En route to the Tuamotu
Anastasia
Phil May and Andrea Twigg
Wed 11 Apr 2012 05:10
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9:31.5S 141:06.5W 440 miles to
go
This morning at 07:00 we left Nuku Hiva, bound for
the Tuamotu, in the company of Serendipity. We were some of the last boats
to leave, but the earlier yachts have had to motor for much of the 500
miles and we decided to wait for better wind. The grib files suggest that
we should now be able to sail the whole distance, and so far the wind has been
exactly as predicted.
In the days before GPS entering the Tuamotu was a
perilous thing to do. They are basically 1000 miles of
coral reefs that are extremely hard to spot until you are right on top of
them. Nowadays our chart plotter will lead us into a safe area without
worrying too much about that first landfall.
The most important thing for us is to time our
arrival at our first atoll (Manihi) carefully because there are two things we
have to get right. We have to arrive
(a) when the sun is high, so we can see the
coral below the surface and pick our way through the coral heads within the
lagoon (Polaroid sunglasses are an essential item of equipment to help with
this) and
(b) when the tide is slack so we don't get strong
currents at the entry to the lagoon (the passes into the lagoons turn into
rivers when the tide is flooding, with the water flowing faster than we can
motor).
Since we are sailing for three days to get
there we should be able to adjust our speed on the last night to arrive
mid-morning, although if we get it wrong then Manihi does have sandy
patches outside the lagoon where we can anchor until the sun and tide are
right. The pass through the reef is 40m wide so we will have 15m clearance
each side, but it would still be nerve racking to enter with a strong
current behind us shoving us through the
gap. At least we are a catamaran and so don't have any issues with depth
(aside from the possibility of hitting coral), whereas the monohulls have the
additional complication of running aground on sand bars in the passes as
well.
It all sounds a bit fraught, but I am sure we will
get used to it after visiting a couple of the islands. Our next planned
stop is Rangiroa, but we may visit Ahe as well.
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