Update 14 -- Wallis Island

Orca Update 14

Hello from Wallis Island! We've covered nearly 1,500 nm since the last update, so we've got a few stories.

We left Raiatea with 5 days left on the visas, and scampered through the pass at Bora Bora just before nightfall. Ghosting into a pretty anchorage just behind a shadowy motu at dusk we found the water to be of reasonable anchoring depth and dropped the hook to enjoy the last of the sky's colors. Morning broke the spell, showing 100's of hotels, resorts, condos and bungalows littering the shorelines. Hourly flights from Tahiti roared overhead, and high-speed transports zipped through the lagoon delivering people to and from the airport. Rental jet-ski's buzzed like hornets, and tour boats rumbled by with running commentary oozing from their PA systems.

In protest we hung our damp salty underwear out to dry in the view-shed of a few dozen Ritz-Carlton executive suites.

Paperwork and shopping took the remainder of our time, and soon enough we were back at sea. The wind was light, which is fine with us. We scrub Orca's hull religiously so she moves well in light air.

About this time we began to enter the South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ), a little known but feared stretch of the South Pacific where the consistent balmy trade wind weather becomes a bit sinister. The warm, moist air from the east, which has been blowing over the equatorial waters in the form of the trades for the last 5,000 miles, meets waves of colder air forced north by storms around NZ and Australia. For reasons not entirely clear to us, this interface doesn't usually produce large scale storms, but instead manifests itself as one or more stationary fronts which are characterized by narrow bands of intense squalls which can last for weeks. Stories abound of moonless nights in which an unsuspecting sailboat stumbles into one of these fronts and finds the wind going from 5 to 80 knots in a heartbeat. Few fly spinnakers at night in this stretch of the ocean. Two weeks ago a 67' catamaran was overturned in one of these squalls and had to be abandoned.

Three nights out of Bora Bora we began to see signs that we were approaching one of these squall lines. Just after sunset, we began to see flashes of lightening below the horizon reflecting off nearby clouds. By midnight, a line of thunderheads blocked the horizon, stretching out of sight from SE to NW. At 5 am, it was nearly upon us. The wind jumped from 10 to 25 knots and switched direction from E to N. Continuous lightening made headlamps on deck unnecessary. We reefed down to storm canvas, re-lashed the dingy, unplugged radios, and wrapped crucial electronic gear in tin-foil to protect it from the huge electromagnetic forces that would result if we took a direct strike. Just before sunrise, a line of rain moved toward us– big cold drops that could be heard moving across the water toward us in a hiss. The wind increased to 35 knots and began to whistle in the rigging. Webs of cloud-to-cloud lightening crackled across the sky overhead and a few big ground strikes hit the ocean near us. The thunder was felt, rather than heard, over the sound of the wind and waves.

And just like that, we were through: 10 hours of anticipation—10 minutes of terror. Blue sky stretched ahead to the horizon and the wind dropped to 10 knots. Kara danced the robot in the flashes of lightening as we scudded safely into the clear predawn sky.

Before we knew it, Aitutaki was in sight. This Cook Island has a lagoon that rival's Bora Bora's for magnificence, but is much less visited; there is no natural pass through the reef. An artificial pass was blasted in the 1940's during World War II, but has since filled with sediment and is now only 4.5' deep at peak high tide, which is too shallow for most large powerboats and nearly all sailboats. Being rather dainty, as far as bluewater cruisers go, Orca draws just over 4'. We went aground in the lagoon 3 times and had to kedge off twice (kedging involves taking an anchor back into deep water with the dingy and using it to pull the big boat off the shoal). Safely into the harbor, which was about the size of a basketball court and 6' deep, we explored the island.

Aitutaki has a small airport with connections to Auckland, and nurses a small tourism industry. We jumped right in and decided to rent a motor scooter. At the rental office, the native islander with a big afro and acres of tattoos showed us to a shiny red scooter with a big logo on the front, “Rino's Rentals”. He asked if we'd ever driven a motorcycle or a scooter before and we said no. Rather than give us a few pointers, he said “well you better take this one instead then” and rolled out a scooter that had obviously been in an unhealthy number of high speed crashes. It was missing a rear view mirror, the turn signals were held on with duct tape, it leaked copious amounts of oil, the brakes (we later found out while descending a steep dirt road) worked at about half capacity, the plastic bodywork was hanging on by faith alone, the muffler didn't muffle, the shock absorbers didn't absorb, and, naturally, there was no trace of the rental logo on it anywhere. But, for $14 US, we had her for the next 24 hours with tacit permission to crash as many times as it took to figure out how to drive a moped and how to negotiate traffic on the wrong side of the road. The other challenge was that neither of us had driven for almost a year. With all this we figured we'd better stay away from people so we took to the dirt roads and trails on the interior of the island and spent the rest of the day bouncing, wobbling, and sliding along deserted ridge tops. The next day, we drove on the beaches (our only crash was when we hit some deep fluffy sand, lost control, and ended up in a heap).

After a week at Aitutaki, we scraped our way out of the lagoon and set a course for Wallis Island. We spent 11 days at sea, and the wind averaged a lovely-sounding 15-20 knots. The average is a bit misleading, though, because for the first 6 days we were becalmed and the last 5 we spent hove-to or running under triple reefed main with winds between 30 and 45 knots and 15-20' seas. Kara enjoyed celebrated her birthday by being tossed around the cabin. It was a challenging passage physically and mentally, not to mention the wear and tear on our gear. Luckly, nothing broke, we built confidence, and now we're safely ensconced in Wallis Island's lagoon taking a breather before pressing on to Savusavu, Fiji.

Thanks!

J&K