In my last letter I said that we were tentatively hoping for a Tuesday arrival.  Having written that the wind got up and for several days the old girl really flew despite a reefed main and rolled genoa.  Thus we began to suffer from the curse of 'arrival time mania'.  For nearly two weeks we had been happily sailing along taking what was doled out to us and none of us had actually thought about the ending.  We were happy in our own little world.  Suddenly other members of 'the village' were asking when we were going to arrive.  One member some hundreds of miles behind us had already worked out his arrival time.  We were somewhat aghast at this and we all feel that committing oneself even mentally to an arrival time is (a) asking for trouble and (b) upsetting to the atmosphere on the ship.

So far (a) has not happened but we have all found ourselves getting more tired and less tolerant to life on a moving platform.  It has been blowing 20 knots or more for over a week now.  As Christabel put it, 'suddenly we went from being happy to go on for ever to very much wanting to arrive'.  Discussion has somewhat laid this ghost and also the fact that the perpetrator of arrival times who is well behind us has had to considerably change his has made us even more shut mouthed about  ours.  However it is fair to say that short of some disaster we have bungled the arrival time.  We are due off the southern tip of Fatu Hiva about 2200hrs tonight when it will be very dark!  We could not speed up enough to make it before dark nor successfully slow down enough to get in at dawn.  Heaving to is more comfortable than sailing very slowly and being knocked by the seas.  Actually the bay we are going to anchor in is not difficult and a night arrival would  almost certainly be possible however as we are arriving at what others have called one of the worlds most spectacular islands  we feel that we owe ourselves a daytime approach.  Thus tonight we will spend some hours hove to and make our final approach in the first hours of daylight tomorrow.  There is another reason why we need to arrive, the protein level of our pasta is going up alarmingly as the weevils multiply.

 

Last night we were having a rain squall about every two hours and although trying these have proved harmless as the wind goes up about ten knots at the most.  Usually it does!  Suddenly with a jet black sky behind me I felt the wind go up in temperature a noticeable amount.  A few minutes later the temperature plummeted, I hardly had time to think about BA lectures on downbursts when the real wind arrived.  All I know is that for minutes on end the wind showed 38/42 knots while the speedo showed we were sailing away from it at  a constant 10/11 knots.  This with reefed main and tiny boomed out genoa.  At times like this I say to myself, no one else being around as the only sounds I heard from below were the slamming closed of the hatches, that Nordlys and her sisters were designed to be raced by ten or more strong men who would no doubt have had a storm kite up in such conditions.  So far the faith I have in her has never been misplaced.

 

One feeling we all have is that we are very privileged to be going to our destination.  There may be plenty of yachts going our way but we are bound for one of the least accessible islands in a group that is in itself very inaccessible except at enormous cost.  To fly from Tahiti to the Marquesas being very expensive and Fatu Hiva is one of the islands that has no airport.  We are all looking forward to walking in its valleys and seeing the villages.  Total population of the island is 650 we are told.  More of this when we know more.

David, Annette and Christabel.