Today alternated between reasonably pleasant motorsailing on long, straight courses, and frantic activity trying to find a safe anchorage and get anchors set. Life has its ups and downs. Last night after I sent the email out, I did an anchor check, and found that the boat was slowly dragging out of the bay when we were hit with "williwaw" gusts coming down the slopes of the surrounding mountains. The holding wasn't that great, with a thin layer of soft mud over a hardpan bottom. It was about 11:00 PM when I decided we had to reset, and got Karen up to drive while I picked up the hooks. We went up until the depth sounder showed us we were starting up on the shoal at the head of the bay, then set the two anchors at an angle of about 120 degrees, making the boat less likely to swing around twisting the anchor. That more than double the holding power. By then it was about midnight. Karen stayed up until 3, doing anchor watch and refining the sailing instructions and charts. She tells me we used the waypoint functions of the GPS in 2001, and she just refreshed her memory on it. I don't recall anything but plotting on paper (age related memory loss?), but this is working a lot better passing among the reefs.
By morning there was so little wind we couldn't sail better than 2 knots, so we started the motor and let it run slow, but within an hour I had picked it up to about 1/3 throttle, holding 4 knots, getting an occasional boost from a gust of wind in the sails. We had a couple of tense moments when we had to orient ourselves to accommodate missing markers, and I had to disassemble, dry, and reassemble the autopilot twice more. Water kept evaporating out from under the drive motor, condensing on the top case, and dripping on the circuit board. Karen suggested that I use some of the little silica gel packets I hoard from pill bottles, which was a good call. I baked a few, then tucked them in around the motor and circuit inside the case. It worked well the rest of the day. We'll see what tomorrow brings.
As we passed the entrance to Labasa we saw our friends boat, Stelite, anchored near the shore, about 2 miles off our track. Then we got a VHF radio call from Fay. She and Peter had seen us coming, so we got to talk for a few minutes, though that required that we slow the motor to an idle so we could hear the radio. Having the motor in the cockpit has a down side with the noise level, even though it's a pretty quiet outboard.
Once past Labasa we had a long run beam reaching in about 5 knots of wind, and were so tired of listening to the motor we shut it off and sailed for about 3 hours. We figured even at 2.5 knots we'd get to the selected anchoring spot before 5:00. Eventually we slowed below 2 knots, and after a while I started the motor again, but I'd let it go til the last minute. Hence the panic, when we reached the bay just after 5, and found in 3 tries that the whole bottom seems to be limestone and coral, with no holding we could trust the boat to. Then it was throttle up, and Karen drove while I plotted to get us around a huge fringing reef and into the next bay for another try. At 5:40 we tried to stop in the outer bay, but it was the same hard bottom. We had about 20 more minutes of light, and then it was going to get VERY sketchy, driving around in the dark with reefs on all sides. Far up the bay we found a hump of 15 feet depth with 25 feet on the inner side. It's unlikely that the anchors will drag up a slope like that, so we put 2 down and she held on the first set. By the time we had sails tied up we seriously needed the anchor light, as I could hear one of the local boats coming down the shoreline. I got a flashlite on deck in time to hear them call greetings as they whistled past on the outside and headed out to sea running totally dark. These guys must have outstanding night vision.
During the midday, while the running was easy, and the autopilot would steer, we sat on the cabin top or forward nets and watched the dramatic, jagged line of the mountains pass, looking at the mottled colors of brown, dry grass on the sunny SW slopes, the dark green of trees where it was too steep to harvest them for timber, and the light green of new growth on the cooler, more shaded NE slopes. Most of the easily accessed trees have been cut for boards, plywood, and now chips for making paper pulp. There are patches of trees planted in rows as a timber crop for 20 years in the future. That was a surprise, as few tropical islanders think even 2 weeks ahead, let alone 20 years. Houses were scattered along the way, usually in groups of a half dozen in tiny villages, almost always right down at the water, behind the first row of trees and palms that border the beaches. Small boats were pulled up on the beach or moored in the shallows, usually behind a bit of reef to give protection from waves. Children and adults alike waved and signaled as we sailed past.
Now it's 10 at night, and calm. The sea breeze that kicked up at dusk has died down to a whisper, and the sounds are the chuckle of little wavelets on the hull, the faint chirp of insects from the island, and the odd bird calling. It's almost cloudless, so the sky is studded with stars and planets, and no moon in sight.
I've about finished my "homework", getting ready for a complex zigzag thru the reefs to Tilangatha Pass tomorrow. That's 22 miles from here, and will take most of the daylight. We hear the anchoring is good there, but we'd rather have time for a "plan B" from here on. Then, Sunday morning if the weather is acceptable we hop out to the ocean, around the last piece of the Great Ocean Reef, and enter the Nukundamu Pass to reach Thawaro. My Cmap program is corrupted, and won't let me print the screen on large scale charts. I can't even open them directly, but can open a small scale, and then alternately move and magnify to get what I need to see. I devised a method for getting paper copies tonight, though. Got the screen I wanted, then took a picture of the screen with the old digital camera. Oddly enough, when I plug the camera in to the USB port, the laptop tells me there are no files in the camera. But our printer has a card reader, so I put the card in the printer, and print the pictures of the charts. Do you see a pattern here? In order to get the result from one piece of high tech nav gear, I had to use two others to work around a glitch in the first one. There's a reason I don't really trust all this stuff. I have at least a limited ability to help the electro-mechanical autopilot limp home. Fixing software is out of my league....so far. It seems that if you want to keep sailing now, you have to be able to do EVERYTHING. We aren't ready to quit yet, Monday notwithstanding, so I guess the schooling continues!
By the way, I mentioned last week that Louis and the crew on S/V Elysium had to abandon her and be rescued. The report wasn't quite right, as is often the case on first reports along the coconut telegraph. They had reported trouble to us on the Rag of the Air when the prop shaft, which they'd had re-trued in Suva came loose and backed out of the shaft log until it hit the rudder, allowing the engine room to flood. The coupling bolts hadn't been safety wired by the mechanic, and Louis failed to inspect it. Small error, but BAD. Louis went in the water and pushed the shaft back into the log, they locked it in with couple of clamps, and went to the nearest island, Fortuna, in the Vanuatu group, to anchor and improve the repair. Anchorage there is not very good, and while there they were caught in the dark by the frontal system I mentioned, with a couple hours of winds to 50 knots. Terrible luck. With no motor, and little searoom, they were driven up on the reef where the boat broke up. They spent a couple hours in the water, but worked their way up on the shallow part of the reef after the wind dropped and went ashore to be cared for by the local villagers. Cuts, bruises, and emotional trauma, but they all survived. The locals were out the next day, carrying salvaged gear off the reef to the beach for Louis. He said that 2 hours after daybreak, six of them came walking down the reef barefoot carrying the diesel engine. Now THAT is TOUGH. Some of the nearby yachts are trying to arrange to have the salvaged gear brought to Port Vila, where it can be sold to give Louis a little something to restart his life with.
So that's the news from the Pacific Paradise. It ain't all roses, but it beats watching TV.
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Ted
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