Wednesday night 29 May 19

13º 54.447s 142º 55.757w

Thu May 30 2019

Underway for Tuamotus 4, Wednesday night 29 May 19

Why is it fish only want to hook up either when we’re trying to relax and enjoy our morning coffee, or just at sunset when we’ll have to interrupt dinner and butcher them in the dark? WTF? Anyway, we hooked up a decent sized tuna tonight, perhaps 30 pounds, and now the fridge is stuffed and Isabel is fretting about how she’ll fit it all into the freezer. I think she’s going to try her hand at canning, as Behan Gifford gave her a lesson back in La Cruz. As I recall, it involved drinking a bottle of wine, but there were 4 ladies participating. We’ll have to belay the wine part, but hopefully it’ll all be processed by mid-day tomorrow and we can legitimately toss out the hooks for another big’un.

It’s been a very gentle day of sailing today – even got so light, around 2 – 3 knots TWS that we motored for around 4 hours, taking the opportunity to make about 400 liters of water. Nice to have a little extra for wash down as there was fish gore everywhere on the back decks by the time I was done butchering that rascal.

We’ve played with light wind sail configuration today, i.e. full main and screecher, loosely sheeted, and found that we can sail at nearly wind speed at 3 – 6 knots true wind if we keep the apparent wind at 70 – 80 degrees. That’s meant not pointing at our objective while the wind has flaked all around, but at least we’re still moving South and we’ll deal with the offset when it becomes imperative. For now it’s nice to enjoy the quiet and save the diesel for when we’re actually in a hurry. We’re really tickled pink at how well JollyDogs goes in light airs.

The wind has been pretty flakey this evening, but right now we’ve got 6 knots from the East. Seas are essentially flat with just a slight following sea off the port stern. We’ve got 166 nm to go to the initial approach fix for the pass at the Southwest corner of Kauehi, and will plan to enter Friday morning around 0830 local time if the “tidal guestimator” gets it about right, then proceed to the Southeast anchorage where we hope to say hi to SV Hullabaloo. We spent a good bit of the afternoon reviewing the compendium for all the various comments on bommies and good anchoring spots, and we’ve got all the Google Earth imagery going on OpenCPN. This will be our first atoll, so we’ll be taking it easy. We don’t want any loud scraping or crashing noises while navigating our way to the anchorage.

Amongst my old glider racing pals, the joke was that a successful landing was one that you could walk away from. I only had one failure, and the upside was a free helicopter ride.

Friday Isabel and I will be looking to raise the bar a bit. Once the hook is down and we’re feeling secure, we’ll raise our glasses, but not yet.