We left New Caledonia on 12 Nov 2015. We sailed off of our mooring at Ilot Maitre with our friends aboard SV Dream Time sailing behind us to send us off in style. They broke off to head to another year of lovely gunkholing around Noumea, and we continued sailing out Dumbea Pass pointing at Sydney.

We knew we would hit a front around 28S and after that the weather was unpredictable but with nothing too scary in the forecast and the MJO was behaving itself. We hoped to sail to Sydney but we knew we wouldn’t know if that was possible until we started pulling weather forecasts after the front.

We started out in 10-15 knot winds, had a bit of light air sailing which over the course of a few days clocked around to the NW. Instead of a few hours of fickle wind while the front passed (as has been our experience in the past) the wind simply flipped 180 degrees to the SSE in the 20-25 knot range. We reefed down and pointed East until the winds slowly backed around to the ESE and we could continue sailing toward Sydney. After a day or so of this, the forecasts were showing the possibility of an East Coast Low forming over Sydney and so we turned for Coffs Harbour.

At this point we had a 24 hours spinnaker run with an eddy in the Australian current pushing us toward Coffs. Light wind, flat water, sunshine and a favorable current – a Pretorien owners dream! Note: This site gives an excellent visual of the current state of the current.

The clearance was easy peasy. They took our produce, eggs, cheese and milk and canned meat (poor pate gone) – all as we had anticipated. They examined our shells, took a few pictures, charged the stupidly expensive fee of $380AUD and were on their way. Nice guys.

Coffs Harbour was a surprising treat. It is a dirty, dusty, slightly run down port filled with a interesting, diverse, salty crowd of honest to goodness sailors. The staff were super friendly. The town was cute and we were picked up when hitch hiking immediately and even given a ride when we were just asking someone about the bus. The showers were hot, high pressure, and with shower heads taller than I am. As an aside, for whatever reason, even though I am only 5’8” most S Pacific shower heads are positioned at my neck requiring (on the few times we’ve been in ports or haul outs) me to crouch down to shampoo. If Coffs were closer to Sydney we would have stayed there for a while but the lure of Christmas and NYE in Sydney proved too difficult to resist.

We made it!

With the exception of passages to weather, we’ve never really had to wait for weather windows. For as long as we’ve been cruising, when we say “we’ll start looking for a weather window on X date” we have nearly always had an immediate, too close in time window that requires us to scramble to prep or to check out of the country. Instead of fighting boredom and working on our patience, we have historically had to make certain we aren’t rushing and leaving so quickly that we (and the boat) are underprepared.

And so it is with some amusement that I note that we are getting shut down on our upcoming passage to Australia.

I have been watching the weather in between New Caledonia and Australia on and off for months, and I have not seen such disturbed weather, for such a long period of time, between the two, until now. There was a decent, albeit strong wind window before we were ready to start looking and since then the weather windows have either involved long sections of motoring or big fronts (and associated strong wind and seas) anticipated at arrival.  We are listening to the relevant SSB nets to monitor boats on passage, checking the windows we didn’t take and so far, we correctly predicted that they weren’t the right windows for us.

The nice thing about Australia is that although we have preferences on where we make landfall we have nearly 700 miles of coastline, interspersed with legal arrival ports, as a target. This is wildly different from most of the passage making we have done in which we have to arrive at a very specific point in the sea, where there is a pass into an atoll or a safe arrival path into a single clearance port. On the other hand, this is a longer passage, which makes it more difficult to time generally, to a country which is fussy about after hours and weekend clearances, which makes the timing important.

And so we wait and watch. We have another two weeks or so before our visas expire. Depending on who you listen to the S Pacific hurricane season has either already begun or begins at the end of the month. Little pressures that we snuff out before they grow in our minds.

Waiting and watching means keeping the boat in a constant state of near readiness. We have done all of our pre-passage chores. The boat is tidy. We have bought what groceries we could buy in advance for the passage, then eaten them, and now are readying to buy them again. We are still kiting, swimming, and playing, but every move has to be planned with the passage in mind. We can bring out gear if we have time to let it dry and pack it away before leaving…

At the same time that we become antsy, we also don’t want to leave. The tropics at this latitude are starting to truly feel like summer. The weather is glorious, the already excellent kiting conditions now include warmer water and constant sunshine. There is a reason that cyclone season is considered by some to be the best time to cruise. We are very, very jealous of our friends with EU passports who get more than 3 months in French territories.

I posted a picture on our Facebook page of us kiting and someone told me how surprised they were to see grey, cloudy skies because “you guys don’t usually have those”.

…and I thought “crap” I’ve really misled my poor Mom (and anyone else reading this) about the weather out here in the South Pacific.

While it isn’t as grey as the Seattle area, we get a lot of overcast skies, usually paired with strong winds, as fronts and other pressure systems blow across the South Pacific. In a bad year, such as this year, maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of our days are overcast and grey. We spend those days either hunkered down, tending to our boat, or out kiteboarding. What we don’t usually do is reach for our camera. Grey days don’t inspire our inner photographer and so unless we are inspired to take photos for another reason, most of the photos we take, and post, are from sunny days.

The amount of grey days and pressure systems had varied hugely across the 4 seasons we’ve been cruising in the South Pacific. Partly this is a function of the El Nino cycles, partly this is a function of the area we are cruising (Eastern S Pacific vs. now entering the Western S Pacific) and also whether we are in a country with large land masses such as Fiji which encourage rain to dump.

Speaking of large land masses and fronts, when a front is coming through and people are getting ready to settle into their books in a safe anchorage, people going to windward perk up and start wondering if the front will bend the trade winds enough for them to make mileage eastward, and whether the front will have too much convective activity (i.e., squalls and thunderstorms) to make it worth taking. For this reason, when we are going to windward we spend a lot more of our time in fronts, sailing in crappy, grey, rainy conditions than we do when we are sailing downwind (although we get it there too).

Even worse is going to weather in places like Fiji where the front is interacting with squeeze zones between large land masses. We tried three times to make it to the Southern Lau and in the first two instances the weather as experienced had no relation to the weather as predicted. In case you are wondering, we aren’t exactly weather dummies. We look at a lot more than the gribs and still we were shut down twice. People who tried the window before us had a lot of success, others have correctly predicted the weather in the two windows we tried and we imagine some have motored part of the way in light conditions .

…but the third time’s a charm, right?

Here is Estrellita’s home for the cyclone season, and you may have noticed she isn’t floating in the crystal clear blue waters of the Marshall Islands.

No one is certain (still) whether this year will be an official El Nino year or not, but with the increased west wind anomalies and the elevated risk of typhoon activity in the Marshall’s, the fact that the Marshall’s are atolls (and our own sucky experience with wind from the wrong side in an atoll), we decided to delay heading to the RMI until next year.

We debated staying in Tonga, and were on the waiting list for the keel pits in Fiji, but by mid-October had decided that we would head to New Zealand for the first time. After planning to be in NZ at the end of 2012 we figured it was about time! We had gone so far as sending in our arrival paperwork to NZ, in a 24 hour period we were notified that we had a spot in the keel pits in Fiji if we wanted it and we had a pretty fantastic opportunity to as caretakers as a resort in Tonga.

The decision: Ultimately, we decided to make the passage to Fiji, put Estrellita in the keel pit, prep her for leaving, and fly back to Tonga for some resort time near our favorite kiting location in Vava’u. And so we did…

I’ll write more about the passage, our experience going into a keel pit, what we did to prep the boat, finish up my memories of Tonga by boat, and write about our land travel over the next few months.

The plane plan: We aren’t certain where we will head after Tonga. NZ by plane is a real possibility but we are staying open to other opportunities (anyone have any flight passes from Nadi or Auckland?) but we’ll end up back in Fiji in time to do a month or so of work on the boat and splash in Fiji at the very start of the season to start exploring a new country.

The area between French Polynesia and Tonga has been called “The Dangerous Middle” by one of the freely available online guidebooks (Mr. John's). This is, in large part, because of the unsettled weather in the region. We call it the complicated middle because there are a bunch of different weather phenomena at play in the region, each of which can occur without advance notice: fronts, the official South Pacific Convergence Zone, other convergence zones, etc. 

If a new system suddenly appears, it changes the forecasted movement and strength of the other systems. It’s a place to keep a weather eye, and to take seriously. A week after we made landfall in Niue, when we wanted to leave, there was 5m swell and 35+ knot winds in the region. We waited. Another boat stuck on passage during that system took damage to sails, solar panels, bimini etc. in squalls and oversized waves. Later that same week a small depression showed up suddenly on the weather charts. Within a few days it was over Suwarrow and they had 40 knot westerly winds in an anchorage exposed to that direction. Sadly, a boat was lost that night when their anchor tackle failed somehow*.

With this in mind, although we wanted to sail directly from French Polynesia to Niue, we set off from Maupiti with our bow pointed much further north than the direct line, at Suwarrow. Suwarrow was about 5 days sail from Maupiti which is about as long as you can trust a weather window. Further, there was a front passing south of Suwarrow when we left and so sailing north of the rhumb line would both allow us the option of stopping in Suwarrow if the weather went wonky and keep us above the squalls, wind strength and wind directional shifts associated with the front.

As we were closing on Suwarrow, we saw another front passing Niue and knew if we took a direct line we would pass through the front. Having experienced rough weather in an atoll before, we thought we would rather be at sea sailing to Niue than inside an atoll (e.g., Suwarrow) during the front (in hindsight, this particular front missed Suwarrow, staying south and so things were fine there). We sailed directly for Niue, experiencing strong NW winds, a squally night with unsettled wind, 6 hours of being hove to waiting for the front to pass overhead, and then “frisky” SW-then S-then SE winds. All of that was as expected and we flew the last few days into Niue, running fast and wet ahead of a decent swell.

All of this tactical maneuvering took a 1050nm passage**, added a bunch of miles sailed extending the passage to almost 10 days – but we we very happy with our 10 carefully chosen days of within limits sailing,. Another passage with nothing broken on our bodies or our boat – cheers to that!

*So far  this year we know two boats that have lost rudders, one that went aground, one that took shaft damage when a pearl farm line wrapped their prop, and the two boats described above. Oh, and the French Polynesian customs boat which ran aground on an atoll!

**This is our second longest passage sailed with only the Mexico to Marquesas run being longer.

In French Polynesia are 5 archipelagos. One archipelago, the Easternmost, is called the Gambier Islands. The only island of the Gambiers with a pass to enter for cruising boats is Mangareva. Thus, Mangareva is the name of a single atoll in the Gambiers but is synonymous in cruisers’ talk with the Gambiers.

Like many atolls, there are small islets called motus on Mangareva’s encircling reef. Mangarevas reef is mostly open to the ocean on the entire Southern side of the atoll with another large pass on the West making for little current inside of the atoll or in the main pass. Depending on the direction of the swell you may get incoming or outgoing currents in the false passes but not in the large navigable passes.

What makes Mangareva unique is that inside of Mangareva encircling reef are a number of small islands – not one large island in the middle like you might find in the Society Islands (another archipelago) in French Polynesia. This means that within an 8-10 mile sail (often much shorter) you can be in a different anchorage on a different island or motu. Gunkholing paradise!

While book writers disagree on the subject, most Frenchies and Mangarevans consider Mangareva to be outside of the hurricane zone and along with the Marquesas are a common spot for European boats to cruise through the hurricane season. We are the only N American boat here this austral summer and most of the European boats are either staying here for the entire hurricane season or splitting their time between here and the Marquesas.

Most N American boats visit during the austral winter, arriving usually from the Galapagos, which is also the time of the worst weather in the Gambiers. It’s storm season here then, and the low pressure systems from the Southern Ocean whip up the seas and the winds when they pass through. Reportedly, the weather is often squally and less sunny and pleasant than the summer average. The good news is that when it is squally here, as mentioned above, there are a lot of anchorages, in close proximity, to switch between to gain protection from various wind/fetch directions.

The main island with “the village” is Rikitea. In Mangareva, like many remote spots in French Polynesia, there is only one village and it quickly becomes THE village to those living in, or hanging out in the atoll. We have visited many of the outer islands and many of the motus and are planning on working our way through the rest.

The only downside to Mangareva so far for us is that most of the anchorages are deep – 40 to 60 feet. While we have anchored in shallower water here, we are usually cranking like crazy people on our manual windlass to raise an enormous amount of 5/16” HT chain and our hefty Manson Supreme. We have started using a single pearl farm buoy at 2-to-1 before dropping the rest of the scope to help with the weight of the chain.

While there are pearl farm buoys to avoid when navigating, I think that this danger has been overemphasized in some of the passed-around-information. The pearl farmers aren’t interested in losing their expensive equipment (and pearls!) anymore than you are in having a line around your prop and we have found large thoroughfares left throughout the atoll for local boats (and subsequently for cruising boats).

Supply ships come regularly but not on any particular schedule and there are at least 5 small grocery stores that we know of that each offer their own selection and each have different arrangements with the supply ships. The offering is similar to the Tuamotus with perhaps even fewer vegetables on offer. Thankfully there are a lot of opportunities to exchange or be gifted fruit and vegetables.

LEAVE A CLEAN WAKE: Even more so than other areas in French Polynesia, it is important to ask permission here and tread lightly. The locals have seen a dramatic increase in boat traffic in the last 10 years and while they would like to be welcoming, the pressures we put on the local community when people arrive en masse with their bags and bags of trash from passage (for example) can be heavy. Also, while the law dictates that below the high tide line is public land in French Polynesia, there are people here who prefer if you ask permission before you anchor in front of their family motu/island/piece of land. This is not true in the village but ask around with some local cruisers before you explore the outer islands. And, as always, if you see people ashore, go and introduce yourselves – even if you have to use sign language or a phrase book.

It was exciting to go on passage again when we left the Tuamotus for Tahiti. With our flight back to N America and time on the hard we hadn’t been to sea for 8 months. Technically that is a lie because any transit between atolls in the Tuamotus is open ocean sailing, but leaving the Tuamotus for the Societies felt like a “real” passage. It was a fast, wet, fun ride with 20-25 knots of SE wind increasing to 30 and seas rising to the 3m range. Estrellita flew under reefed down sails and our windvane took over the steering while we held on for the ride.

Our passage from Tahiti to Tikehau was another wild ride with light winds to start and then steadily increasing wind and seas to the same conditions as our passage to Tahiti. There have been a series of fronts coming through (it is mara’amu season) and after waiting until we were no longer patient, we squeaked in a passage between fronts.

Passages are like good drama. In our drama, Estrellita is the heroine. The wind and waves are sometimes the supporting cast and sometimes the villians-to-be-cursed. Carol and I are usually the comic sidekicks. Like a drama, on our passages there will be a point when we want to laugh, and a point where we want to cry. There will be a moment when everything seems to go wrong and the successful resolution of the problem binds our main characters together further.

On our passage to Tikehau we tried out the new-to-us used tow generator that we had purchased at a swap meet. It was amazing. In the ballpark of 5 amps at 12V incoming day and night. Then, one hour before we made landfall we noticed no amps and…our prop had broken off. Apparently someone brilliant decided to make part of the connection out of plastic. The good news is we can make another. The bad news is we just left the neck of the woods where we could have bought parts. It’s a good thing we have friends in Tahiti kind enough to ship things to us in the Tuamotus.

It isn’t uncommon for storms to whip through the islands of French Polynesia and when they do so in crowded mooring fields and anchorages, things get a bit intense. Marina Taina in Papeete is one such place – protected in most conditions…except when it is not.

In what was our third visit to Tahiti we went to Marina Taina for the first time and took a mooring while we sorted out our new dinghy, new-to-us dive gear and refilling the boat with food after we purposefully ate it ‘dry’ before hauling out last year.

The storm was forecast to pass South of Tahiti and while the crew from three boats were in downtown by car we started receiving stressed out text messages and phone calls. We hurried back, jumped in our dinghies and tried not to get rolled by the waves as we ran downwind from the dock to our pitching boats. All of our boats were fine and after we added an extra line to our mooring and secured our own vessel, we engaged what always becomes a community effort in a storm: saving each others asses (and stuff). Our friends rescued a dinghy. Carol and another guy wrestled down a sail on an unattended boat that was half unfurled, shredded, and trying to take down the boats rig. We answered phone calls from friends at jobs who couldn’t come back to their boats and kept an eye on their homes for them.

At the peak the winds were in the 45-50 knot range. Boats at sea experienced gusts to 60 knots. The peak of the storm was only a few hours and mostly we saw 30-35 knots on our mooring. Other than the hairy dinghy ride we were mostly watching in case other boats broke lines and came at us.

Estrellita is just fine of course as are her crew.

I’ve been meaning to write about two books that I read on our crossing from Mexico to the Marquesas that I had set aside just for that passage and enjoyed a great deal. Honestly, I thought I already wrote about them but I can’t find the post in my offline writer or on the blog so apparently I didn’t. Is there a cruiser version of senioritis or can I get senioritis before 40?

Both books are non-fiction and both are the type of books that, in my opinion, if you like the idea of the book, you will like the execution. If the idea of the book sounds boring, give it a pass.

The first is a book about rogue waves by Susan Casey called “The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean". Although perhaps a questionable choice of book to read while surrounded by hundreds of miles of ocean with no port in sight, I loved the book. I particularly enjoyed the fact that she skips back and forth between information and viewpoints from wave scientists, big wave surfers, and shipping companies and insurers.

The second book was about the discovery of longitude, or rather, the accurate measurement of longitude on land and later on sea. The book is “Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time” by Sobel. It is a bit nerdy, engaging and concise and I really enjoyed it.

I’ll bet your local library has copies of both or if you are feeling flush pick up a copy for yourself when you are ordering your holiday gifts from Amazon.

There is something very romantic about pulling up to a dock with hand laid stones in the center of a village. We had stopped first on the West side of Raiatea to pick up some supplies from the stores by the two haul out facilities and then moved to the East side of Raiatea to the town of Uturoa.

When we arrived in Uturoa we hadn’t tied a dock for 8 months, since La Paz Mexico in February, with the exception of two hour-long tie ups to fill our water tanks. We haven’t even tied up to any fuel docks in the S Pacific. For one reason or another we always end up schlepping our jerry cans to the station.

If you look at the tree line behind our boat, just to the right of the trees that you see in the photo is a park where people launch their kites. Raiatea had great constant, non-gusty wind when we were there. Unfortunately the launch spot is a bit too sketchy for Livia’s skills (you have to jump off a pile of rocks into the water with your board in your hand) but Carol kited until his abs screamed.

On our first afternoon there we went over the kiting area and asked questions of a local kiter about the entry. As these things seem to happen often, that conversation led to an invitation to a birthday party the next evening and our entree into the kiting gang of Raiatea. A group of really nice people that we’re looking forward to seeing again the next time we pass through. Thanks to everyone.

Raiatea and Tahaa are two islands with a surrounding reef. The reef has joined so that the two islands are inside the same lagoon. They look somewhat like a peanut. We hiked the short but nice hike to the top of a mountain and took some photos. In this one you can see the right middle side of the peanut.

We didn’t anchor out by the lagoon which looks lovely because we were waylaid by kiting and because we spent a week pinned down by mara’amu winds. Note: mara’amu winds are the name of the strong ESE winds caused by a high pressure system (above 1026) traveling below French Polynesia. When people say a mara’amu is coming they mean that a high pressure system is going to accentuate the normal trade winds. How much they are accentuated is, of course, the important part to keep an eye on.

We were starting to get anxious. It was nearly the end of October and with Nov 1 being the official start of the hurricane season, and with an impending haulout still 300 miles from Raiatea, we were wanting to get further East. It was nice to be forced into a week in Raiatea by the winds because we really enjoyed it and we wouldn’t have stayed that long if we had the weather to move on.

We left under power for the Moorea-Tahiti area in light winds and calm seas. Blechity. Motoring.  We had entered in Passe Rautoanui on the West side which was wide and calm and exited on the East side from Passe Teavapiti which, in the light conditions we left in, was flat.

Notes about the dock – the far South side, connected to the small boat basin, is the only place you want to be in E or ESE winds of any strength. The rest of the dock, which has better cleats and wood rather than concrete, is great in light winds but gets bad fetch when the wind comes up. We were told that if you come for a day or two, no fees are assessed but if you camp out too long they come by asking. We were there a week with no problem but a French boat that was essentially trying to live there for free was asked to pay. In high season the demand for the dock might be higher and you might try to free up space because many people come in just to buy groceries at the Champion right across the street. Great place to buy heavy things because you can roll your cart right to your boat.

Arriving just ahead of a frontal system, we spent the first few days watching a beautiful motu just South of the pass get rained on. We felt lucky to do this, not just because we were watching rain in Bora Bora rather than rain in Victoria, but because the frontal system hit Moorea, the place we had just left, with more strength, and reportedly caused a bunch of boats in Opunohu Bay (in the same bay as we had been, but in the anchorage in the opposite side from us) to drag.

 After that front, we picked up a free buoy outside of the restaurant Bloody Mary’s, had some drinks (clearly), took a long walk around the point to meet the resident kiteboarding instructor Alban, and went into town for part of the Heiva festivities. As a sidenote, Heiva is a nearly month long festival, culminating on July 14th, for Polynesians, by Polynesians. There are sporting, musical and dancing events. They rock the house. I took video so no photos for now.

Carol hiked up the top of a nearby hill to grab a shot of Estrellita on buoy at Bloody Mary’s with the mountains in the background. He also managed to grab a bunch of edible coconuts which he husked, cracked open and grated and I made fresh coconut dark chocolate macaroons. Oh yes, delicious.

We left Bloody Mary’s after a few nights because Bora Bora is really about the motus and the lagoon on the backside. The motus combined with the mountains of Bora Bora are spectacular and when the swell breaks over the SE corner of the island, the water clarity of the lagoon on the E side is very good and the colors…oh the colors. We crept along slowly, very close to the hotels on the E side of Bora Bora with least depths seen of 8 feet (we are 6.5 feet deep). Telling ourselves “it is just sand” we pushed on until we reached the SE area, dropped the hook and then pinched ourselves to see if we were dreaming. A few hours later, without coordination, friends arrived and we had paradise and social time all wrapped together.

Here are our friends aboard the Swiss flagged SV MOMO floating in the blue lagoon.