Lat: 15 29.856′ S
Lon: 144 29.348′ W

The last few days have been some of the calmest sailing we’ve seen yet. The winds are light, so our speed hasn’t been great, but there’s hardly a whitecap in sight, and the days are sunny and beautiful. The wind has slowly clocked toward the northeast a bit, so we’re using a spinnaker to run downwind. The spinnaker we usually fly has a tear in a trim piece, so we’re using our other spinnaker, which is green and white. It’s a bit smaller and slightly asymmetrical (an intentional design feature to make it easier to fly when not going straight downwind), but is staying set pretty well in the light wind.

On the negative side, the main halyard chafed through again. This time the 1/4″ stainless steel wire rope I spliced in at the end of the halyard actually chafed through! It was still running through a block outside the mast, which doesn’t look like it’s going to be a feasible approach. Hopefully in Tahiti I can get a longer piece of wire, splice it back into the halyard, and try it again. There’s got to be some solution that will work.

With such calm seas, there wasn’t much adjusting to do, so we’re all pretty well settled in. New Zealand radio comes in pretty well, so we’ve been able to listen to news shows, which we’ve appreciated. There was a news piece on today about a Kiwi member of parliment who’s caught a bit of heat from the press for having the most travel expenditures ($67k NZ year-to-date). He’s promised to get around by hitchhiking for a while to cut costs and get to know his constituents better. That’s good stuff. Lauren and I have been spending some time with a sudoku book that she found in Panama (the Spanish-language crossword puzzle books weren’t going to work), and we’ve all enjoyed making a passage with less motion than some of the anchorages we’ve been in.

Aside from the usual reading, I’ve been able to start some work on the boat as well (yeah, I am actually a little bored). We haven’t ever had a working knotmeter (speedometer), but we have a spare on the boat, so I took a look at things. The GPS can tell us what our speed over ground is, but without a knotmeter (which gives your speed through the water), we don’t know the strength of the current, which can be nice at times. The previous owner said the transducer just needed a new impeller, but in typical fashion (a) that wasn’t true at all, the transducer was shot, and (b) the transducer wasn’t even connected to the display. I looked into a new transducer before we left, but everyone standardized on through-hull diameter at some point since ours was initially installed and the size they chose was a bit larger in diameter (and our old version is long since obsolete), so to put a new one in we’d have to put in a larger through-hull (make the hole in the boat bigger) — not really do-able while you’re on the move. Luckily, although it’s a slightly different design, the spare is the correct diameter and doesn’t seem to leak when it’s installed. Even though it doesn’t have any documentation, I was able to figure out the wiring and it looks like we should have a knotmeter and water temp sensor later today.

It looks like we’re going to try stopping at two of the Tuamotus — Kauehi and Fakarava. The Tuamotus are a string of atolls running northwest-to-southeast between the Marquesas and Tahiti. While the Marquesas are relatively young and high volcanic islands with only one bay having a coral reef, the Tuamotus are old volcanic remnants — the peak of the volcano has sunk back into the sea and all that’s left is the fringing barrier reef, which is present in the form of small coral islets (motus) of shallow reefs that mark where the barrier reef of the old island used to be. In between the newer Marquesas-style high island with no reef and the atoll are most of the Society islands, including Tahiti and Bora Bora, which have a high island surrounded by a fringing reef that creates an encircling lagoon. The atolls are all lagoon, and when the tide goes out, almost all of it runs through the one or two small passes into the lagoon. Imagine the water level in 50-200 square miles of lagoon dropping by several feet over the course of 6 hours or so and all having to run through a couple of small passes — the current in the smaller passes can exceed our cruising speed of 6 knots under power! In order to avoid having to time the tide and associated current, we’re going to try stopping at a couple of atolls with larger passes. We are hoping to be able to dive one of the passes, as watching the marine life funnel in and out is supposed to be amazing. We may also get our first encounter with sharks as well — the slogan of the dive shop on Fakarava is “every dive without a shark is free.”

The nights have been beautiful as well. The moon is starting to wane, but is still so bright that you can easily read during your watch by moonlight; it hurts your eyes to look directly at it. We’ve seen a few ships, which is a change from the Galapagos-Marquesas crossing, where the signs of mankind totaled one loose orange buoy and one floating pair of pink underwear in 22 days.

Lauren’s mourning our dwindling list of ingredients for meals, but we’re still eating pretty well. A couple of days ago I opened a coconut and we had fresh coconut and homemade granola with powdered milk for breakfast. Last night we enjoyed homemade pizza, although the funny no-refrigeration cheese doesn’t melt too well (I guess whatever French word gets translated as fondue doesn’t really mean melting cheese). We have potatoes and eggs from Nuku Hiva, so Wes & Tiff made a traditional scrambled eggs & potatoes breakfast this morning. Pasta & sauce or rice & something shows up every day or two, and when we’re near a store here in French Polynesia, there’s always baguette with cheese and cucumber or tomato.

This afternoon, Lauren spotted a spinnaker behind us on her watch, and minutes later a call for “the sailboat flying a green spinnaker” came up on channel 16. We answered and had a nice chat with a Kiwi boat called “Alpha Cruces” (after the brightest star in the southern cross) that’s been out sailing for 4 years. They left the Galapagos headed straight for Tahiti — we were the first boat they’d seen in 23 days. Like other Kiwis we’ve talked to that have been around the world, seen most of the Pacific, and are finally headed home, they’re biting off some long Pacific passages to get home soon. In all our travels, we have yet to hear a bad report on New Zealand, so we’re really looking experiencing it ourselves.