On the way to Tahiti
Gudrun V
Axel Busch
Thu 21 Jun 2012 22:27
This morning the anchor wouldn't come up, probably because it was caught underneath some coral. I didn't want to go about it with brute force, and instead dived down to clear it. 14m is a little deep for freediving for me, but I have a little air tank called "Spare Air 300:, about the size of a water bottle, and this is very convenient for those occasions. Just stick it in your mouth and it gives you air for about 50 surface breaths, a little less than half of that at 15m.
Thanks to the trip-line the anchor was freed quickly and we were on our way to Tiputa pass. We went through at 10:00, one hour before low tide. That gave us four knots of current in the back. Then we ran into some 2m standing waves (wind against tide) on the exit off the pass. Not so nice, I recommend to go through the pass right at slack water.
It's 200nm to go to Tahiti, which we can just make in 24h in 20kn of Wind on the beam. But at the moment we have only 10kn, so we'll probably have to spend two nights at sea.
Since leaving Ua Pou we've only stopped for a few days at islands (Nuku Hiva, Fakarava, Rangiroa), and we feel like we've made good progress towards New Zealand withoug rushing it too much. All those islands/atolls are quite small, and five days is more than enough to see everything there is. Papeete will be something else, especially because there are festivities now (leading up to Bastille day), and there are some repairs that need to be done before we go on a week's sail to Niue. So we think that we'll spend one or two weeks in Papeete.