Position Report on Sunday 18th May 2014

The Alba Chronicles
Neville Howarth
Sun 18 May 2014 16:36

Position Report on Sunday 18th May 2014 at 0800

 

8:56.26S 140:09.80W

 

We’re just about to set off from Daniel’s Bay in Nuku Hiva, heading to Kauehi Atoll in the Tuamotus. It’s just over 500 miles, so we expect to be at sea for 4 nights.  Here’s what we did yesterday.

 

17 May 2014   Daniel’s Bay, Nuku Hiva, Marquesas

It was a horrible morning with rain and huge gusts of wind making us veer around the anchorage, rolling every time that we went side-on to the swell creeping into the bay.  There was no way that we were going to be able to hike up to the nearby waterfall, so we resigned ourselves to a day on board and decided to leave for the Tuamotus tomorrow.

 

I spent most of the morning trying to figure out the tides for the entrance into the Kauehi Atoll.  You would think that it would be a simple thing to look up, but I checked two different electronic charts, a program called wxtide32 and the tide tables from NOAA and none of them were the same. There’s 90 minutes difference between all the sources, so I guess that we’ll have get there at the earliest slack water and eyeball it.

 

The rain stopped after lunch, so we pumped the dingy back up and went ashore.  We walked to the small village and bought 10 pamplemousse. 8 oranges, 30+ bananas, star fruit, etc., so we had a good haul of fruit ready to go to the Tuamotus where fruit and vegetables are very, very scarce.  The guy who sold us the fruit had a fabulous set of tattoos, which he said were done in the traditional way – not with a machine.  When I asked to take his picture, he snarled making himself look fierce, presumably like his cannibal ancestors would have looked.

 

After going for a walk and chatting to the locals, I feel a bit better about this anchorage, but it won’t make it onto my favourites list.