September 7, 2009

Anchor Down in New Caledonia
Yesterday after I got my last email sent, we evaluated things and were leaning toward slowing down so we would arrive at Havannah Pass for a Tuesday entrance. But then the wind eased enough to allow the sea to settle into long, smooth rollers. There was plenty of power still in the breeze, and it backed just enough to let us put on a little bit of jib and get the boat moving. We decided to push a bit and see if we could get in on Monday. We started averaging better than 6 knots, with the accompanying hiss and splatter of passing water, and the occasional boat shuddering crash as we passed through an out of sequence wave.
In the afternoon we passed through several clusters of sailboats racing from New Cal to Port Vila. They had the wind behind the beam, and were flying all plain sail. All unoccupied crew perched along the weather side rail, to help make the boats stand up to the wind. These were fairly high dollar, high tech vessels, and they were making pretty good time, paying for it with a pretty low comfort factor. They were wearing mighty nice wet weather suits, too. I saw the last of the fleet pass northbound just as the sun set.
With all that boat traffic as a reminder, we kept a good watch all night, but the sailing was relatively easy compared to the first day, and the wind continued to back until we were on a beam reach by midnight. The moon lit up the sea nicely, and the visibility was a comfort at 1:00 AM as we passed within 2 miles of Lifou Island lighthouse, 80 miles north of Havannah Pass.
With the dawn came showers of misty rain, with very light, shifty wind while it rained. But the showers were of short duration, and between them the wind filled in strong from the east, pushing up a big but fairly smooth sea. We were pleasantly surprised to be able to average almost 8 knots all morning, arriving at the pass entrance just before noon. It's a good thing that our friend Teddy from the boat Alice Colleen had warned us about the state of the water in the pass if the tidal current was against the wind. Even forewarned, it was hard to make ourselves sail into the seething, heaving pass. We were surprised at how far into the channel the big breaking waves persisted. Karen steered, surfing town the wave faces for a half hour while I ran around looking for markers through the rain, and plotted our position every few minutes, since we couldn't actually hold a course more than just a general direction.
By the time we cleared the rough water, it was clear that we couldn't even get close to making it around the end of the island to Noumea before dark. A friend who comes here regularly had told us about a conveniently placed small harbor where we could make a stop for the night, and though there was some anxiety when the channel markers weren't where our chart showed them, we did find it, and by a bit after 3:00 PM were anchored. We had spent a day in Port Vila removing, restitching, and refastening the forward nets on Sequester, but age and the extraordinary workout of this passage has done for the port side. The explosive force of hitting the big, irregular waves tore the net fabric along most of the outer side. I'll have to decide what to do about that while we're here, before we leave for NZ. But the project for tomorrow is just to get around the island to Noumea and get cleared in. Should be a fairly easy day, which is just as well. Ted