S/V Indian Summer 1

We arrived at the pass of Raroia around 11 and Ian jumped in the dinghy to check out the current which had to be slack and preferably inflowing. As I watched, I realised I was more worried than I had ever been since living on board. The last time we had entered a pass we lost an engine and we had been warned about the dangers of getting through passes so I was really nervous. Ian came back all smiles and shouted ‘piece of cake’. We then proceeded to sail through without any problems at all. We were inside this beautiful lagoon and all we needed to do was find an anchorage. We were the only boat so had lots of choices and dropped anchor just off the village. There are bommies everywhere in the Tuamotos islands – and it’s highly recommended you float your chain. This means you need to add a heavy duty float every 5 or so meters to lift the chain from the bottom to prevent getting it entangled in the coral. Problem was we had no floats but we’re told that they often wash up on the shore and we may be in luck finding one, so we set off to walk the shore hunting for a float. The shore line is all coral so we needed sturdy shoes and within about 20 minutes we had found about 20 – we chose the five best ones and took them back and floated the chain. Now we were all set to go and explore.

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We were quite pleased to eventually arrive somewhere where they had a boatyard so that we could get our engine fixed, our rigging report and be on our way. We only had a three month visa and many islands and atolls yet to explore so we thought we would be here for just 3 or 4 days….. How wrong were we!

The day after we arrived the boatyard sent out a couple of guys to check our rig and engine. The first bad news was that they couldn’t determine exactly what was wrong but the second bad news completely shocked us. They found a couple of broken strands in the starboard shroud – the stainless steel wire that hold a the mast up. Shrouds are made up of about 20 strands but when one breaks it weakens the others and has to be replaced. Ian had checked them before we left for the Galapagos so it must have broken since then. He then went up the mast and saw that the other parts of the rigging were starting to look worn. This meant we couldn’t sail any further as the risk of being dismasted was too great. We also couldn’t motor with one engine – it’s fine when you are going fast but slowly you just go round and round! No good for anchoring and getting into a marina. Both huge money of course…

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Sailing from The Galapagos or Panama to French Polynesia is the longest stretch any curcumnavigator will do without landfall. It is one of the rites of passage and can take anywhere between 20 – 40 days depending on the winds. Halfway across we would be as far you are can be from humans as possible on the planet – not a place to have anything go wrong with your boat so we had checked and re-checked everything and felt confident we would be ok. One last check of the weather and with a beautiful sunny day, excellent winds and a fully stocked boat we were off…. this would be our longest sail of over 3,000nms to the stunning islands of French Polynesia. We had planned on going to Nuku Hiva but opted instead to go to Gambier – a group of islands further south as we knew we would not have backtracked to see them if we had gone straight to Nuku Hiva.

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We had a good sail from the Las Perlas islands and had a few visitors en route. We were joined by lots of red footed boobies who would not leave – even when we put the hose on them… initially they were lovely to watch but as our boat got more and more covered in their crap – we decided they had to leave and that’s when the battle of wills began. Eventually we won and they did leave, but they hung around for ages!

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