Position: 08 23 528S, 136 53 619W, Boat Speed 7kts, Course 236T, Wind E17-20, Seas 3ft, Temperature 83, Humidity 70%, Barometer 1012 rising, Skies clear w/building squall clouds.

We're getting close. Maybe too close?

Our mantra during this whole passage has been go, go, go. But now, as we close in on our destination, it's whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down. This is easy to do physically, but rather hard to do emotionally when you've been in the mind set of "fast passage". On top of that, our goal is now within reach and we can smell the barn, as they say.

At the moment, we are less than 130 miles from our destination, the island of Hiva Oa. We're almost there! Yet as I mentioned in a previous post, it is preferable to arrive in the day light, which we can do if we slow down a little. It may be that Mother Nature has slowing us down in her plans for today, but the forecast says that's not the case. We expect continued wind speeds in the 15-20 knot range. If we deploy our sails in a way that takes full advantage of those wind speeds, we can easily crank out this last 130 miles. But. That means we probably arrive tomorrow in the early morning hours of darkness. It would be much better to arrive in the early morning hours of lightness. (Lightness - that's a valid word, right?)

Yesterday our reading materials changed dramatically. We've gone from recreational reading to all business. Guide-book business. As in books about the Marquesas designed to provide us more detailed information about where the heck it is we are about to land. We've traveled 2,600 miles to get here, it's time we begin digging out some details.

One of the details we have begun to dig out is a better understanding of the port where we are about to make landfall. It's called Autona, the port of entry on the island of Hiva Oa and one of the two ports of entry in all of the Marquesas. The essential detail we are discovering about Autona is that it is a small, tight anchorage. Given the number of sailboats that are about to converge on this place, we can imagine that it is about to get much, much tighter. Especially if a number of these boats are double-wides like Double Diamond. Given that essential detail - tight anchorage - it's becoming all that much more important that we arrive in daylight.

After our middle-of-the-night, double-reef episode night before last, it was very tempting yesterday to unfurl everything when wind speeds finally dropped down into the range of "more reasonable". Tempting? Let me rephrase that. It was agonizingly painful yesterday to not unleash more canvas and go faster. That same theme will repeat itself today. GO SLOW. Arrrgh. At least Erlin seems to share my pain. He's spent too many years racing and purposefully going slow is not how either of us is wired.

We are also reading our guidebooks to work on piecing together an island touring itinerary, something we've put off until now. It didn't make sense to spend a lot of time figuring out an itinerary when we were so unsure of our arrival date. A typical planning number for this passage is 24 days and we discovered yesterday that one well-respected guide (Charlie's Charts) suggests 27 days. It looks like we're doing it in 18. Cassie's plane is scheduled to depart the island of Nuku Hiva on April 27th. We can now make some definitive plans on where to go and what to see in the time we have available before her flight.

So why 18 days for us and slower for others? Good question. Some might say "catamaran" They're just flat-out faster than monohulls, right? Huh? The Lagoonebago? Hmmm, maybe, but I'm not buying that catamaran is the essence of the speed equation. There is a monohull out here, Cherokee Rose, that is setting the same if not faster pace than us and having seen her on the race course in Banderas Bay a few weeks back, I know that she is a fast boat and well-sailed. Maybe we're just good sailors? Ha! In my opinion, we're one bad gybe away from being total goofballs. (Erlin sez speak for myself).

My answer? We had wind. And it's not because we're highly skilled meteorologists who can pick a good route. No, it's Mother Nature. She looked down at all the boats and sprinkled her fairly dust on us. "This one" she said. "This one gets wind". Seriously. There were boats 50 miles to the west of us and 100 miles behind us who had no wind while we were getting blown out of the ocean. I will give us a pat on the back for timing our departure to coincide with a good weather pattern, allowing us to sail to the trade winds in fairly short order. Other than that I attribute our fast(ish) passage to good luck in the wind department.

And now we're trying to slow down. Go figure.