Monday 11th June: South Pacific Ocean 17 52.0S  178 02.1W  

Today’s Blog by David (Time zone UTC +13.00;  BST+12.00)

We spent last night on the far side of the world  under  our “storm canvas”: two reefs in the staysail – leaving only the specially reinforced fly of the sail out to  catch the wind - and a tiny scrap of mainsail , no more than a metre along the foot, exposed. There was an uncomfortable beam sea that kept  us lurching to leeward – the  watch was firmly strapped on in the cockpit.  

The wind wasn’t that strong – 20-28 knots on a broad reach  - our problem was that we were going too fast and needed to slow down.   The Lau Group of Islands are the easternmost of Fiji, a group of low lying islands and reefs which we have to thread our way through. This is a passage that we preferred to undertake in daylight and hence the need to slow down. With 18 hours to go before this morning’s dawn we were only 90 miles from the islands – we had to keep our speed down to 5 knots.

And what a challenge that proved to be. Even under storm canvas, the windage from the bimini and spray hood etc. contrive to drives us along consistently at around  5 knots.   Job done you might say?  And so it was, but it did lead us to reflect what we might need to do if we ever did get caught out in  real storm and needed to slow down in earnest - say in 50+ knots of wind. {Classically, a yacht needs to be able to slow down to prevent her catching up the wave ahead and burying her nose in it (and broaching)}.   

What we learned last night is that the storm canvas alone with all the other paraphernalia set, is not going to cut it.

Back to the drawing board…….