 150 miles to the west.
The wind was light at 10 knots but the big red, white and blue spinnaker kept us moving till late morning when it suddenly ripped across an upper panel. On the long passage from the Galapagos that spinnaker had been up for 76 hours at a time, many times. Day after day that light sail pulled us westward sometimes aided with a stay sail poled out to windward. The 130 genoa was unrolled and took over the down wind work for the spinnaker. We had a nice sail over calm water towards Amanu. The main sail is hardly ever used for down wind work. The main torques and unbalances the boat. As Bill Seifert says, “It is easier to pull a boat than to push it.”
I figured the tides and slack water a few different ways and compromised on the best time to transit the pass. The passes in the coral atolls of the Tuomotus can have up to 20 knot currents with standing waves. At least those are the words of the guide books which like to startle the readers. This particular atoll wasn’t known to be one of the more dangerous or fast ones so I felt it was a safe first atoll to visit. We arrived at the exact minute of predicted slack water. We had a two knot current moving us through the pass for a total of 6 knots over the ground. Hmmmm. On the left shore were thick stands of coconut palms. On the right shore was a small church and nicely painted buildings of Easter egg colors of blues, greens and pinks. This could be the Bahamas if it were not for all the coconut palms and obvious lack of litter on the ground.
Having a current behind gives you less time to react if a coral head is in front of your bow, but as long as your engine can go faster than the current, there is sufficient water over the rudder for steerage and thus not much of a problem. Patrick handled the boat wonderfully and we enjoyed a slightly exciting passage through the pass. He was actually taking pictures more often than not. I was shrieking to put down the camera and pay attention!
Once we made it through the pass, a sharp 90 degree turn to the right kept us off the shoal and in the rapids of the channel. We proceeded to where the documented anchorage was. It wasn’t there well maybe it is there but the Sailing Directions is for ships not yachts. The anchoring depth was 70-100 feet of water, so now what? We proceeded towards what appeared to be a shallow spot about =BD mile south of the little 200 person town. Beautiful turquoise and then light green water. We went all the way around this obvious rock shoal and found a perfectly protected anchorage with coral forming a break water, or break boat, on almost all sides. We put our anchor down in 40 feet of water. We enjoyed 2 perfect nights there, with majestic sunsets, backgammon, and a flat flat anchorage. I was very happy there- ready to take up residency! The sails were truly down at last. Aaahhhhh.
We enjoyed some time ashore, mostly with the children of Amanu. We learned that the large number of dogs and puppies on the island is because dogs are not pets here. There is little for a goat to survive on here and a cow would starve in a week. The dogs lay around the dirt streets or in the shade of shrubs. Most of the dogs don’t let you get too close to them because they are afraid it may be their turn to be dinner. The puppies don’t know better and I scratched many bellies. They are ugly mutt looking dogs though.
A couple of the older children knew some English, so we were able to learn that they go to secondary school over in Hao, the atoll 17 miles to the south. I asked one girl how old she was, and she said 12, so we gave all the children a lesson in English. I asked each one “How old are you”? They caught on, and some of them could even count to ten in English. One tried to tell me he was 29 he was but 5. We shot a few baskets on the basketball court, and shook some coconuts to listen to the milk. We were a real novelty to them. We also introduced ourselves to some people operating the one small store on the island. We longed for the eggs and the onions and potatos they had, but the prices were very high, and we had no way to change our US dollars in to FP francs there, so the $8.33 per dozen eggs stayed on the shelf. We walked the streets of the town, saw the power plant which runs the whole little village until about 11pm at night when it shuts down for the evening. We saw the fairly modern school and tiny post office which is open two hours a day. 2 or 3 churches seemed like overkill for 200 people, but their churches were pretty and well maintained. No trash on the streets or shoreline like in the Bahamas, and people raking, and weedwacking suggest a high degree of pride in their home. The homes all had water catchment systems with big black plastic water collection tanks next to them. They were modern but modest concrete homes, something like you would see in the better Bahama villages. We also asked about the fish having ciguatera. Ciguatera is a toxic dinoflagulate living in the coral. Fish of the wrass family, such as parrot fish, eat the coral and can’t help to ingest the toxin. Big fish eat the little fish and the toxin works its way up the food chain. It is a nasty debilitating poison for a human to endure. The effects of sore muscles and joint pain can last 6 months. We asked several people and they said there is no ciguatera on this atoll. Great news.
The coral is beautiful here. The water in the lagoon isn’t as clear as it was at Tatakoto, but the wildlife makes up for it. Black tip sharks are everywhere, tons of two pound groupers but no edible fish bigger than that, 1 white tip shark, 1 unidentified shark, a big beautiful octopus, and TONS of beautiful tropical fish of very odd shapes and colors. Also, large clams with lips the colors of the rainbow growing out of vibrant, interesting coral formations. This is really some of the best snorkeling we have done in at least a year!
A few days ago, we sailed three miles out to the middle of the atoll using some waypoints from another cruiser. The waypoint was off by one mile. We had found the “Etoile Reef”, a three armed starfish shaped reef. We anchored for the night in the shallows on the lee side in 35 feet of water. The normal depth crossing the atoll is 200 feet. The only direction we wouldn’t be well protected from was from the southeast. Of course on a new moon night, with not a bit of light, the wind shifted from the southeast, and I was up quite late trying to shine a light on the coral to see how close we were getting to it. Patrick slept well while I worried, studied the chartplotter ( this reef did not show up at ALL on the chartplotter – we are in no mans land here), studied the fishfinder, and tried to shine beams of light and a laser beam to no avail on to the reef. I stood by ready for anything. Nothing ever happened and the wind finally shifted back the other way so I went to bed. Needless to say I had a headache and was tired the entire next day.
However, in the morning I wanted to go grouper fishing. The water is shallow enough that I could hunt too. It’s remarkable the sharks are timid, and the groupers are curious and even aggressive. Patrick pursued one little grouper for a while today, sans speargun, and the grouper came at him! Patrick played along and got scared off hopefully that grouper tells all his friends that when a human comes after you just move towards them not away and then the human will swim away! Hopefully he tells all his big brothers that story! Patrick felt the groupers were too small and we should let them grow up if they do in fact have the capacity to get any bigger.
We instead took the boat over to a couple of passes looking for a shallow anchorage. We finally found a spot behind one of the many coral upcroppings which rise vertically to just below the surface. It is enough protection to break the waves. One would never maneuver around this huge lagoon at night or in poor weather. These coral heads are everywhere and small ones are extremely difficult to see from a distance. The people who have powerboats here have all their controls very forward in the bow for this reason.
I had a splitting headache, from the festivities the night before, so Patrick went to the shallow passes in the shoreline without me. He said he didn’t see much besides Baby Black tip sharks ready to bite his ankles. Brick House was in a terrible anchorage, and of course the wind kicked up, so we decided not to spend a night there. Besides, the last boat of people we saw when we left the Galapagos, Denny and JT on Jubilant, had sent an email saying they decided to come to Amanu before going to Hao, and they were to be arriving that afternoon. So, following closely our track on the chart plotter, we made our way back down to the original anchorage where Jubilant was already anchored. Jubilant is a 50 something feet long ketch and too nicely taken cared for, for a cruising boat. Not a crumb out of place. JT is a friend of a friend of Denny and flew into the Galapagos to make the passage to Tahiti.
After anchoring, Patrick spent time disassembling the watermaker inlet hoses etc to get the watermaker going. It works but he thinks it should be running better. We only have about 5 gallons of water left. This old water maker was installed by a previous owner in 1996. It is amazing the old machine still works at all but its top capacity is only 6 gallons per hour. Not much more than a survivor water maker with a motor attached. We have started to take salt water baths only – no fresh water showers. We have 2 eggs left for baking, and no fresh veggies or fruits. Eggs cost $8.33 a dozne here, but there is no bank to exchange our money and they wont take US dollars, so even if we were willing to pay $8.33 for a dozen eggs , we couldn’t. When we asked about bread, they only had a box mix from which one makes their own bread.
A couple of days later, Denny and JT from the yacht Jubilant boarded Brick House and we all motored against the wind to cross the lagoon to go see what the snorkeling would be like on the more protected side of the lagoon. It had been blowing 20 knots for days. The snorkeling was no better and still a lack of sizable fish and no lobster sightings but we had a good time, and had a fun lunch aboard Brick House before sailing back to the anchorage at the end of the day.
Jubilant is in desperate need of bread, eggs, and other foods, so they will go to Hao. We would like to go further west, but despite popular belief that the southeast tradewinds blow all year here, they actually blow from East North east. So the more westward we go, the harder it will be to get to the Marquesas without sailing upwind or even having to tack to get there. Because of the great possibility of having to sail against big winds and waves to get to the Marquesas, we decided to depart Amanu the next morning express to the Marquesas. We timed our departure with Jubilant to motor through the pass together. We expected slack or a little against us, but of course we had current behind us again as we departed. All of the children in the village were at the cut to wave goodbye to us! Jubilant waved goodbye as they went south for Hao, and we turned north for the Marquesas.
The weather forecast was for 2 days of 20-25 knot winds, like it had been doing for days, then 1 day of 10- 15, then 2 days of no wind. When we came out of the lee of Amanu, a giant wave greeted us, and a couple of garbage cans of water came in every window and down the hatch. Everything was drenched. We had JUST opened the windows a few minutes prior since it seemed like we were going to have such a nice sail. So for the next 2 days, waves pummeled us, we were totally uncomfortable beating to windward, ate nothing but crackers and juice, and had a sauna to sleep in with everything closed up tight, damp and musty smelling. Misery.
After 2 days though, the wind settled to 10-15 knot and the waves dropped in size but there were two wave trains to bounce us around in uncomfortable directions. I made cookies, and a nice dinner. Now its day 4, and the wind has actually remained at 15 knots with the seas becoming flatter and more regular from one direction. It is odd but we are sailing fast, 6-7 knots through the water. Maybe nearly empty water tanks have taken enough weight off the boat to improve performance. We should be anchored in Hiva Oa by tomorrow ! We will get legal there, and start the 90 day clock ticking. We have many fun plans for the Marquesas
Rudder Lost Mid Pacific
