THREE THOUSAND MILES TO THE FRENCH MARQUESAS

With three thousand miles ahead of us to the French Marquesas Islands we set off in fair winds and started to settle into our tried and tested routine at sea. After dinner I take the first watch as Andrew finds it difficult to sleep in the day and I can sleep in broad daylight. He then takes the late evening, I relieve him around two am and I do until about 5 or 6 am and after breakfast together I turn in for my second sleep and then sleep until I wake up, which feels like I am having a lie in. Sometimes we nap in the day but as and when one of us feels the need, so we are both up together for most of the daylight hours. Then sundowners and cards, weather permitting, before dinner and into the watch system. Routine is important at sea to help pass the day, almost as important as interesting and tasty meals, just not too spicy whilst we get our sea legs!

We had left Santa Cruz just behind Cheglia so we were in radio contact with them for the first couple of days as we both headed South to 10 degrees to cross the ITCZ in search of better winds. We posted each day on the cruisers net for the Pacific Puddle Jump our position and conditions and really enjoyed reading all the other boats posts. It became part of our routine to read them with mid morning coffee when I woke up and it was really nice to know there were other boats out there and to hear their news each day. One boat reported that due to a mispronunciation of a non English speaking crew member that the new word for squalls on their boat was squirrels and soon the whole fleet were reporting encounters with these hairy creatures.

There was also a SSB net that we were part of but although we could hear them there were only a few occasions when we managed to communicate, as we were a few days and several hundred miles ahead. Andrew’s father became the editor of the South Pacific Times keeping us up to date on the news from home. In particular the Brexit fiasco which we passed on to other Brits on the Ocean.  We were all keen to know if we would still be Europeans when we checked into the French Marquesas with the right to stay as long as we wished, or were going be limited to three months and subjected to a lot of hassle posting bonds etc. , as the non-Europeans were.

We sailed for most of the trip wing on wing with our Yankee poled out and managed to achieve two hundred mile days. Once we were accustomed to riding the bucking bronco we included exercises into our daily routine in the form of squats and using the BBBR bands, the moveable floor all adding to our core strength! The skipper incorporated this into his morning schedule whilst I was having my lie in and in addition took it upon himself to hoover every day. He got quite stressed one morning over coffee suddenly jumping up and proclaiming that he had forgotten to hoover whilst I rolled about laughing, what is it about boats that make men so domesticated!

Our night watches were well lit by the moonlight and the amazing stars which I could stare at for hours. They were all in the wrong place, the North Star was no longer visible but we could now see the Southern Cross and Venus made an appearance towards day break lighting up the sky like a street lamp. We couldn’t quite make ourselves go to bed together for the night and not keep a watch, even though we only ever saw two fishing boats, but it was easy to snooze on deck. One evening I was feeling particularly sleepy in my rather cozy day bed that I had made up in the cockpit and concerned I wouldn’t wake up periodically I set the alarm on my iPhone to go off every twenty minutes. Unfortunately I wasn’t woken by the phone nestled into my ear but by the skipper who had been asleep below in our cabin and been woken by a load buzzing, whoops!

We were relatively lucky with the weather having to only motor on a couple of occasions and we only had one really bad squally night. The rest of the time the winds were very friendly and we even managed to hoist our kite on a few occasions. We gave it the nickname The Monster though as it is really rather large and can only be flown in up to fifteen knots, in truth we are both rather scared of it!

We put our fishing rods out on several occasions but never managed to land a fish. We had one fly into the pilots berth through the window one evening and even better one that landed in Andrew’s bunk. There was an almighty screech as he got into bed with it.  Apparently it was wet, cold and slippery and it made quite a mess of the sheets.

Every few days we had to change our clocks as we passed through different time zones, each time taking us further away from GMT. The time passed surprisingly quickly with the help of our new addiction to the American version of House of Cards and the many books we had downloaded. In the middle of one chick flick I will admit to an overwhelming desire to go to a large departmental store and purchase a vast array of goodies like my heroine. I also had two occasions both at night when the cabin got very stuffy and I was convinced that I couldn’t breathe and had to rush on deck, which may have been a panic attack. But in general I loved the vastness of the Ocean which is lucky as there is a lot of blue sea out there and not a lot else.

On the negative side we had a lot of breakages throughout the trip. It started with our starboard primary winch that failed to work, push button said no! It turned out to be a blown fuse which we were able to replace once we had taken the head lining down. Then the generator overheated and failed to work. It turned out to be a broken impeller and we have three of those so we managed to get it working again. Despite this it became somewhat temperamental and we started to notice that the voltage would just drop out if we used it for more than twenty five minutes at a time. But it hung in there and we managed to keep making water and charge our batteries even if we polluted our lungs with all the black diesel smoke creeping back into the boat.

There were lots of little breakages as you would expect and poor Andrew spent a lot of time mending things. The sink pump breaking was a bother and I spent one evening washing up in a bucket until we discovered we could hit the pump with a hammer and it would work for a little while. However three days from land we had two rather more serious malfunctions.

We noticed that the hydraulics were slow and at first thought it was due to our batteries which were not keeping as much power as they should have due to the short bursts of charging they  were getting from the generator. On inspection of the system we discovered that the hydraulic oil level was very low so dug around in the lazarette and found some oil in a container left by the previous owner, god bless him. We filled up the tank and the sails whizzed happily in and out again.

However in the midst of all this we had turned on the engine and our service alternator had failed. This had two consequences some rather irritating mood lighting one evening when we had to motor for awhile and rather more worryingly our only way of generating power was now our rather unpredictable and failing generator. Our lovely boat is very easy to double hand but the consequence of that is that everything requires power to work. Our Yankee and mainsail and our powered winches, then obviously all our instruments, our heads and of course our fridge, freezer and oven. And heaven forbid if we had to actually helm the boat!

We both took ourselves off to contemplate the consequences of no power on the good ship Hullabaloo three days out from land. I decided there was enough cooked food in the freezer and plenty of tins to keep us going, although the thought of losing the contents of said freezer wasn’t great. The water tank was pretty full, we had plenty of bottled water, several torches and a hand held GPS, a small staysail which we could unfurl by hand and of course The Monster.  We had a working engine and the alternator that charged it (but not the service batteries) was fine and maybe the mood lighting would help light the way. We decided we would be fine although we were concerned about the lack of facilities in the Marquesas when we arrived and very twitchy every time we fired up the generator, breathing a huge sigh of relief when we completed our twenty minute charge and got to live for another few hours.

On day nineteen we spotted land. We were somewhat tired and a little grumpy at this stage and our faces lit up.  We had decided to stop at the island of Fatu Hiva rather than go to Hiva Oa where we were supposed to check in, as it would be an upwind sail to return and the anchorage was supposed to be spectacular. As we rounded the end of the island the ruggedness of the Jurassic Park coastline took our breath away. As we put our anchor down amidst the spectacular rock formations and were greeted by a local from the hillside chanting a Hakka in welcome as he hunted a pig for his dinner we knew we had arrived somewhere special. And the feeling of achievement was fantastic!!