The other side of the world!
Trip Start
Jan 14, 2006
1
10
44
Trip End
Ongoing
Marquesqs,
French Polynesia
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
We were in the Golapagos for 3 weeks due to be delayed for 8 days in San Cristobal waiting for our cruising permit, without which we were not allowed to sail anywhere in the Golapagos National Park. After doing a tour of San Cristobal we left for Santa Cruz on the 3rd of March and spent 3 days there where we did another island tour involving a walk through a 600m long lava tube that was 10m in diameter - amazing! We were taken to a beautiful beach called Tortuga Bay on the western side of the island with beautiful white sand and a good breeze - time for the kite!! So I had George and John on the end of the Flexifoil power kite I brought from England and they were loving it - watch this space for more kiting throughout the Pacific! (I can just hear some of you guys back in the UK laughing yourselves silly, but if you've got a kite; fly it!!!)
We then sailed to Isla Isabella, where we spent 6 days in a beautiful anchorage where we swam with sharks, had Galapagos Penguins fishing under the boat and rode on horseback up to the second largest volcanic crater in the world and hiked over the lava flow of a volcano that erupted last October
Boom fix!
.We left the Galapagos Islands on the 12th March for our 3 week trek across the ocean to the Marquesas. We spent about 3 days motoring south with no wind through the doldrums until we got to 4.5 degrees south of the equator, where we picked up wind, got the cruising chute (kite) up and were making 6.5-7 kts towards our destination. 4 days later we were roaring along in a big swell going through numerous squalls with lightning and winds gusting up to force 8 (34-40 kts). That morning, in a big squall and swell, the boat slewed the wrong way down a wave and the boom gybed, making the whole main sail whip from one side of the boat to the other, resulting in a huge bang which broke the boom in two!!! DOH! That meant that we lost the use of the mainsail for the rest of the journey and had to sail using only the genoa and kite.
The rest of the trip wasn't too bad; we maybe lost a day by not having the mainsail. It was a great passage, spending just over 3 weeks at sea, seeing no land and only 2 other boats the whole trip. We soon settled into a routine of our watch keeping (I was on watch from 1000-1200, 1800-2000 and 0200-0400) and would keep ourselves busy by reading, playing cards and watching movies on the laptop in the evening. It was quite surreal watching The Matrix in the middle of the ocean doing 7 kts with the autopilot steering us west
Broken Boom
. My time was also taken up with teaching John and George the pleasures of navigation theory for their Yachtmaster exam, which they both took on board very well. If you ever get a chance to sail an ocean passage, drop whatever you are doing and go for it! It is an amazingly spiritual experience and you learn a huge amount about yourself.We made landfall on the 3rd of April, when we sighted Fatu Hiva just as the sun set so we had to make our way around the island and into the anchorage in the dark, which meant we woke up to the sun rising over the mountains and showed us that were in the most beautiful anchorage I've ever seen (see the photos although they don't nearly do it justice!). We went in the morning to buy some much needed fresh fruit and quickly realised that our American dollars were going to be no good for French Polynesia and their Polynesian Francs! So we had to find something to trade as the guy who sold us two hanks of bananas, half a dozen grapefruit, half a dozen papayas and a small bag of limes wanted $40 dollars! We ended up giving him two bottles for rum that cost is $1.80 each in Ecuador for the fruit! Good old island economics! We are now down several bottles of rum and boxes of wine. We were able to trade two bottles of wine for some timber that we got from some locals and the use of their circular saw and managed to cut and fix two bits of timber together to go inside the boom and bolted it to the existing boom and we now have a very strong, working boom
Fatu Hiva Anchorage
! The things that you can do if your determined - fixing a boom on an island with a population of 1200 people!Just behind the village in our anchorage was a spectacular 200 ft waterfall with a beautiful plunge pool below, where we swam and chilled for an hour. We also took a boat to the bay to the south of where we were and walked back to our anchorage across the beautifully fertile mountain range that was about 16 km. We had some great views of the amazing island and also of the anchorage (see pics).
We're now in Hiva Oa, which is more developed than Fatu Hiva and has bars, restaurants and shops, luxury! We'll probably be here for another 5 days before heading off to the Tuamotu Archipelago, a group of atolls in between here and Tahiti and the other Society Islands.
Lots of Polynesian sunshine and love to you all.
