2nd August

15 04.691 S

146 50.444 W



Weather; sunny day wild night, wind 5-25 knots, waves 1 foot to 3.5 meters



Well that was a 24 hour period to live through and tell the tale! All day long the sky stayed a fabulous clear, cloud free, blue, the waves were low and of no consequence, the wind was also on the low side sitting mostly around 8 knots. We quite happily sailed along, not reaching any dizzy heights and mostly only doing a 4.5- 5 knot average speed, not great, but we were moving forward. Cooking and drinking hot drinks was no problem and we aren't really in too much of a hurry to have been bothered by the slower progress. Having said that Gerry of course fiddled and tweaked the sails, jumping up every couple of minutes to let out another inch or to reef in a foot or two. The sails took turns in going out and coming back in according to where the wind moved to at any particular second, the only one that remained reasonably constant was the main but even that got its share of movement, out an inch and back an inch, on occasions. Of course the wind played the game of going from t
he bow to the stern, through all stages in between and then did the reverse, it kept Gerry occupied and prevented him from falling asleep in the chair! The sun set was obscured by clouds which had begun to gather at about 5.30 pm and from that point onwards things got more and more wild by the hour. The wind began to pick up and come at us mostly from the beam or just forward or aft of it, so we had the jib poled out and the staysail flying and needing adjusting frequently. The wind speed increased to up to 25 knots and then settled, if that is the right word for it, at around 19 knots, we hurtled along doing up to 9.2 knots but sat mostly around 8.4 knots for a good long period of hanging on whilst being bounced around, heeling over so far that our gun whales were in the water a fair bit. Of course all of this was happening in the pitch black of night as we were negotiating our way through the beginning of the Tuamotus Atolls. There are lots of these atolls spread over a fa
irly big area, most of them are uninhabited and not very many of them have warning lights or lighthouses, you have to be very careful to avoid running into one in the dark! Our sleep was more disrupted than usual due to the constant rocking and motion of the boat, it's a good job that we had more or less caught up before the night happened. We had also luckily closed up the entire cockpit curtained area as waves were crashing into the side of the boat and hitting the windows so we would definitely have gotten soaked if we had left them open. By 4am we needed to run the genset to boost our batteries as the auto pilot continues to be a big consumer of the power we had stored during the daylight solar charging, not that we are complaining, George is doing a marvellous job! Anyway Gerry went to start the gen set up and it did its "start, splutter and die" thing. The filter got changed out (again) but this time the gen set just wouldn't start up again, we need to blow the fuel li
nes through as there is obviously still more dirt in the fuel despite our having run it all through the Baha filter and blowing out the lines on more than one occasion Ð what really need to happen is a commercial fuel polishing with the tanks being emptied and cleaned before returning the cleaned fuel to them, as well as blowing the line through to make sure that there is no residual debris but of course this isn't a happening thing when you are bowling along at 8 knots in rough seas and the closest commercial polisher is at our destination! So now we are without the gen set and the water maker until we get to Tahiti, thank goodness the main engine still runs though we are hard pressed to understand how that is possible as it uses the same fuel line as the gen set, it's a mystery but we aren't questioning it until we arrive in Tahiti. So given no option, we ran the engine to charge the batteries sufficiently to last until the sun came up this morning and our solar panels b
egan producing power. I have to say that the wind generator was going at a million miles an hour but it can't keep up with the demand that the running gear puts on the batteries overnight unfortunately.

Oh we did put the fishing stick in the water during the day, whilst it was calm but sadly not a single nibble was had. With the sun now well up in the sky, the wind has settled down a little to 17 knots but we are still racing along and it's too dangerous to even think about making coffee so our brains are screaming at the moment. Hopefully thing will calm down a little and we will get a better ride as the day progresses.

I'll let you know tomorrow.