Toau to Tahiti

NORDLYS
David and Annette Ridout
Tue 8 Jul 2003 05:38
Papeete
Tahiti
6th July 2003

This webdiary is not designed to make communication one way. Comments, questions and your
news are very welcome to us. nordlys (at) mailasail.com

I write this anchored off the Taina marina in Papeete. Behind me the sun is setting over Moorea showing to perfection the outline that is known to many from photos. In front of me the green hills of Tahiti rise up showing that after the coastal suburbia there is much of the land that is just as it always was. We have come here as opposed to the quay front in the center of town due to the heat, noise and dirt of the latter. Here the fringing reef keeps the water calm. The latter is so clear that swimming is a pleasure and ashore there is the most splendid supermarket just a five minute walk away. To those reading this the last sentence may seem strange but it must be realised we have not seen a decent food shop since Panama and to revel in fresh vegetables, salads and all the other delights of twenty first century western world food shopping is a mouth watering experience for us. Olive bread, pate, Brie and a salad made a superb lunch. New Zealand steaks, potatoes and broccoli followed by tart au fruit are on the menu tonight. There are two down sides to all of this. One, the cost of things here is best not even thought about and secondly the passage here.



We left Toau at first light, 0545hrs, and set sail on a south westerly course with twelve knots on the beam. Perfect. Nordlys slipped along at almost seven knots over a calm sea. By ten o'clock the sky to windward was getting black and grey but there was no increase in wind. We shut hatches and prepared for rain. The wind increased to just under twenty knots and the rain arrived but there was no indication of anything worse to come. The sky was uniformly grey with no sign of the intense thunder cells associated with nasty weather. Thus I did not reef, fool that I was. Suddenly all hell broke loose. The heavens simply opened up reducing visibility to a few meters. I know not what the wind got up to as I could not read the instruments. We simply dropped the main but the genoa was the problem. Let it out and the flogging was horrible to see but even with the sheet loose the sail would not furl away despite using a winch to pull on the line. I crawled to the bow to ascertain that nothing was obviously caught and with my heart in my mouth applied brute force to the furling line. It worked. All I will say is that the girls were superb. Annette kept plotting our position as there was an atoll about ten miles to leeward and I had been headed off to a north westerly course. During the next hour we lost five miles to leeward and got very cold and wet. Suddenly it was all over and within a few minutes we were warming up and sailing over a blue sea again! To say we were a little shaken would in my case anyway be an understatement