Pitufa.at

We reached the Gambier islands yesterday morning, exactly 3 months after we left here for the Marquesas to escape the cold southern-hemisphere winter. After 8 days of passage the calm anchorage off Rikitea is pure pleasure (despite a cold front that’s responsible for grey and rainy weather…). Anyway, it’s spring here, so soon the skies will clear again and we’ll be able to start exploring… Continue reading »

Yesterday we were stuck under thick clouds with everchanging wind directions, gusts, rain and very annoying conditions. In the evening the wind was suddenly blowing hard from the south, so we even decided to motorsail for a while. The weather forecasts didn’t look good: the French forecast predicted strong wind from the southeast (great, that’s where we wanted to go), the grib files contradicted completely… Continue reading »

After 2 days with nice sailing conditions, we’re now back to squally, annoying weather. 200 miles to go.

Last night was really terrible. We passed through so many squalls, about 1 every hour, which slowed down our progress substantially. Not only was the permanent reefing/unreefing tedious, but also the fact that inbetween the squalls the wind was very light and from the wrong direction was frustrating. We lost many of the eastward miles we previosly had fought for so hard. Now we have… Continue reading »

This morning we were lucky and caught a medium-sized yellow-fin tuna. So we had ceviche for lunch and sashimi for dinner Leeloo had sashimi twice. We are making good progress, only in the afternoon, when we entered an area with fluky, light winds and some small squalls, our speed dropped to 3 kn.

When we set off yesterday we still hadn’t decided whether we’d stop on the way in Tahuata or Fatu Hiva again, but the wind made the decision for us: 20 to 25 knots from the east (instead of 12 from the northeast…) made it impossible to reach the southern islands of the Marquesas on our tack, so we’re heading straight to the Gambier. We can… Continue reading »

Yesterday we explored Ua Pou a bit: we walked up from ‘our’ bay on a little path to the coastal road and then for two hours north, because we wanted to get a view of the gigantic stone spires the island is famous for. Unfortunately it was a bit cloudy, so the highest peaks were hiding from us, but on the other hand the overcast… Continue reading »

This morning we got our two anchors up (what a muddy mess) and left the big and busy island Nuku Hiva. We had a pleasant sail southwards in light winds and calm seas down to the little island Ua Pou. We’re the only boat anchored on the western side in the bay of Vaiehu. All around us the waves are thundering against the cliffs, but… Continue reading »

Christian’s been worrying about a throat ache for a while, as there’s no specialist in Nuku Hiva available, we decided to fly to Tahiti to see a doctor there. We left on Monday, leaving Leeloo in charge of Pitufa and our friendly neighbours on SY Kril in charge of Leeloo. We were really lucky, as other cruiser friends (Fabio and Lisa on Amandla) had just… Continue reading »

Yesterday we hitchhiked from Taipivai over the mountains to the maintown Taiohae, because we still had some errants to run there and simply couldn’t be bothered to sail to the uncomfortable bay of Taiohae where we would have had to set a stern anchor again, etc. Instead we took the dinghy along the river to the village of Taipivai early in the morning, walked a… Continue reading »

Yesterday we left Hakatea to sail to Controleur Bay at the southeastern end of Nuku Hiva. What looked like a short distance on the chart (just 8 nm) turned into half a day of beating into the easterly trade wind that gets accelarated to about 20 to 25 knots along the coast with Pitufa stomping into short, choppy seas. After four hours and several tacks… Continue reading »