Position: 16 degrees, 43 minutes south; 146 degrees 21 minutes west

The GPS view of the pass. The soundings are in feet

We’re off once more to new places. This time we’ve left the Tuamotus and are enroute to the Society Islands, principal among them, Tahiti. Right now, it’s an hour after sunset. There’s fresh bread cooling on the stove and I’m heating the dinner I made last night in the pressure cooker. It’s handy because yesterday I cooked beans, pancetta, and potatoes and just left the pressure cooker sealed after heating. No need for refrigeration. Today, I dumped a can of chicken in with a little more water and now it’s heating up. Ann made the bread dough a couple days ago and just threw it in the oven around 1700. It cooked while we enjoyed a Charisma at sunset. Good thing we got all that stuff done yesterday since it’s very bumpy/bouncy and cooking from scratch would be very difficult right now.

Our present course is 240 magnetic. We’re doing 5.5 knots. The wind is out of the east, southeast. There are two wave patterns. The trade wind generated waves coming out of the east and a larger ocean swell is coming out of the south. The combination is what’s making the bumpy ride. The southerly swell is about 4-6 feet and the east trade waves are about 4 feet. Sometimes they combine into a little pyramid and knock us about. Anyway, stars are out as are the trade-wind puffys (little cumulous clouds). Hopefully we can avoid having squalls tonight.

This morning we woke up around 0700 to rain and squally, cloudy weather. We couldn’t even see the shore through the rain. I thought we were going to stay at anchor for another day, but as we sat with our coffee the weather cleared and we were able to proceed with our planned 0830 (ish) departure. We wanted to hit slack water at the reef pass, but as usual in these waters, our anchor was fouled in the coral. Not really badly, but it took an hour to get it in the boat. By the time it was up it was past slack water and we had about a 2 knot flood current pushing against us as we negotiated the pass. It went smoothly though with Ann calling our “left”, “right” from the quarterberth where the GPS is as she watched our progress on the screen versus our line in the lagoon from a few days ago. I love the Tuamotus, but I don’t love going through these passes. They are very nerve wracking with their unpredictable tides, currents, and of course the treacherous coral reefs.

We’ll be approximately 48 hours between Fakarava and Papeete, so this is the first night of a two night passage. We hope to hold this speed which would put us offshore our destination in the early morning. If that goes as planned we’ll either slow down during the night or heave to offshore until morning. We hope to make landfall around 0900 on Wednesday the 20th.

Time for dinner… More on the passage tomorrow.