Well, when "they" say the tide tables are right be cautious in the passes of the atolls. Tango left Rangiroa this morning following the published info that slack water was usually 30 min after the tide change. We watched another sailboat come in-bound. Saw some waves, totally misjudging the conditions. Then "Holy COW YIPPIE Victory AT SeA!" We ended up in the ebb with it hitting incoming ocean swells; the thing that we watched from the beach. Standing waves of about 10ft, lots of current, not a pleasant journey out. Tango is a strong capable boat and we made it through with a couple of full-on bow-submerging crashes, a couple of waves over the stern, one flooding my backup tablet off the seat on to the deck, another bow submerging wave stripping the forward head's solar ventilator out of it's mounting hole and letting oh.... LOTS of water in. We were out of the torrent in about 10 minutes and glad to be in the ocean safely. We followed the tide tables, looked first but couldn't see how bad it was... and we made it with only a bunch of excitement.

We are now pleasantly sailing around the north end of Rangiroa and "reaching" for the remaining 175 miles to Tahiti. Our expected arrival is Sunday morning (it is Friday afternoon right now. We have about 10-15ks of wind from the East and we are currently in the "lee" of Rangiroa for another couple of hours. Weather is good for our transit so it should be unremarkable. Right now we don't know where we will be tying up or mooring or anchoring Tango. Our "agents" didn't bother to arrange a slip for us and everything is either full or first come first served. (Grrrrrrr.....grrrrr....). We made our arrangements in Dec and Jan and thought this was all taken care of...back to grrrr....

Susan Banas will meet us in Tahiti and Paul/Susan and Janet/John will have a land vacation for a week. After the Banas's fly home to Oregon we have a "not-insignificant" list of projects that need attention. We are hoping for about 3 weeks of dock time but we'll figure that out starting Sunday.

Rangiroa is GREAT. I'd love to spend a couple of weeks there getting to explore more of the atoll and learning about living there. Getting food was easy. Getting any sort of boat stuff would have been really hard (parts, fuel, etc.). But then... it is an atoll. We'll be back too.