Big first day!
48º 33.2’ N, 124º 28.1’ W
It’s been a busy last 48 hours! Crew arrived to FALKEN in Victoria on Sunday mid-day in beautiful sunshine. FALKEN had sailed down from Ketchikan, Alaska the week before and had a few days to rest. Nikki is continuing as skipper on this leg, and Lovis, our apprentice, has been onboard since Hawaii. I flew in from Sweden on Thursday and have been battling a 9 time zone jet lag since getting here. Luckily, this morning I managed to sleep until 6am!
This passage is one of our ‘All-Women passages’, something we started a few years ago. I remember so well when Nikki, Emma, and I planned the first one in 2022 on ICEBEAR, and here we are, on the other side of the world with a group of 11 amazing women ready to set sail in the big ocean!
The day started off by getting familiar onboard, unpacking some bags, going over some safety briefings—how to stay floaty, fire free, and fancy—followed by a deck walk. After a nice meal ashore at a nearby restaurant with our very entertaining waitress, James, we all crashed hard on our pillows.
I thought we had an early start the next day with a 7:30 breakfast, but most of the crew had already been up for a while, taken showers, and were sipping coffee in the cockpit! I love when you can start a passage in the sunshine, or at least not in the rain. And to be up here in Victoria, where it rarely gets hot, it is to me the perfect temperature when the sun is out!
After a quick breakfast, we left the dock at nine to head over to the fuel dock before slipping lines and leaving Victoria behind us. The wind is not due to fill in for a day or two, so we spent the first day motoring to an anchorage 50 nm up the coast. A day of motoring can sound boring and stale, but it was a day full of briefings. The crew learned how to safely operate the winches in the cockpit, and the final test was to get Angela up the mast (a few meters) to attach the main halyard. Yes, they passed the test and Angela came down safely.
Every once in a while, someone shouted “whales,” and we must have seen whales close to ten times during the day—a big treat, especially for me being from Sweden!
At 7 pm, we dropped the hook in Trasher Bay and to my delight, Lovis had dinner ready for us! I would say that’s a big first day!
- Mia
mia@59-north.com
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”For some things, we will never be ready.” - Moana 2
After 852 miles of open ocean sailing, the crew of Falken dropped anchor in Moorea's Cook's Bay—not with a quiet glide in, but surfing down waves in a squall, breaking speed records and cheering each other on through the rain. What started as a plan to "just dip a toe" into offshore sailing turned into something harder to explain: the worse the conditions got, the more alive everyone felt. Turns out the question was never whether the crew was ready—it was whether they even needed to be.
Kauehi conundrum
Kauehi atoll was always on the itinerary—until the forecast made it a gamble not worth taking. Squalls, bommies, a tidal pass, and no clean escape route: sometimes the hardest call in sailing is the one that keeps you out of a place, not in it. The Tuamotus will have to wait.
Hove-to!
Falken is too fast—a problem most sailors would kill for, yet here we are, tacking back and forth across the Pacific just to kill time. A rogue low pressure system south of Tahiti has stolen the trades and scrambled our timing for the tidal window into Kauehi's pass, leaving us hove-to 45 miles short of our target in the Tuamotus. Salt licorice, dream sandwich debates, and a philosophical question about mermaid reproduction are helping pass the night.