Pitufa.at

I know it must sound ridiculous, but at the moment we’re faced with more decisions than a stressed out stock broker. We were trying to find a weather window for our next destination Makemo which lies just 60 miles northeast of here (or 75 to the other pass, or 100 going round the western side). We spent hours pondering different options looking at grib files and tide tables, but no matter how we turned it, wind direction (shifting), wind speed (first too rough then dying on us), arrival time (during daytime) and slack water for both passes just never worked out. We also didn’t like the fact that the French weather forecast mentioned grains (squalls) ‘debordant’–we had to look that up and neither ‘brimming over’ nor ‘bursting with’ sounded promising in combination with weather… We were not too keen on venturing out into confused seas (it’s been blowing for a while and the wind’s been shifting now), squally weather and the high chance of running out of wind along the way being tossed around in the still rough sea. Instead we decided to just quickly sail across the lagoon to sit out the wind shift to the south in a protected anchorage. Nice theory, but in the end we got all the stuff we had thought to avoid postponing the passage, just on a smaller scale within the lagoon. Mid distance a series of squalls with about 30 knots got us, all bearing points disappeared in a wall of rain, stopping was no option as we would have been blown off our safe GPS track, so we had to continue cautiously with the helmswoman wishing she was wearing diving goggles to see the chart plotter just in front of her. In the end we were lucky though, the wind turned south earlier than predicted, so we’re finally cosy in one of our favourite spots, Makemo will have to wait a few more days