Position: 16 degrees, 44 minutes south; 151 degrees, 29 minutes west
Infrastructure on Raitea (note the kitty on the right)
Our Pareos
My Pareo (they are very comfortable)
(Sitting here in my new dress…I bought a Parea in Tahiti. Men and women wear them in the islands. They are very comfortable. Google it to see. It’s basically a big sheet that you can wear many different ways and I’m enjoying its comfort). We are back on Raiatea. After a pretty calm couple of days, we’re back in the “wind events”. Today we woke on our mooring to 25 knots of wind and two plus foot waves. We were protected by the reef, but it was a mile away, so the “set” was far enough to produce some good size wind waves. We took our time having our coffee because we knew once we left it would be slammin’ all the way down to Raiatea. Turned out to be right as we saw gusts into the mid-thirties that heeled the boat even though we were motoring (most of the trip was into the wind).
The smartest thing we did yesterday was put the dinghy away before dinner. If we had left it out overnight we would have had a very difficult time this morning putting the engine away and getting it aboard. As it was, it was so windy and the waves so high, we had to sacrifice part of our mooring lines. Since hearing several stories of broken mooring lines, we have taken to tying bowlines into the moorings instead of just putting the line through the mooring and then back from one cleat around to the other side of the boat. This is the most elegant way to do it, but two things happen: It introduces friction and wearas the bow line goes through the mooring attachment and if your line chafes and breaks you have no back up. This is exactly what happened last week in Bora Bora to Blue Rodeo. Their mooring line chafed in fairly high winds and the boat went walkabout while they were ashore. If not for some of their neighbors (and Super Pedro- see our blog titled “Bowling Alley” from late June) there would have been a high price to pay and some changed cruising plans.
Anyway, we put two lines out- one from the port cleat and one from starboard. Each tied with a bowline to the mooring. That way we have a safety. The only issue is getting the bowline untied in high winds. You can’t. The boat is pulling too hard to get close enough to the mooring which is underwater from the force. Soooo…our exit included a carefully timed cutting of the lines. We basically left about ten feet of line from each side of the boat on the mooring instead of trying some heroic method of untying the lines in the big wind. First the port side since I wanted Charisma to “tack” over onto starboard for our departure. There was another boat on our starboard side and the wind was such that I knew when we untied we would be blown a ways before we could develop enough speed to gain steerage. Sure enough, we “tacked” to starboard, Ann cut the line and we got blown sideways a boat length at full throttle before I had steerage. We definitely would have hit the boat on our other side. As it was, we came closer to the reef than I would have normally liked. Oh well, all in a day in the islands…
We wanted to come back to the east side of Raiatea since that’s where all the services are but it’s blowing so hard (and will continue to do so for a few days) that we ducked over to the NW side where we’re having a very calm night. The island is blocking the wind. The downside is we’re going to have to hitch a ride to the other side and then a taxi back when we go into town for provisions to get us from here to Tonga or thereabouts. In other words three month’s worth of food. Actually we have a lot of it, but we’re perilously low on beer and we need some fresh veggies and fruits. We also need to officially check out with the Gendarmes. Seems amazing we’ve been here for three months. We’ll miss French Polynesia, but are looking forward to new adventures as we move west toward New Zealand.