Exit Clearance, DON'T leave home without it
20 October 2012 | Okoe Bay, Hawaii
Scott/overcast for three days now
Ahoy Sailors,
We are now back in the USA, the big island and it feels good to be at anchor vs. racing up from Fanning. Here's Scott's story about why we're back a month earlier than we anticipated:
Although the US does not require an exit paper and in the past we have sailed to Kiribati without one, the officials on Christmas island who oversee Fanning by SSB are JERKS and requested the paper or we couldn't stay.
So our options were to leave immediately or pay an insane $900 fine (bribe). We did not want to pay as it would send the wrong message that Americans were either too rich or too easy and should be fleeced.
Unfortunately the next boat in, "Bravo", did pay up because they had prearranged to pick up crew at Christmas.
After being kicked out of Fanning and having used up our one week grace period to repair a ripped seam and install a new 4th reef in our main sail, it was time to check the weather fax and set sail for Hawaii.
Now Hawaii is 940 Nmi away, as the bird fly's but because it is almost directly upwind in the NE trade winds, the question is how best to sail there?
In light of the fact that we were very close to the equator at just
less than 4 degrees north, my solution was to take advantage of the generally lighter wind and often southeast shifts to try to get all of my "easting" before hitting the strong NE trades at about 7 deg. north.
So off we sailed around the south end of Fanning and struck a
starboard tack course just south of east for a day and half, which
meant we sailed 300 Nmi without getting any closer to Hawaii. This
plan as crazy as it sounds worked out perfectly as the winds slowly
shifted from SE thru E to NE and our course described a huge arc
finally pointing directly at the big island and all of this without a sail change or tacking Celestial.
Crossing the ITCZ (inter-tropical convergence zone) is almost always a challenge of light shifty wind or huge squally thunderstorms accompanied with very heavy wind.
We were blessed and had only a little of that to deal with. Soon we
were reducing sail as we crossed 8 deg. north and really felt the
teeth of the NE trades. Our daily average of 160 Nmi quickly jumped to 180 as we reduced sail down to our new 4th reef and our #3 jib.On the next day the wind increased to 25 knts and we spent 2 nights hard on the wind with only the jib. Sailing at 8-9 knts Celestial covered an amazing 197 Nmi upwind against the current.
We were throwing spray all the way over the boat and taking water down both rails as we blew thru the waves at 9 knts. Our 4th reef, that we just sewed on in Fanning, was perfect when the wind was closer to 20 knts and we just kept on blasting away. Donna was as always a super sailor, she is always ready to help, stand watch, reef sails, navigate, and put up with her speed crazed Captain. We raced past South Cape and into the calm waters of the Kona coast a 02:00 on 10/18/12 just 6 days 14hr and 1,148 Nmi after leaving Fanning Atoll.
In a calm anchorage after our passage,
Capt. Scott
Now my turn to tell you a bit about Fanning. We loved returning to the place we were at in 1989, seeing a house we visited, and a rusty barge and wreck still in the same places. We enjoyed Tyrone, a shipping agent, Bruno, a frenchman who offered a bed and breakfast, Ruby and Judas who baked bread especially for us and more locals.
I purposely brought papers from our old trip that I wanted to put on the computer so I had these memories: 1989: After 3 weeks on Palmyra, we sailed another 250 miles to Fanning Island where 800 I-Kiribati live. We were the only visiting yacht for 2 weeks and the resident welcomed us into their homes and we learned a lot about their lives. We took a ride on a back of a flatbed tractor to an old cable house that now housed a school. I recorded a recipe for 6 loaves of Fanning Bread (Takatic) by Terenga girl - Teaopiti. We learned hello/Mauri, thank you, Korrapa and goodbye, sabu (sp?) and cong cong for delicious!
The only drawback was Copra Beetles. They are ΒΌ" long, black with a hard shell, and they don't bite but the almost took over the boat in our drawers and lining our hatch screens while we were anchored too close to a drying coconut shed. Luckily they didn't reproduce so that by the time we reached Bora Bora, 1300 miles and 10 days later, they were all dead and/or gone.
Now in 2012 there are 2000 I-Kiribati living there but in some ways, no better off. It took over a week to find someone making bread because the island was running out of flour. They use US and Australian dollars interchangeably and the last Kiribati coin was from 1989 so we bought one of those for our collection. They no longer export copra/dried coconut, they were exporting seaweed but that failed so they mainly live on fish, rice, breadfruit, papayas and bananas with little to spare for gringos willing to pay. Luckily we got some locals to bring us some lobster and we paid $10 each for them!! YUMMMM. We paid $20 for 4 papaya and one pumpkin and $6 for 6 medium onions but we were happy to have some fresh items.
Scott pondered what they could do to improve the island and spoke to a few guys about his ideas. Unfortunately their thought was to charge us $900 because we didn't have clearance papers from the US. We were the 4th boat out of 5 who didn't have them so we had to leave after 1 week when we had planned to stay 4 weeks. If it had been $200 we would have paid it, but not $900. We happily had already paid the $70 to their officials to check us in and for anchoring fees. Our friends who had stopped in 2008 and 2006 didn't know about this charge so I will be checking into it and letting all the sailing magazines and yacht clubs know of this unfortunate event. We had hoped to also visit Christmas Island but that is also Kiribati so that was out of the question. Instead we headed back to Hawaii while it was still the hurricane season, not our first choice.
Already the weather is overcast and low winds day after day instead of the beautiful sunshine of Fanning but we don't miss the strong currents or heavy winds that were down their way also.
We're excited to visit the big island. We were last here by boat in 1989 as well. It was our first landfall after 17 days at sea with Blue Jay, our J36.