The sun is shining

What a difference a day makes!! The ocean wasn't trying to kill us, the boat didn't break and the bugs were not invading. Darryl's shift until midnight was unbelievably wet, but the squalls have left us alone since then. It was blessedly calm and beautiful all day today. We had a wonderful day of sailing in glorious sunshine and decent winds all day. We are trying to be cautiously optimistic that night #5 will be gentle and dry.

Tonight we will start wending our way through some of the atolls of the Tuamotus so will need to be more vigilant with our watches as up until now we have been out here all alone with no obstacles. Goal is to arrive in Tahiti by February 4th so just 3 more sleeps hopefully.

Creatures of the deep & unwelcome company

Okay, so night #3 was unpleasant but no additional broken boat bits to report so will call that a win. Apparently I should not have boasted about a dry helm and silent engines in my last post. I actually had to pull out my foul weather jacket which I haven't used on the boat since possibly the Atlantic crossing?!?! The volume of rain we saw through one squall after another I am convinced rivaled how much rain we experienced during a tropical storm in Grenada. But like all good sailing stories, it can't be substantiated.

In addition to the rain, there were two highlights to my evening. As I sat at a now very wet helm seat surrounded by complete darkness with the only light on offer from distant lightning that surrounded us and the annoying hum of an engine, suddenly this supernatural glow caught my eye off our starboard (right) side. Once my eyes had a chance to adjust, I witnessed the most spectacular bioluminescence drifting past us. I can't adequately describe the large, greenish orbs that swirled and intersected with each other. I aimed my flashlight on the water to see what was causing the dancing lights but this offered no answers. Jellyfish?? A school of fish?? I have no other suggestions but it was a beautiful sight and a welcome distraction to my drenched self-pity.

On this high, I turned back towards the front of the boat when something else appeared in my periphery to the left. I quickly realized I was sharing the helm seat with a most unwelcome guest. Slowly darting towards my leg was a HUGE cockroach. Yup. A big, ugly cockroach with antennas that rivaled the size of its body. Feeling trapped in my seat and paralyzed with fear, I managed to flick it away with my jacket sleeve. With this momentary reprieve I was able to scramble down the helm station into the cockpit. I quickly caught sight of it again, where it was now exploring the seat back cushion of the helm seat. Of course I did what was only logical....I started screaming. I felt like I screamed for a long time before Ella came up to investigate. She aided me by preparing me with bug spray and a shoe. I stood there glaring menacingly at the beast hoping it would recognize it needed to find a new ride but it remained undeterred. I was left with only with one possible option, I had Ella wake up her dad. Despite Darryl's equal dislike for these nasty bugs, he is more of a problem solver than me and managed to bravely go into battle with the beast and conquer. With the roach now crushed and drifting away at sea, other than a bruised ego, all was well on board again.

On a side note, this morning I told Iris about the battle with the bug and she calmly says to me..."oh, that is what you were screaming about"?! Seriously kid??? No investigating to see whether your dear mother needs assistance, she clearly just managed to get herself back to sleep.

Now that I have demonstrated to all my lack of resilience I will end this post here. All is well on board. The engine did eventually get turned off and we are enjoying an easy sail at the moment with only one squall hitting us so far today. We will see what night #4 has on offer...

Rain, rain and more rain

So our second night was much better than our first with only one squall paying us a visit which where we were trimmed well for so it passed without incident. However, Day 3 has been one squall after another. Needless to say the cockpit is soaking wet. The only saving grace is the angle of the wind and rain is on the opposite side to our helm so we are able to stay relatively dry at the helm when the squalls hit. Squalls always seem so much easier to contend with during the day when we can see them coming from miles off and are more than prepared for them when they hit.

Despite the torn sail and wet weather, we really can't complain. We have been sailing beautifully along, haven't needed to turn on the engine once since leaving. Even when the sun is needing to fight its way through clouds the solar panels are doing a great job of keeping our batteries charged during the day. The seas were a bit confused yesterday which generally does not leave the crew in a great mood, but today the seas are cooperating better. The girls only mildly grumbled about having to do a bit of school today after taking yesterday off. Otherwise, the girls spend their days laughing while binge watching the series, Big Bang Theory, so really they shouldn't complain about putting in an hour of school a day.

As usual, the Maple crew prove to be incompetent fishermen and despite having two lines in the water, we have yet to get a nibble. Meanwhile when we were in the Marquesas we had friends who took pity on us and generously shared portions of marlin, wahoo and yellow fin tuna with us. It is not like the fish are not out there they just seem to do a terrific job of evading our lures. So instead we enthusiastically enjoyed fish tacos last night using wahoo courtesy of Sugar Shack, thank you guys!!! We still have 500 miles to go before reaching Tahiti so perhaps I can try to be cautiously optimistic on replenishing our now depleted fish stocks.

I will sign off for now as another squall looms behind us.

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?!

Moments of Zen

There are two wolves battling inside all of us. One is joy and hope. The other is sadness and despair. Which one wins? ....

So the last 48 hours or so has seen me having to dig deep on not letting the miserable conditions get the better of me. On one hand we have had phenomenal sailing wind, but with good winds comes big seas and boy have we been seeing that in spades. Generally there is a rhythm to the swell but every so often we just get nailed by a big wave. Maple has taken more waves over her bow this passage than I think she ever saw on two ocean crossings combined.

Generally when we sail the conditions allow us to have at least the main salon hatches open slightly or the bathroom portholes open that allow some air flow through the boat. In fact I believe we never had to close the salon hatches during either ocean crossing. But with the conditions we are seeing on this passage all the hatches have to be locked tight. The main sliding door is left open but when sailing upwind that doesn't allow the wind to come inside the boat. This means that Maple is outrageously stuffy and warm. This translates into me feeling nauseous the second I cross the threshold. It means cooking needs to be done strategically to allow me to get a breath of fresh air every so often. Meanwhile, the girls will sit inside watching movies the entire day!! I don't know how they pull it off. However, every so often Iris will come join me on the helm seat, snuggle her entirely too warm body against mine and hold me for a minute or two while she cools down before returning to the hot box that is Maple.

This morning Ella said to me, "There are two wolves inside all of us. One is joy and hope. The other is sadness and despair. Which one wins?... Depends which one you feed." My wise 13 year old was reminding me to feed the joy.

So instead of feeding the wolf of despair, I am feeling grateful for the strength Maple continues to demonstrate in difficult conditions. Overwhelming gratitude for a partner who keeps my spirits lifted with his eternal optimism even when my despair wolf is taking the lead. Laughing with Ella when twice this morning she received an unintended salt water shower when she decided to sit on the windward side of the cockpit. Feeling my heart brim over with love when Iris gives me a giant, toothy grin and the dive symbol for "Ok?" every time she sees me. And of course remembering how fortunate I am to be on this remarkable journey with my family.

I hope everyone today has found a moment to feed their wolf of joy and hope!!!

Rough Start

So we have been bound for Marquesas for about 36 hours now. We had a terrifying start to our passage yesterday when leaving the pass in Makemo. The reason we were leaving for the Marquesas at that time is because there is an unusual north west wind that has been blowing due to some systems far south of us. This was helpful because it allowed us to sail east the first 24 hours, which is typically the direction of the prevailing winds. The one problem with this north wind though is that the pass we needed to exit faces north. This means that the wind driven swell was being pushed hard into the pass regardless of whether the tide was ebbing or flooding. We wanted to time our exit for slack tide, the very brief period between where the tide is transitioning, but a squall hit us at the time we wanted to lift anchor. So we sat out the squall which delayed our exit, we had no idea what the 30 minute delay would mean for the pass. By the time we headed for the pass, slack tide had ended and the tide was ebbing. The result was that the water inside the lagoon was being pushed outside at the same time a 20 knot wind was pushing water into the lagoon. This created very steep, short duration, confused seas in a tight pass with reefs on both sides. In other words, SCARY!!!

Our friends on Sugar Shack went through the pass ahead of us. I don't think it helped watching them get tossed around ahead of us considering they are 10 feet longer and likely 6 feet wider than Maple with much higher freeboard (the space between the water line and the top of the deck). But we didn't want to miss the weather window and the seas would only continue to build as the ebb current continued to strengthen. We had all windows closed tight, the girls were safely inside watching a movie, typically means they are oblivious to what we might be dealing with outside. D was hand steering, doing a stellar job of keeping calm, while my only job is to stop my nervous chatter that drives him crazy. I really can't put into words how scary it was as we started to get tossed around in these steep waves like a toy boat. Just as we were hit broad side on the port side by a huge wave, a huge bottlenose dolphin jumped right off our starboard side, distracting me to the wave that was coming. Fortunatley D did see the wave approach and did his best to steer into the wave but at this point our port hull was lifted far out of the water as the wave raced beneath us. Sugar Shack later told us that it literally looked like we flew a hull, which I can assure you our model of catamaran is not designed to do.

At the moment that Maple tipped precariously onto her starboard side, Iris and Ella both let out ear splitting screams from inside. I figured for sure all of our computers and other electronics had spilled to the floor. But the girls were reacting to what they realized was not a natural tilt for Maple, the first time in 4 years that they really even noticed something out of sorts. In the end the only casualty was a small picture frame that smashed to the floor. Thankfully we had done a decent job of stowing before we left knowing that it could be a touch bouncy. We also lost a wake board that was clearly not well secured and blew away. As you can appreciate the conditions were not really conducive for attempting a man overboard drill to recover the board.

Once safely out of the pass, the conditions were still unpleasant to say the least. Didn't take long before Ella was looking green, but the crew were all rock stars! Conditions now have smoothed out beautifully, the girls even managed an hour of school this morning. We have now turned north on almost a direct line to the Marquesas. We hope to arrive the morning of November 8th if all continues to go as forecasted. Can't say I will entirely miss the Tuamotus in spite of their beauty. Looking forward the ease of approaching the Marquesas islands without their barrier reefs or coral bottoms to foul our anchor.

Halloween Take 5

Our first two Halloweens were very low key, which is bound to happen when in countries like Greece and Morocco that don't celebrate it and you have no kid boats around you. But we always manage to pull something off one way or the other. The last two Halloweens in Bonaire and Guatemala we were with loads of kid boats and in a cruiser community that assisted to make it days the girls will never forget.

This year we were well and truly on our own. By 10:30am on Halloween the four boats we had been sharing this beautiful anchorage in Makemo with all weighed anchor and left. But before our friends on Sugar Shack headed off, they left us with the brilliant idea of doing a treasure hunt with the girls.

Unlike Thanksgiving this year, we actually were prepared with necessary treats for Halloween. Fakarava actually had a good selection of candy so we were set in the most important aspect for this "holiday". And the huge bonus was Darryl was able to buy a pumpkin!!! Like turkeys, pumpkins are a rare commodity in our travels. D was on hand as the weekly supply ship was being off loaded and when three pumpkins rolled into the grocery store, I think he knocked a few people out of the way to snap one up. Mind you, the pumpkin cost us $30 USD, but hey I guess it was worth it for the smiles it put on the girls' faces.

Our attempt to use shells and coral to make our pumpkin look like a hermit crab didn't fully pan out. If you squint your eyes in dim light, you might be able to tell that is what we were trying to pull off. Oh well, the hermit crab pumpkin was short lived anyway. We were determined to get as much value out of our $30 spent. While the girls ended the day with watching Ghostbusters, D cut up the pumpkin and I am already in the process of baking my first two pumpkin chocolate chip loafs for breakfast.

Costume options are often limited on Maple although a few key pieces came with us when we moved aboard like a Greek Goddess outfit and a mermaid tail, which came in handy a number of years running. This year the girls wanted to go for local flavour inspired costumes. The girls organized their costumes well in advance and were prepared for the day. They looked beautiful wrapped in pareos, with flowers in their hair, shell necklaces around their necks, donning tattoos. Speaking of limited costume options, D opted for Naked Chef this year...I am sure you are relieved internet is not an option to include a picture.

The treasure hunt went off perfectly with clues leading them to candy hiding in the dinghy, sailbag, snorkel gear, my favourite was hanging off the bow under the trampoline, among other spots. The girls had a blast running around in the dark, using a flashlight to find their loot!!! Thank you, Sugar Shack, based on the girls enthusiasm I think we have a new tradition on Maple!!