Tahiti Bound
Vega
Hugh and Annie
Sat 17 Jun 2017 20:08
Sadly we are now leaving the Tuamotus for Tahiti, which is in the Society Islands. Even more sadly we are motoring as the light wind we had been expecting has turned out to be very light indeed. The Tuamotus are about as South Pacific as you can get, at least by comparison with the musical. Low coral atolls with white sand, palm trees and crystal clear water. We would have liked to stay longer but Annie is flying home for three weeks on 23rd and we need to get Vega settled into a marina in good time for her departure. We have discovered that there are a lot of young women looking for crew spots to get them around the Pacific and for some reason Annie has alerted friends here on other yachts to make sure there are no stowaways whilst she is away.
We had agreed that we should make a return trip to the uk every six months to keep up with family and friends back home. With the high cost of flights from Tahiti and the need to press on towards New Zealand we had thought that we would be better waiting until November for a return. However, our compromise is that Annie should go and bring back the long list of things it would be extremely expensive to have shipped out here - new laptop for example. She can catch up with children and grandchildren while at home and feels much happier with her flight now booked. It means we have to motor for up to two days though and for the first time ever the fuel gauge is down to half. This means, according to the table in the boat manual, we have 70 litres remaining which gives us around 35 hours of motoring. If the wind doesn't rise above 8kts we will need another 24 hours of motoring which, by our standards, is cutting things extremely fine. We do have another 20 litres up our sleeve.......
Until the advent of chart plotters the Tuamotus were largely off limits for yachts and particularly at night. Even within the atolls you have to keep a sharp lookout for shallow areas and reefs. Light blue sea means white sand beneath shallow water. Dark green means coral at depth. Brown means coral at or close to the surface. The angle of the sun can be critical to being able to see these colour changes and facing into bright low sun is the worst. Clouds don't help as their shadows either look like coral patches or they make the unshadowed sea look like shallow areas. The other day we cut a corner from the marked channel and sailed right into the afternoon sun but thinking there were no charted obstructions. We sailed right over a very shallow patch that I only noticed when we were on top of it. I looked behind to see an exposed lump of rock and coral that we had missed by a only a few feet. The navigator was not happy with the skipper and the skipper was feeling pretty chastened.
The coral near the shore, if not a reef, occurs as lumps rising from the sea floor (called "bommies" for some reason). At anchor your chain can wrap around a bommie as the boat swings and to avoid this you can attach floats to your anchor chain to hold the chain above the level of the coral. Fenders are commonly used as floats but out here you can find floats that have broken away from pearl farms. Everybody collects a few from the beach to use as anchor chain floats. It's a well tried technique recommended by the sailing guides. You have to work out by trial and error at what intervals to attach the floats to support your chain without it either hanging in deep loops or being suspended at the surface. We recently overhead a conversation about how effective this technique is but in particular how close to the anchor the first float should be. The chain normally runs from the anchor across the sea bed before being lifted up towards the boat. You have to put out enough chain to keep this flat run to the anchor even when the wind is blowing the boat backwards so that the anchor is not pulled up and out of the seabed. A float may increase the vertical angle of the chain to the anchor and could cause the anchor to be pulled out more easily. On the other hand if you leave a long length of chain to the anchor before attaching the first float you run the risk of the chain wrapping around coral close to the anchor which could make retrieval difficult. We joined in the conversation and had a wonderful discussion about catenary curves, horizontal and vertical forces. One enthusiastic American guy was calculating the effect of the floats and the balance between the weight of the chain and size of float to prevent the chain from concertinaing into a vertical line of floats and chain with the boat above. Apparently the maths of the effect upon the holding quality of the anchor with various angles of chain is rather more complicated. Sounds like an exercise for friend Chris in a spare moment on his summer sailing cruise in the Mediterranean.
I have an expanding list of maintenance items to be attended to while in Tahiti and a few bigger ones that will have to wait until New Zealand. I reproduce the list here for the possible interest of other yachties but for those that might find this even more tedious than the rest of the diary please look away now.
Remove twist in reefing line in boom (replace the car and two lines with just a single line?) T
Add a line from the 3rd reef crinkle in the luff of the mainsail down to a block to enable the luff to be winched down when going downwind T
New alternator belt and impeller for engine T
New engine hours led display NZ
Replace locking pin on Hydrovane rudder stock T
New spinnaker halyard sheave in mast NZ
Windlass service NZ (T?)
New coppercoat antifouling NZ
New circular dial cover for plotter (from U.K.?)
Replace solar panel socket on coachroof T
Oil the hanks on the staysail T
Clean the cockpit teak T
Scrape clean the underwater hull T (probably one of the islands beyond as we hear of illness resulting from immersion in Papeete water)
Clean and polish all metalwork (!) T & NZ
Clean and polish hull and coachroof T & NZ
Source new hull scrapers, caribeenars, anchor chain length marking inserts, fuel filling funnel with filter T