15.45S 147.33W Nearly there!
Mojo 2
Andrew Partington
Mon 15 Aug 2011 03:24
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I am struggling to find adjectives to describe
how fantastic the conditions have been overnight and today.
All last night we motored across flat calm
water in a clear moonlit night [the moon was huge]. We did see a hit of
breeze at about 8pm so we motorsailed for a couple of hours but most of the
night it was glass. With the islands to the east of us there wasn't even a
swell.
At 7am this morning we motored around the
western side of Arutua and set a new waypoint for Papeete, some 205NM away. Not
long after this a breeze started to develop from the south so we motorsailed
with the main at the first reef and the full genoa. Within minutes we had 9
knots of wind so we took down the genoa and hoisted the genneker.
For all of today we have sailed with this
combination, with the wind about 90-100 degrees off our port bow. Wind strengths
have varied from 7 knots to 11 knots but throughout this we have been able to
keep our boat speed to within about one knot of the wind speed, not bad for a
big cruising cat!!
The weather today is hard to fault. We are sailing
across a dead flat sea and maintaining 6-8 knots of boat speed.
Most of the day has been cloud free and the temperature would be about 27
degrees celcius.
The Tuamotus look to be amazing islands and we
both wished we had the time to explore them... maybe next time. They are well
named as the "Dangerous Archipelego" though. We saw three of the four wrecks on
Takaroa and from the look of the electronic charts most of the islands nearby
each had three to four wrecks. The "County of Roxburgh" was clearly a very large
sailing clipper. I plan to do some research to learn its story [and
fate] when I get to Papeete. We are starting to get a sense of just why
this region is the cruising sailers "dream" destination.
It is 6pm now and we are looking at our last night
at sea on this passage. When our auotpilot died 1300NM ago we thought this
evening would never come.
We have a another 152NM to go to sail into Papeete
Harbour and we are both determined that this will happen tomorrow.
Andrew Partington.
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