Next Stop, Tuamotus!
I wasn’t sure we’d ever get out of Nuku Hiva. After spending over two weeks on anchor in a rolly Taiohae Bay, both Emily and I were ready for a change of scenery. We’re not your typical cruisers—after a passage we tend to sit tight in one place and recover, doing small boat projects, going exploring ashore where we can, but generally not moving the boat. For one, FALKEN is very difficult to sail short-handed. Handling the mainsail is the tough part; just flaking it on the boom requires three to four people and a deliberate plan. Plus, we’re happy to sit tight, and normally we only have five days between the end of one trip and the start of another.
But in the Marquesas, we had more time. Partly because we were ahead of schedule on the passage (I always allow more time on the longer trips), and partly because we knew that resources would be scarce in that remote archipelago, and if we did have any problems on the crossing, it would take more time than usual to sort them out. As it happened, we had a pretty uneventful crossing, and besides dropping the jib topsail off for a minor repair with Kevin at Nuku Hiva Yacht Services, we had a pretty mellow stopover. Make sure to read my blog from our hike with Tangy & Ana in the valley near Hakaui, which is posted on The Quarterdeck.
And yet, when the crew finally arrived on Saturday, the island didn’t seem to want us to leave. It’s just the start of the rainy season in the Marquesas, and boy did it show. For almost two weeks Emily and I enjoyed sunshine and the odd shower. I went for several jogs on shore (and got overheated!), and we had starry nights. But leading up to crew arrival, the weather took a turn, and on Sunday, yesterday, when we had planned to depart in the late afternoon, the rains turned biblical. All through the valley in Taiohae, waterfalls sprung up out of nowhere and the harbor turned into a muddy trough of washed-out debris. We couldn’t run the watermaker, but then we had so much water streaming off of our sun awning that we managed to fill our tanks in an hour, redirecting the flow right into the open deck fill.
So we sat tight, and woke up to sunshine this morning and a green light for departure. As I type this, FALKEN is out of the lee now of Ua Pou and sailed fast on a beam reach in bright sunshine and deep blue water, having covered 42 miles in our first five hours or so. The remnants of yesterday’s rains, though, were visible even 20 miles offshore—we sailed past an enormous tree stump, probably half the length of the boat and a few feet thick. A scary thought in the dark…
It’s hot and sunny in the cockpit, and the off-watch crew is taking advantage of the shade up on the bow, sitting on the windward rail behind the jib and watching the waves go by. Feels very good to be at sea again.
// Andy
andy@59-north.com
View more passage logs
”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.