11:04S 141:22W

 

Ua Pou took a long time to fade into the distance yesterday....in fact those spectacular jutting peaks were still visible as the sun was setting.  The wind gave us a good start but died a little over night and went a bit too far aft for our liking.  As usual, it came back as the sun rose and has settled at about 12 knots...we’d like a little more but we’re not complaining.  We need to keep a constant eye on speed to time our arrival to coincide with tide times and the one that suits us is early morning on Saturday.   The Tuamotos, often called the Dangerous Archipelago, are a series of atolls (Mururoa...site of those ghastly nuclear tests....is one of them) and have entrances that cause headaches to even experienced navigators.  We’ve picked one of the easier atolls for our arrival – with a largeish entrance but it still calls for extreme caution.

 

As usual, neither of us got much sleep on our first night out.  It’s always the same – takes a few days to get into a rhythm.  But we’ve just had coffee with the last of our French pain au raisins (have to make muffins for tomorrow’s morning tea), the sun is shining and it’s another heavenly French Polynesian day.  Life is good.  Now, we just need to catch a fish for tonight’s dinner.