lines slipped
Departure Day! It's 8:30 in the morning and the crew on FALKEN is doing the final prep before departure. Crew arrived on the 4th to sunny Lagos. We knew some weather was coming in on Sunday, so we put all crew to work straight away (after a cup of tea—when you have Brits onboard, tea breaks are taken very seriously) and hoisted the Yankee. Great teamwork to learn how to work together and operate the winches! After a nice dinner ashore, we were all pretty tired, but as usual, not everyone slept that great the first night—lots of new noises, new people, and some dock lines moving around.
Yesterday we started our briefings on deck and were very thankful to have the Yankee up. The wind increased during the day and the rain started late morning. After the front had gone through, the wind eased off and I went up the rig to do a final rig check before departure. Even a little bit of sunshine came through while I was up there.
After some more chat about the passage and dinner onboard, we all went to bed after what felt like a very long day, even though it was only 8:45 pm when the lights went out. More rain overnight, but we are hoping for a sunny day as we depart Lagos!
/ 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.