90 - Sailing new waters

We made it!!!  After sailing 3700 miles in 27 days (and 4 hours) from the fuel dock in Panama City, we dropped our anchor in the Bay of Virgins on Fatu Hiva in the Marquesan Islands of French Polynesia. Our passage while admittedly long, was about a week faster than both boats who were sort of traveling with us.  

Leaving Panama, our first obstacle was getting across the Bay of Panama which is notorious for its seemingly constant lightning storms. While we certainly encountered our fair share of both lightning and squalls, we thankfully made it through the area unscathed.  

A bonus of sailing in this area, however, is that it’s also a common whale migration route and, within just a few minutes of starting out, we were so excited to be greeted by a small group of whales broaching the surface and slapping their tails in the water.  Sadly, this was the only whale sighting of our entire trip but we enjoyed what we got.

Whale sighting

Upon successfully navigating the Bay of Panama. next up on our journey was the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) or commonly referred to as “The Doldrums.”  For all recorded history, this roughly 250-mile-wide area has at best, frustrated and at worst, devastated sailors traversing this area. The ITCZ circles the globe near the equator and gets its name from the convergence of the northern and southern trade winds who seemingly try to negate each other.  Every boat we know who's traveled through this area either had some difficulty or were forced to completely change their plans.  Sturdeee (the catamaran we befriended and helped cross through the Panama Canal) hit something, severely damaged their rudder, and were forced abort the trip to turn back to Panama.  Several other boats either had to motor for days or were forced to detour to the Galapagos Islands (at great expense) for repairs.  Another boat in our group reported that they were dismasted and forced to detour to the Galapagos where they were able to get fuel delivered before they could motor back to Panama.  Thankfully, no one was hurt and they were able to safely return to Panama.

We now know that we were very fortunate in our crossing.  While we thankfully did have wind throughout most of the ITCZ zone, the wind was directly on our nose thus forcing us to tack (change our heading and thus our sails) several times and we often found ourselves going almost opposite to our desired direction. One boat, who left almost a week before us, was forced to motor for several days just to get through the zone and, the boat who left a week after us, experienced much of the same head winds that we did and really did have to sail in the wrong direction for many hours (adding on several days to their crossing). So, considering the troubles of our fellow sailors, we apparently got off pretty easy – although admittedly, at the time it didn’t seem so.  I guess the winds, as with most things, just comes down to the luck of the draw!

After about 5 days of uncomfortable weather and beating into the wind in our attempt to sail south, we finally managed to reach about 2 degrees of latitude (2 degrees north of the equator) where it seemed someone flipped a switch as almost instantly, the wind shifted and the fun began.  While, we still encountered storms, had wave heights of up to 10 feet and wind speeds of 30 or more, once we finally managed to catch the trade winds and picked up the pacific currents, our heavy boat (she weighs about 60,000 pounds) got her groove and kept her passengers moderately comfortable and dry. On ocean passages, we normally hope to cover 100-150 miles in each 24-hour period.  On this passage, we had many days in which we sailed over 200 miles and on our best day, we covered 250 miles!

Sailors have a tradition of calling those who’ve not yet crossed the equator “Pollywogs” and give the title of “Shellbacks” to those who have.  Many of the boats who crossed before us even set up complicated ceremonies for this occasion - one boat spent 6 hours writing the boat's name "Kapo Rico" on the equator by motoring the path.  On our 17^th day of passage at 2am, we marked our accomplishment simply with an offering of rum to both Neptune and Poseidon (to make sure we covered all our bases) as we crossed from the northern hemisphere to the southern.  Just so you know, contrary to what we were told, the toilet doesn’t change to flush counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere (yes, we checked) but, nevertheless, we were proud of our newly minted “Shellback" ranking!

 

In addition to lots of reading, our entertainment during the crossing was initially marveling at and later chasing away the many Boobies who use passing boats for a perch (which we were cool with) and then a toilet (which we were not).  Our other distraction was the daily counting (we had 28 one morning) and removing the various flying fish and squids who landed on the boat during the night.  One a couple of occasions, we were heard them flopping and were able to rescue but most were long dead by the time we were able to get to them.   I wanted to plan for a calamari lunch one morning but a Google search suggested that they turn bad quickly and we decided open ocean wasn't the best place to be if we got food poisoning.  

With the help of incredible starlit nights of clear skies devoid of any moonlight to nights of moonshine so bright you could almost read by it, the discomfort of rough waves and storms were quickly replaced in our memories of the passage.  While sadly I don’t have a camera capable of showing the starlit nights where we could clearly see the Milky Way, I did take catch the sunrises, sunsets, moonrises, and moonsets and even caught one rainbow! 

Put any group of sailors together and the talk will invariably lead to complaints about everything that can and does go wrong and with a passage like this one bad weather and things breaking top the list.  While we experienced a variety of sailing conditions from ugly storms to very confused seas, we too had many glorious days that allowed us to truly remember what we love about sailing. However, we certainly weren’t without incidents and did have several things break along the way, but thankfully Pedro, was able to fix or work around all of them including repairing our auto pilot while we tried to hold the boat "steady" in 6-8-foot seas.     

In addition to his Mr. Fix-it skills, Pedro also managed to catch us several fish along the way.  Within a day or two of our passage, he reeled in a nice Mahi-Mahi and then a few days later a delicious skipjack tuna.  Aboard our boat, our rule is to catch a fish and eat said fish before trying to catch another.  So, we enjoyed meals (mostly ceviche and sashimi) for the next several days and then my fisherman put his line back in the water.  He caught several small Mahi-Mahi which we decided to throw back before he reeled in a large Wahoo which was so big we enjoyed it for several days and then put the rest in our freezer.  Next, he reeled in an even bigger skipjack tuna which we again enjoyed for several days and were also able to freeze some.  However, while the ocean does give, it also takes as we lost 9 fishing lures to fish who were apparently way too big for our 30-pound test line.  Pedro thinks in all fairness we should have used 80-pound test but we are both at odds as to how we could bring such huge fish aboard (the last tuna took over an hour to bring in and it probably only weighed about 35 pounds).  While we were warned to bring lots of fishing lures, we’ve warned friends who are coming next year to bring even more.

While this was a long passage - our longest to date - and at times grew taxing, overall, we thoroughly enjoyed the sail.  However, we were beyond ecstatic to pull into Fatu Hiva and be reunited with Dan and Alison who sailed their boat Equus over several months before.  While we’d seen them a couple of times since on land, we’d not sailed with them since we both left Greece in 2022.  As soon as we dropped our anchor and started settling in, Herve and family from Kapo Rico (they arrived a couple of months before), dinghied over to deliver some local pamplemousse (grapefruit).  It was a perfect way to end our first Pacific crossing.

The next morning, we decided to hike to a nearby waterfall.  While the roundtrip was only about 4 miles, it is extremely steep hills, which, combined with walking through the woods and over rocks, emphasized how out of shape we were.  However, once we saw the gorgeous waterfall and felt the cool fresh water, we loved it so much that we summoned up enough energy to walk back the next day too.  On the way back, we found a hollowed tree and tried to recreate our London group telephone booth picture.  We thought we were funny anyway!

While back in Panama, Dan and Alison were asked to buy some grinding blades for a local wood and stone carver named Sopi who lives in Fatu Hiva.  They were told (and we saw first-hand) that items such as this are very difficult and extremely expensive to source locally.  We had no trouble finding his house (the first person we asked pointed us in the right direction) and quickly became friends with Sopi and his wife Lea.  He was grateful to get the blades and offered us bananas, papaya, pamplemousse, rosemary and basil (all growing in his yard).  In addition, we arranged for Sopi and Lea to host a traditional Marquesan pig roast for the 4 of us plus the crew of 4 from another boat -s/v Pele- who arrived just a few days after us.  The feast was amazing and it was the perfect introduction to the Marquesan culture.

Now don't get the wrong idea.  Our time on Fatu Hiva wasn't all fun and games (well, for most of us anyway).  As we were arriving, once again, we discovered that our anchor windlass wasn't working.  Thankfully we were able to use our second anchor.  However, once we got settled, Pedro had to again take the first windlass apart and (with the help of Herve from Kapo Rico) repair it again.  Turns out it was a loose connection inside the motor and apparently defective from the manufacturer. Additionally, I had the bright idea for Alison to come cook her famous crepes to use up a few of our new bananas (hey, I sliced the bananas for her) and Dan had to go to the top of our mast do a repair that I tried but couldn't do.   

As there was no local immigration office, we enjoyed a week in beautiful Fatu Hiva and then had a great, albeit sporty, sail (winds over 20knots) over to the larger island of Hiva Oa to officially check-in to French Polynesia.  This second island stop was almost culture shock.  It’s much larger and more populated and while it was wonderful to shop a bit in the larger stores, we didn’t enjoy the huge amount of traffic passing us as we walked the 2 miles into town each day.  However, as our reward, we treated ourselves to a local beer and freshly baked Pain au Chocolat while overlooking the beach.  On our last day there, we were awoken early morning as the island's cruise and cargo supply ship arrived in port.  That was interesting to see.  In all fairness, we only spent a few days here as we wanted to meet back up with Dan and Alison so I think we’ll go back while we’re in the area and give the island a second chance.

Leaving Hiva Oa, with the winds in the perfect direction and the day sunny, we decided to take the long way on our sail to our next island of Tahuata.  For most of us, sailing starts to become a way to get from A to B and we often forget we actually like to sail. So, we decided that a few extra hours of "fun" sailing was exactly what we needed.

Much like Fatu Hiva, Tahuata is very small with beautiful harbors however, the people were even more friendly and welcoming.  On our first day there, Pedro and I were walking by a house where the wife had just left her yard and was walking into town.  She saw us, and told us to wait - as she spoke French thankfully it was only one word so I caught what she said.  We waited while her husband picked some bananas off his tree to hand to us. They joined us as we continued walking back towards town. We talked with them a bit in my bad French and his thankfully very decent English.  Next thing we know, he takes us a bit off the main road and we soon walked past his aunt Tehina's house who invited us in and put wonderful gardenia leis on both of us.  She thankfully spoke fluent English so we had a wonderful chat. It turns out, she runs a hotel/restaurant (seating is her front porch) and had some overnight guests we met.  She's American but has lived in Australia most of her life and he's from the UK and both were marine biologists studying the manta rays here in the Marquesa’s.  It was completely fascinating learning from these two and hearing about the island from Tehina who also invited us to attend service at the church on Sunday morning.  

The church service was delightful. While they spoke and sang in their native language and we couldn’t understand anything they said, we all loved the service and marveled at the singing.  What made the singing even more special was that they sang in 2-part harmony with the men singing one part and the women the other.  The last song of the service was sung by all for the children who belted out the song with immense pleasure.  After church, we met a few locals and bought some pastries.  We went back into "town" that evening for an amazing dinner at Tehina’s house/restaurant making it a completely perfect day!

Just to make sure, we weren’t having too much fun, the next day, we decided to walk the other village for lunch not really realizing that it was 8km each way with constant up and down hills.  We somehow made it there but found the restaurant we wanted to visit was closed so settled for hamburgers and fries at a smaller place.  As we’re heading back to the boat and really realizing how out of shape we were, we were so grateful when about 1/2 way home, the pastor from the church offered us a ride back.  We agreed that there is no way we would have made it home before dark.

Now, exhausted but happy, we were dinghying back to the boats and were flagged down by a fellow cruiser who told us that we'd drug our anchor and run into Equus.  Several other cruisers had thankfully tied both boats together to keep us from hitting and put out an extra anchor on our boat. Thanks to these cruisers, we only suffered a little surface damage to Equus and the stainless bars around the gate opening of the starboard side of our boat got slightly dented and bent.  The other boats were rightly worried that we could have drug so much that the boat would end up on the massive rocks lining the harbor.  We immediately moved the boat and reset the anchor, but Pedro slept in the cockpit all night just to watch.    I took this picture from our chart plotter to show how much our boat swung around overnight ("X" marks the anchor and squiggly lines our track) and while it was a bit stressful, thankfully our anchor held.

Anchor reset and boat seemingly happy, we again decided to have some fun.  Those same rocks that surround the harbor and threatened the boat, are home to a beautiful array of colorful fish which we were able to see with just our snorkel gear by jumping right off the back of the boat.  Another gift from the bay, were several coconuts I found floating in the water after a heavy wind went through.  I brought several back to the back and made Pedro cut them open.  It turns out this is a lot harder than it looks – for Pedro at least – but I was so excited to get both the coconut water and the meat which, whatever I didn’t eat outright, we turned into everything from coconut encrusted wahoo to coconut bread, coconut milk, and cookies.  It was amazing!

As our next island stop was about a 13-hour sail away and there is only 12 hours of daylight in this area, we left Tahuata right at sunset, had a mostly wonderful overnight sail with moonlight for the first few hours and dropped anchor in Nuku Hiva arriving just after sunrise (we don’t like to arrive at night in unfamiliar anchorages).  As I type this, we’re still in the anchorage at Nuku Hiva exploring the island and marveling in the dockside farmer’s market with fresh vegetables that they have most days and enjoying hiking all around us (well that’s a stretch as I realize how out of shape, I am with all these hills, but the views are amazing and I am getting better).  But I’ll fill you in on that next time.

Until next post!