A little scratch on the skipper’s soul

The missing blog post concerning our fortunate escape from Fatu Hiva finally went online (thanks, Olli !) So now you can see that although we managed to sail nearly half way around the world, we still make a lot of mistakes. Or rather -me- as it’s the skipper who’s in charge of things on a boat. And although I thought we had everything setup perfectly and we’d get out of that little bay just as well as we entered it – it went wrong.

There are a number of reasons why we hit those rocks and that was what I was thinking about during that trip to Hiva Oa. So I was silent while Gui wanted to speak about what happenend. That of course led to an argument between us but – hey – there are limits to how personal I’m getting in that blog here. Anyway… It’s really risky to be sailing without a working engine and that was the main reason why during the stay at Taohata, I spent nearly two entire days in the engine room. Now we’re heading towards the Tuamotus and those are even riskier islands. Until a few years ago many sailors still sailed around them because of the many little reefs and currents that make this archipelago that dangerous. But we’ll only do one stop for now and that should not be a problem.

As for the passage to these islands – it’s running great !! We expected to have very light winds during the first two days and we had very little wind during the last night. This prompted the appearence of the Blister right after breakfast – but now we have nice and steady wind with enough power to push us along with 5 to 6 knots with just the small Genoa and the main in the first reef. Wonderful sailing with agreeable movement and beautiful blue sky and sea.

LATITUDE: 11-04.56S, LONGITUDE: 140-29.96W, COURSE: 231T, SPEED: 5.9, WIND: ESE 4-5, DISTANCE: 447nm