En route back to Tahiti

Well that first night was unpleasant to say the least. After such a chill first half to Day 1, the second half decided to throw us a curve ball. We were hit by two squalls, the first of which we were very much unprepared for as there is no moon beyond 10pm right now so we had no light to work with to see what the sky is doing other than to see that the stars have disappeared. Our experience up to yesterday had been that squalls in the Pacific were pretty low key, perhaps you see some rain and a 5-10 knot increase in wind speed. But that is all, generally passing quite quickly. Given that for the first 14 hours we were only seeing 6-10 knots of apparent wind, we kept the sails full with no reefs, which is not typical of us at night. Well that first squall decided to give us a cruel reminder on why we prefer to be cautious on night sailing.

It was only 11:00pm but the moon, for the tiny crescent it is worth, had already long set. D was nearing the end of his shift and as usual I am lying awake in bed listening to every noise. Suddenly I could hear the boat start to race down much longer and steeper waves than we had been experiencing and the water just sounded LOUD. I raced upstairs to find D hand steering desperately trying to keep Maple heading downwind with the full sails still in a wing on wing formation without accidentally gybing (letting the wind come onto the other side of the main sail). Unfortunately this is very hard to do when skidding down waves with full sails and in 25 to 30 knots of apparent wind. All it took was a moment for the wind to sneak behind us and with one loud boom of a sound, the main sail tore straight across just below the first reefing point. Sigh. We had really hoped that sail would hang on until Thailand as we knew she was starting to show her age. The good news is we can still use the main sail, it just needs to be always reefed at the first reefing point and Maple has a very resourceful Captain who is already exploring how he is going to stitch her up when we arrive in Tahiti. Needless to say we were better prepared for the second squall that hit us last night without further incident.

I will say I am hoping that the rest of the passage does not continue to replicate our first night otherwise this is going to be one painfully long 7 days. On the upside, we have collected ourselves a bunch of rain water to keep our water tanks topped up, which is helpful since the watermaker stopped working a few weeks ago. Always something isn't there?!