agility @ sea

Jer:

We had a crazy 30 hours getting here. Had a wonderful last night in Tauo (Wednesday) with friends from 3 other boats sharing an amazing lobster dinner prepared by Valentin and Gaston. The outdoor dining area was decorated with fresh palm fronds, orchids, with bowls of black pearls on the tables and jasmine flowers on our plates to place behind our ears. What an all-around wonderful experience. While I’m thinking about it, Gaston happens to hold the Guinness World Record for largest coconut crab every caught. I believe he said 8 kilos?

Sven and two other guys from Awloplast arrive Sunday to begin repairs on Agility Monday morning so we had to find the best weather window we could to get to Papeete on time. Big swells were forecast for the remainder of the week, but Thursday looked like the best departure time with slightly smaller swells and decent winds. Remember that we left Chile on 4/1 and haven’t been in any type of area that has reasonable supplies since then (fuel being the driving factor here). We left at 6:30 a.m. in torrential rains and were greeted by big seas within minutes.

Our total auto-pilot failure became official Wednesday afternoon after conversations with Garmin and lots of trouble shooting so we knew we were in for hand steering. For those of you that don’t sail, the auto-pilot on a boat is a very heavily relied upon system. They fail and people deal with it, but I think I can safely say that no one is ever particularly happy about it. It means that a pair of hands are lost in any type of work to be done. In addition, it’s physically and mentally demanding to steer. For example, I can’t do anything, but steer. I can’t take off my jacket, shoes, move too much or even think of anything besides steering (well, I can sing out loud to Abba and eat coke flavored gummies stuffed into my jacket pocket) or I’m suddenly off 40 degrees. Sometimes there aren’t any options so…

We leave, dumping rain, I leave the aft cabin door open so water is flooding into the cabin, Tim’s at the helm getting drenched, and I feel downright ill due to excessive fretting about the auto pilot throughout the night. Fortunately, within a few hours Tim somehow manages to set the sails at an angle where the boat sails itself and we lock the helm and don’t have to actively steer. We still took turns out at the helm getting completely drenched by waves breaking over the bow and testing out our full foul weather gear, but it was a lot easier. This worked off and on until about 10 p.m. when the wind shifted enough that we couldn’t get it to work. I was out for a couple of hours until 2:00 a.m when I could no longer see straight, Tim took over and was also loopy and we decided to see if we could heave-to. That went very well so we both went to sleep for 2 hours up in the salon while the boat bobbed around in the swells. I slept a few more hours, took over, Tim’s turn, and soon we could see Tahiti. Yay! Tim’s speed record surfing the swells was 17.4 and I got up to 16.4 so we are pleased with ourselves there.

We are anchored outside of town and will head into the marina tomorrow or Sunday. Lots of clean up to be done. There’s a Carrefour in town and lots of other stores so will do a ton of provisioning. For Boulder people, we haven’t been to a store since April that can hold a candle to Lolitas. I’m going to be completely overwhelmed. Believe it or not, we are finishing our last tin of Illy coffee that we bought in Chile hoping it would last until we arrived in Tahiti.

We appear to be anchored in the middle of an outrigger canoe race so I am maintaining a low profile this morning in case people are pissed off. I actually ducked when one of the supervising power boats came by.