For days we’ve had the wind howling over the boat with around 30 knots, frequent squalls and freaky changes of weather. Black clouds rush in, rain whips horizontally along, 5 minutes later blue skies follow and so on… Trips ashore become adventurous, just going to get a baguette in the morning requires putting on full foul weather gear and we’re both sneezing and sniffling all the time. We can’t wait to get away, but the last front was too violent for us to venture out (6m high waves) and if we arrived in our next destinations in such conditions we wouldn’t be able to enter the lagoon anyway. We’d like stop in the Tuamotus on the way to the Marquesas. The Tuamotus are a chain of tiny atolls that stretch out from here to Tahiti, but most motus are just a ring of coral with some palmtrees on and only one or two channels into the lagoon. Getting the timing right to enter the lagoon is tricky even in calm conditions, but when the wind has been blowing hard for a few days the high waves fill up the lagoon and the current in the channel can get too strong for a sailing boat to enter.
The weather forecast predicts the end of the stormy weather for tomorrow, but unfortunately then the wind will drop below 10 knots for several days–not enough to carry Pitufa away under sails. We’ll have to wait for the next southerly winds from the south and hope that it won’t be a strong as the last one.
