We left Raiatea on June 14th, sailed 4.5 days to get to Palmerston Atoll in the Cook Islands. It was not an easy sail but not horrible either. We arrived on Saturday afternoon, but they would not clear us in until Monday. Sunday was a beautiful day, but we were boat bound. We are sailing with 2 other boat buddies now: Daryl, a solo sailor on Vimy, and Tony & Margaret on Joalea. They are all from Canada and lots of fun. We had them over for dinner Saturday night and had dinner on Joalea Sunday night.
Unfortunately, on Monday, the wind changed and we were then backed up to a reef and the mooring balls were not very good. In fact they were in horrible condition. Joalea had broken off their mooring and had to anchor and then wrapped around the rocky bottom. Our mooring looked so bad, we had them put out an extra anchor, but when the wind shifted, the anchor line wrapped around the mooring line and the balls were banging on the hull. Vimy thought his mooring was dragging Monday morning. So we all made a quick exit. Well, not so quick. Joalea took 30 minutes to get off the rocks. We took 30 minutes to get untangled from the anchor and mooring line. Then Vimy's main sale got stuck, so Tony and Tony went over by dingy to help put Daryl up the mast to fix the problem.
We were so excited about meeting the people there and seeing the beautiful island.
(See Photos) Palmerston is an atoll in the Cook Islands, and is approximately 5 by 7 miles in size. There are only ~40 people living there and it is one of the most remote and isolated communities in the world. A host family "adopts" you and feeds you the whole time you are there, in exchange for supplies from your boat. The supply ship only stops there every 3 months and they really depend on sailors to bring them things. We had already been "adopted" by 3 different host families and they all seemed so nice. I had a ton of stuff including school supplies, fishing gear, etc. to give them and was in tears that we had to leave so quickly and I did not get to give them anything. Not to mention, we still had not fully recovered from the 4.5 day sail and I had no food precooked for the passage.
But, we made it another 3 days to get to Niue and arrived June 23rd. It was an easy sail the first day, so I cooked pasta and made a big cabbage salad. The next 2 days were really rough with 25 knots wind and 10-12 foot seas. But, thankfully, we did not hit any storms, so all was well.
More Later - G&T