Looking into the wind, I can see faint orange lights. A few rain drops were falling, but now they're gone. The brilliant moon illuminating the ocean, sky, and clouds in a silvery white light is momentarily blocked by a towering thunder head lumbering silently past. I am drinking a freshly brewed mug of Pete's coffee. A batch thick and black enough to make my dad proud. It seems to me to be the most peculiar place to be. Parked on the side of the worlds widest highway.

On the ocean you can pretty much just pull over and park anywhere. Manjula woke me at about 1:30 AM to let me know we had arrived at our way point. We had marked our chart with a position about 10 miles off of an island which lay just east of Raroia. We didn't want to risk going any closer to the dangerous low lying reefs of the Tuamotu islands at night. The wind had been increasing all night on both of our watches and with it the seas had become fairly choppy. We reduced the amount of sail we had up trying to slow down, but with the amount and angle of the wind, Endless Summer was in a mood to go fast. So we arrived a bit early and didn't want to continue the last 16 miles to the reef pass until daylight.

So we decided to heave to. Heaving to is a sailing technique that allows the boat to point into the wind and tend to herself. Each boat does it differently. For Endless Summer we take in the head sail, and center the main sail and then just point her into the wind. She will just stay there sliding slowly sideways at about 1 knot per hour. Parked.

It is fairly windy, but hove to, Endless Summer is very comfortable. I am sitting in the cockpit, "the back porch", in a directors chair just watching the ocean and clouds drinking coffee and waiting for daylight. Not something you do every night, but I recommend it once in a while.

In the morning we will negotiate our first reef pass. Manjula will again stand on the cabin top pointing the way through the deeper water as we try to avoid driving onto anything hard and pointy. When we arrive at the pass we will be looking for signs that the tide has stopped flowing out. That is our cue that the current will be slacking and we can enter the lagoon of our first Tuamotu atoll. Roroia.