We have a shipment arriving in Honiara, the capital of the Solomons, mid May (new solar panels, a new anchor chain, etc. coming on a container ship), so we should slowly make our way southeast towards Honiara before the trade winds set in. No problem, we thought, even though there’s not much wind we’ll just do short hops with little puffs of wind, it’s only about 180nm altogether from Noro down to Honiara.
So far we’ve had basically no wind and ended up motoring short hops. Yesterday there was finally a northeasterly breeze predicted from early in the morning, lasting until noon and then calm weather. Therefore we made a plan to have an early start from northern Rendova island, sail 30 nm down to a chain of little motu on an extended reef and anchor there rather exposed in the predicted calm weather.
Great plan, except that the promised NE breeze never arrived and we ended up motoring 30 nm with the main flapping uselessly on the mast. Just as we were approaching the anchorage (a narrow shelf with a shallow reef behind it and a steep drop-off towards the lagoon, like always here), the clouds that had been building, reached us as a squall with easterly winds, so we were bouncing on a lee shore with a shallow bank right behind our stern. We had anchored in 5 m and were swinging into an area with 3 m and just 25 m of chain down. Things then calmed down, but at 5 in the morning we were woken up by a squall from the south, 20 knots and Pitufa now had 18 m under the keel–not exactly an ideal scope with 25 m of chain, so Christian quickly let down more chain.
We waited for dawn to be able to ride the southerly wind of the squall to the next anchorage, but of course the wind died down as soon as we had enough light to manoeuvre between the reefs. Now it’s raining and we’re getting some work done (Christian programming and I’ve been wiping mould from furniture), ready to use the next squall with hopefully a useable wind direction to make some miles SE. Annoying weather.
