Goodbye Marquesas

Jackamy
Paul & Derry Harper
Thu 22 Apr 2010 19:47
 
Thursday 22nd April
 
Our aim was to leave at first light but things don't always go to plan. We were all up at 5.30 but we still found odd jobs to do which delayed us so we eventually left around 07.15. We were headed for Ua Pou, the island opposite Nuka Hiva, where Mark and Chrissy were waiting for us.
 
 
Leaving Taiohae Bay
 
  
 
Arriving Ua Pou
 
Amy spent the whole 3 hour crossing asleep as she'd had a late night so had only had a few hours sleep - typical! Once there we had some brunch and packed up the boat ready for the 450 mile sail to Manihi in the Tuamotus Islands, the next stage of our Pacific crossing.
 
We eventually left the Marquesas Archipelago at around 12.30 for a 2-3 day sail. The watches were started at 3 with Amy taking the first one and we were soon back into the usual routine. Including the routine of seeing Amy's first meal twice!
 
The seas and winds picked up as soon as the sun went down and we were in for a rough night, Paul spent most of the night sleeping on and off up on deck. In fact it was a pretty horrible first 24 hours. We had dozens of waves over the cockpit and probably just as many squalls. But by mid afternoon on the first proper day, Friday, the winds and seas had calmed down and we were sailing along nicely with the music blaring.
 
As darkness fell the sky suddenly seemed to be full of menacing big black clouds that you just knew would pick their moment and suddenly open up. We had a few "little" squalls but the meanest of all came around 04.00 on Amy's watch. She'd been tracking it on the radar and it only appeared to be a "medium" sized one and it should have passed just behind us so she wasn't too worried as we should have just caught the edge of it. Anyway, the wind speed was gradually getting higher and higher and higher so she checked the radar again only to see that another 3 of similar size had opened up above us creating the mother of all squalls. Paul appeared at the companionway much to Amy's relief to help shut down the boat in the 40+ knot winds and thankfully they got everything under control!
 
Saturday started off quite bright and cheerful and as the the winds and seas were calm we planned to have a game of scrabble. Mother nature made sure that our plans were ruined by throwing some really rolly seas at us and more squalls. We didn't expect it to be like this, it's worse than the Atlantic. After last nights experience Amy thinks the clouds just go looking for yachts and when they find one they just open up onto them as the squalls just appear from nowhere.
 
We're having to slow ourselves down quite considerably as we need to reach Manihi at around 14.30 on Sunday when it is high tide so that the depth is 2.4m. Our draught is 2.2m so that means we have 20cm of room between us and the bottom, super!