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 the corners of the archipelago that we’ve missed the first time round! The lush green hills here are a nice contrast to Nuku Hiva, which got browner every day with the advance of the dry season.

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 suggesting light wind from the north (even better, downwind Pitufa needs much more than the predicted 8 knots). We were frustrated, but fortunately the trade wind decided to ignore both forecasts and started blowing steadily from the east with Pitufa rushing along closehauled with 6 knots. Today it’s still from the same directions, the skies are blue, the Pacific has got this incredible shade of dark indigo blue that it only seems to have here in the south and we can’t wait to get to the Gambier tomorrow!

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 to gain easting again quickly otherwise we have to coil our way through the atolls of the Tuamotu.

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 just see the mountainous silhouette of Fatu Hiva, the southernmost island of the Marquesas, disappearing on the horizon. Despite her weight problems Pitufa’s doing well closehauled and we’re making good progress in steady winds under sunny skies.

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 skies saved us from a potential heat stroke on the road. Our initial plan had been to hitch rides, but during our march north not a single car passed by–as soon as we turned back we were lucky though and a pick up came by and gave us a ride. The houses are smaller, the main road isn’t paved and only few people seem to own a car–apparently Ua Pou’s the poor little sister of Nuku Hiva… Today we prepared the boat for the passage south (took the dinghy on deck, flushed the outboard with freshwater, took the mobile solar panel off, baked bread, stored everything savely away etc.), because it seems there’s a favourable weather window during the next week to sail back down to the Gambier. Sailing along the island we got more spectacular views of the sheer cliffs and monoliths of Ua Pou, nevertheless we were happy to leave the island behind, because sailing on the western coast with little wind, but gusts howling down the mountains wasn’t an easy task. Now Pitufa’s stomping ahead slowly–instead of the predicted 12 knots beamreach, we’re facing 18 knots closehauled. Hopefully the wind will change when we get further off the island, to make the ride less bumpy. We haven’t had much luck fishing around the Marquesas, and when the lure went tight this evening we excitedly ran to see what we had caught and were quite shocked to see that a booby (our favourite seabirds) had caught the lure and was being dragged behind the boat underwater. What a horror. We quickly slowed down the boat, got the poor guy up and freed his beak from the hook. Af first he was just lying still, but then he started coughing up water and sat up. After a while he started flapping and we helped him back into the water–hopefully he’ll recover