Pitufa.at

We had good sailing today, finally making miles towards the destination. On this trip material fatigue has started showing. Apart from the crack in the boom yesterday we had smaller things breaking. A shackle that holds down the running backstay snapped, today the sheet of the foresail ripped–nothing spectacular and all things that were quickly repaired, but it shows how hard the past few months… Continue reading »

I was catching up with sleep this morning when a shout had me stumble up on deck in record time: ‘The main boom’s broken!’ We quickly got the sail down and then Christian showed me a long vertical crack in the boom, just above the place where we had repaired it in Panama with an aluminium plate and rivets. While I still desperately checked on… Continue reading »

This morning we set sail again and this time our course on the chartplotter is set to Tahiti (620 nm as the Tropic Bird flies). We started out with wind still from the East, so for the first time on this trip East we’re tacking up and down which is quite frustrating. During the first 5 hours we sailed 31 nm to the NE, but… Continue reading »

This rough and nasty leg of our passage ended quite pleasantly today when the wind finally shifted north and we reached Rarotonga at 3 in the afternoon with light winds. Putting a med mooring (bow anchor and stern line ashore) worked nicely, but the northerly waves make it into Avatiu Harbour, so we’ll spend another night in passage mode (mattress on the floor and sofa… Continue reading »

Each time we set out on a nice looking weather window it turns out that the wind is blowing much harder than predicted and also more easterly. Pitufa’s stomping bravely into the 20 and more knots of wind and lumpy seas, but we are pushed too far south so we have to make a few extra miles and a countercurrent of about 1 knot doesn’t… Continue reading »

We set out from Palmerston this morning into squally weather with strong winds and lumpy seas, caught a tuna within the first hour and did some extreme-fish-filetting (maybe a new discipline for the olympics?) We all got slightly seasick, so it seems it’s not the sailing that makes us seasick, but the breaks in between. Now I understand the motivation for these non-stop-round-the-world events.

We were racing all day long yesterday averaging 6 knots, but we still didn’t get to Palmerston before midnight. Fortunately a boat we know from the Marquesas and the radio net gave us the exact coordinates of the mooring here, so we managed to pick up a buoy in the dark.

Surprisingly enough the dreaded journey eastwards turns out to be more pleasant than the passage in the ‘right’ direction two months ago. Instead of the sickening rolling motion that we were used to downwind, Pitufa is now ploughing along in fortunately light winds (15 knots from the SSE) doing steadily 60 degrees on the wind. We’re not heeling too much and the boat seems calmer… Continue reading »

Early this morning we reached Beveridge Reef with the last dying breeze. Just in front of the pass two whales surfaced just next to the boat, spouted a few times and disappeared again with a last wave of the gigantic tail fin. We have used this welcome break in the passage to wash some things that got salty underway, air out towels and clothes, go… Continue reading »

The wind has finally shifted to the north, but we were pushed too far south already to reach Beveridge Reef before dusk, so we’ve slowed down to get there tomorrow morning. Entering an uncharted submerged atoll at night didn’t seem very tempting, despite the fact that we have our old GPS tracks to follow.

Yesterday it was blowing hard from the Southeast again, we set the windvane to ‘go-as-hard-as-you-can’ and Wayne Vaney sailed Pitufa straight towards Niue. When we contemplated the evening grib, we found that he was probably right: there’s a phase with easterly winds coming up–no good beating into that. Instead we decided to take a break in Niue and wait for the next clocking of the… Continue reading »