13:10S 160:43W

 

Rain, lots and lots of it, fell last night giving Bandit a thorough wash.  The worst thing about it is we were unable to catch a drop of it and with our watermarker not working it would have been fantastic.But just not the most sensible  thing to open our water tanks and risk taking a wave and contaminating supplies.  Hopefully it will rain while we are in Suvarrow.

 

With squall clouds approaching last evening we decided to sail reefed down expecting the usual increase in wind but during the night when the squalls approached the  wind died completely leaving Bandit wallowing in the swell and wandering in circles in solid rain. With little moon and heavy clouds it was pitch black on deck and the rain lasted for ages.  When it was dry enough to do something about pointing the boat the right direction the wind was gone so we dropped the main and motored for a while before getting a headsail up. By dawn the wind was back and we are now rolling along under twin headsails, the genoa poled to starboard the the staysail to port. We used this rig often on the Atlantic crossing and don’t know why we don’t use it more. It allows us to sail dead downwind and “Harry the Hydrovane” steers perfectly allowing Zac the autopilot a bit of time off.

 

We are better off than our cruising friend Harry who is sailing his boat Malua single handed from Bora Bora to Tonga.  He has engine trouble a torn mainsail damaged in a 40 knot squall and this morning is in what he described as “enormous” 5 meter seas and 25 –30 kts of wind.  For Harry to say enormous....they must be huge.  He is quite philosophical though and spending most of his time in his quarter berth.  Yesterday he watched Lawrence of Arabia to remind him there is dry land out there somewhere.  He is a very experienced sailor and has a solid boat.  The whole of the area between French Polynesia and Tonga south of 15 degrees seems to be lying in very strong winds from the east and south east, one of the reasons we opted to head north. The only problem with that is we will need to head south again at some stage to get home! Hopefully things will have settled down a bit by then.