Well, Tahanea has been a wonderful stop full of fun and games such as spear fishing, beach walking, collecting pretty seashells, snorkeling, catching the elusive low speed spider conch for conversion into fritters, kite surfing, repairing our own and other people’s boats, etc.
We managed to resuscitate an abandoned pup, feeding her whatever we had and treating her mangy body with medicated shampoos and oil rubdowns. Mike brought worm meds and dog food rations from Nuku Hiva, and everyone in the anchorage has shown Lassie lots of love and affection. Darned if she didn’t go from being a shy little girl to the happy doggie that follows folks around during their beach walks. With any luck she’ll find a home.
I spent about a day on SV September, identifying the cause of a burned up electrical relay, then coming up with a work around so they could get their generator running and get the water maker back in service. Boats might not seem like a vibration environment, but the pounding of the hull into seas creates broad spectrum energy that causes things to loosen up. In this case a 230 volt lead between the generator and the 3000 watt Victron inverter. Harry and his family should be able to carry on just fine, and once the new relay arrives the boat can be returned to standard configuration.
That burned up electrical relay got me to thinking about the high power inverter switch on JollyDogs, so I whipped out a brand new spare and did an R&R (remove and replace). Sure enough, the old unit showed signs of getting pretty hot. Crisis averted.
There was an Austrian boat with a family aboard about a mile from us down in the Southeast corner. Both the teenage sons were superb kite surfers and the one named Florian was rather complimentary of my brute force and awkwardness approach to “survival kite surfing”. Florian spent as much time flying through the air over sand bars as he did skimming along the water’s surface. If he wasn’t such a nice young man I might have been tempted to throw seashells at him as he passed. Maybe that’ll be me someday . . .
This morning I baked a loaf of crude bread – Jim Leahy’s “no work” recipe. Easy peasy. Luc from SV Caroligui came over to review the weather forecast and our passage planning up to Fakarava. We ate warm bread with butter and jam. Yum. For lunch Isabel sliced up the tomatoes that Luc’s wife Isabelle had given us, and we had ‘mater sammiches with Isabel’s own homemade mayonnaise. Wow. Shawnee knows what a ‘mater sammich is.
We weighed anchor at 1400 and sailed at 6 knots with just the jib up to the pass where we followed SV Ari-B through at 1615. No standing waves, and the swell once at sea wasn’t as bad as we had expected. We’re now underway for Fakarava North pass, hoping for a dawn arrival and adjusting our sail plan to try and make that happen. The entire trip is about 90 nm, with a 72 nm leg with wind on the starboard stern quarter, apparent wind wandering around from 120 to 150 degrees, and the seas about the same.
A bit of an update at 2100. Wind just went from 090 to 030 and from 14 knots to the low 20’s, helping us achieve a boat speed of 11.7 knots. Woohoo. Gotta slow things down a bit – so turned to port to bring the apparent wind well aft of the starboard beam and got things under control. One consideration is SV Ari-B which is now about 0.5 nm to port, and obviously trimming their sails to deal with this squall. JollyDogs is closing on them so time to furl about half the jib, as we’re already as deeply reefed on the main sail as we can be. A radio call to Alex on Ari-B assures him I’m tracking him visually and with radar, so he’s not over there wondering if I see him.
Now it’s 30 minutes later and the wind is back to 073 true and down to only 9 knots. I’ve redeployed the jib and if this keeps up it’ll be time to shake out reef 2. I’ll rig for reef 1 just for the squalls and because it’s dark outside. Time to download some fresh weather.
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