Cruise of the Ketch Julia

[J.Madison]

Early the next morning we were awakened by the sound of 4" chain dumping down into our cockpit. The Aranui was docking, they dropped an anchor and were using it to turn them parallel to the dock. Prop wash from their massive thrusters sent a neighboring boat careening through the anchorage, his anchor dragging easily.

Its hard to get a feel for just how close this thing was....



The hills above Atuana are magestic though. And we can count our blessings in that we have two masts, and this poor guy has none. He offered to buy one of mine....


See those faint streaks going down the hills? From this vantage point we could see 10 different waterfalls at once.



That pretty much brings us up to date. Unfortunately Atuana is also completely out of butane, and it will be 3 weeks until there is more. If I had an empty bottle there might be a guy at the boatyard that would sell me some, but I have a small amount of propane left and am loathe to dump it in case I can't get anything more. So I think we are going to sail for the Tuamotus without more gas, we've already started cold-brew coffee and overnight oats, and bought some charcuterie type things to make our little bit of gas last all the way to Tahiti, or as close as possible.

We won't starve, but we may have to light some beach fires to cook a pot of rice now and then. Speaking of the glamorous life, today was laundry and boat project day. Tomorrow we get some diesel, the other reason we are here, and then we set sail 500 nautical miles to the Tuamotus!

[Mark0]

Just our of interest, how much propane do you carry and what do you estimate as a burn rate ? I'm paranoid that I would need to get to the point of cold brew coffee.....

Thanks for the pictures/post. Your you tube videos are great. It would be interesting to see a "sub thread" here with more details of your wind vane.

Cheers,
Mark

[J.Madison]

We carry one 20 lb tank, and it lasts us 2-3 months. We tried to buy a second smaller tank to use with the BBQ and as backup, but prices for a good aluminum tank in Mexico were too high.

A windvane thread would be good, one of these days!

[Alan71]

Hello J.M,

Continuing to enjoy your wonderful photos and interesting notes and descriptions.

I prepare a mango for my wife's breakfast almost every morning....from now on I'll be reminded of you peeling your mangos with your teeth!!!

Thank You!

Alan

[Mark0]

Hey J,

While I'm busy thinking or extra threads for you to start (more work), I was wondering if you could give a quick summary of your ships systems, likes, dislikes and things you would do different.

Cheers,
Mark

[AJZimm]

Obsessively dot-watching the progress of Julia and vicariously imagining this wonderful journey. I see that Julia has reached the classic coral atoll of Keuehi in the Tuamotus. From the position, Julia appears to be anchored off the village.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kauehi

it will be interesting to get an update when the ketch is next to somewhere with sufficient connectivity and bandwidth.

[wizbang 13]

Even these days, in the crowded developed Caribbean, folks panick and run out of cookin gaz.
It's a constant area of discussion on the "nets".
Where can I fill my british bottle on a french island?
What taxi driver can take my bottles to be filled?
It's relentless
just a single burner non gimballed primus as a back up and some paint thinner can save (and cook ) yer bacon

[J.Madison]

We extricated ourselves from the extremely tight confines of Atuana harbor, a neighboring dinghy helped us with our second anchor and Whit handled the stern line from our own dinghy. We reanchored just outside the harbor entrance to coil down and hose the mud off the deck. Then we were off for real. Hiva Oa does have a stunning landscape.



We sailed in light winds past the southern coast of Tahuata, our last view of the Marquesas. They had been spectacular, we were not at all ready to leave, but time was running out. This leg was to be about 500 nautical miles.



Winds were light. We put a few rolls in the jib just to keep it from slapping around quite so much in the chop.



We bobbed along at a few knots into the sunset. The thing with ocean sailing is, you can only ever show half of it. Fully half is the private domain of the crew, no photos or videos can capture the hours of darkness in a way that shows what it is really like at all.

[J.Madison]

In general things were pretty light for the first several days. But it came and went and we made miles the whole time.





We stood 4 hour watches. Pretty soon the sun was setting again. This was pretty easy sailing, and it felt good to be back at sea.



When the wind went totally flat, we rolled in the jib and motored for a bit, making time to hit slack water at the entrance to the atoll.



Just a sliver of the moon, following the sun down. These were very dark nights.

[J.Madison]

The next day the wind filled in for real and we had excellent sailing. With relatively flat seas and the wind just forward of the beam, the boat is stable and happy.





But the classic wear and tear of the sea was showing up as well. The extra weather helm was making the windvane work hard, and the cheek plate of the block chafed through the outer cover of the double braid steering line. I climbed out there and adjusted the line to wear on a new location.



We spent most of our time below hiding from the sun, looking around every 10 or 15 minutes for the chinese trawlers that are busy sweeping these seas clean of all life.




As darkness fell, we got hammered by a series of squalls, and I got called out of my bunk to help deal with it. Torrential rain fell as it hit, we rolled in the jib but had the full mainsail up. It overpowered the self steering and rounded up until we were fore-reaching along at 3-4 kts, partially luffing. This was pretty stable, the vane trying to turn us down but unable in the strong winds. After deeming the situation stable we went below to hide from the rain.

[J.Madison]

After an hour or two things calmed down and we turned back on course. Sailing was pretty good all day.



That night, we got hammered again. We saw it coming and put a reef in the main and rolled in the jib. That was still too much weather helm, so I clawed the mainsail down all the way. I have never had so much trouble with a sail, the halyard tail blew out of my grasp around the spreader tip. One hand pulling down the sail, one hand feeding out the halyard doesn't leave any hands to hold on as waves wash over and the deck edge plunges deep. Big swell was rolling in on the beam and the deck was slick. Each approaching roller glowed with bioluminecense along the top as its head tumbled down its face. I finally got the sail down without going overboard, but it was quite a project in the dark. We then let out a fraction of the jib and tore off downwind. The helm was nicely balanced, but a lot of good that did because at that moment the steering line on the windvane chafed completely through! Whitney was not happy..... but she hand steered the rest of her shift and at sunrise the squall had abated and we had our first glimpse of the "low islands."



As the sun got up for real, we were at the pass into the atoll of Kauehi. If you've never looked at the Tuomotus on google earth, it is worth it. They are impossibly thin rings of reef and land, some 5 to 40 miles across. The land is never more than a few feet above the sea, some atolls have very little land at all. In any case it is just a ribbon of shallows or islets called "motus." Outside the waters drop to thousands of feet in just a few boatlengths. Inside the depths are generally shallow and coral bommies proliferate. Reef fish and coconut palms are the main forms of life. Supposedly these were ancient volcanoes, towering islands like the marquesas. But time has worn them completely away and only the self-repairing fringing reefs remain.



Tidal ranges are small, but the volume inside the atoll is vast and it all exits through a few little channels. Additionally waves continuously break over the low portions of the reef, filling the lagoon and changing the time of supposed slack water. In some weather there is never slack water, just a continous outpouring through the channels. When these currents, usually 4-5 kts but sometimes much more, collide with the ocean swell conditions can get dangerous fast. To make matters worse, I had 3 different sources for tide information and they were all different, sometimes by multiple hours. This makes actually finding slack water very difficult and the real strategy is to arrive and look at it with binoculars and enter if things aren't too bad. We were probably an hour or two wrong, but decided it wasn't too bad and powered on into a 3 kt current. It was tense for a moment, but then we were through and the world was calm.

The sun was too low for proper navitgation, which is done by eye, so we stuck to the marked channel and anchored in front of the village.


We were amazed at how different the scene was from the Marquesas. There the waters were deep and dark, black rock reefs and towering misty green mountains surrounded. But here, everything was varying shades of tourquoise and blue. With white sands and palms.

As the anchorage was a bit far from the town we set the sailing rig and sailed into the village.



This was the landing beach.

[J.Madison]

The trade wind clouds seem to sit just out of reach, no hills to push them up any higher.



Thats a little skin on frame dighy a long way from home.... Mr Gentry should be very proud, its been an excellent tender.



We headed out across the atoll to have a look at the ocean side. Like everywhere in French Polynesia, the roads were impeccable, far out of proportion to the number of people who use them. The concrete roads are brought in by ship, sacks of cement on pallets craned onto the dock. I assume french infastructure dollars are at work, the roads appear to cost many times what the houses that line them cost.



There was a little black tip reef shark in the tide pools on the ocean side.



The crabs can somehow tear open coconuts to get inside.



Its the kind of place where forgetting your sun glasses would probably render you blind in an hour or so. The sun seemed to be searing white hot light on everything.

[J.Madison]

A local driving by stopped and asked if we wanted a coconut to drink. We jumped in the back of his truck and went to his house where he picked two coconuts and opened them up for us. What hospitality! When it started to rain he invited us into his house and we had a conversation in several butchered languages. He taught us to say hello and thank you in the local language, rather than french. I don't know why we tried to learn french, it is basically impossible wheras the same effort put into Tahitiian yields actual results!



Our peace was shattered when we arrived back at the dock. That same half cruise ship, the Aranui, had followed us! It was disgourging passengers on the dock. And here we had thought we were at the far end of the earth, the only people who had ventured to this mythical place.



Local people met them and each was given a flower lei.



I was interested in their transport scows though, there was less than a foot of water alongside the pier, but they managed well.



The local outrigger canoes were very cool as well.



Check out the hurricane ties holding the roof on. Actually the entire settlement looked to be one stiff breeze away from returning to the sea, it is just so low and unsheltered. They do get hurricanes, though they are mercifully rare. Note also the rainwater catchment, the primary water source in the islands.

[J.Madison]

Is this pretty much what you pictured when you thought about a south pacific coral atoll paradise? I thought the Marquesas were spectacular, but this was too, in a totally different way.



I love their boat lifts, so simple, so smart! Turning the wheel winds the rope up on the pipe axel. No bearings, no motors, no nonsense. Imagine trying to get a permit for this in Puget Sound....



Just a few hours after arriving, the Aranui left. Maybe they had a cargo to deliver, or maybe they were just giving the whistle stop tour of the Tuomotus.

We pulled the hook out of the white sand bottom and headed across the lagoon to some uninhabited motus on the far side.




Navigation is done by eye, from the foredeck or higher if necessary. The sun should be high, but slightly behind you. The goal is to see the coral bommies before you hit them.

This is what we are watching for. This one merited a "+" symbol on the chart, as it was directly in the navigable channel. Most are not charted at all. This monster reached from 60 ft or more and came within inches of the surface. A real boat killer.



We found a little patch of sand between bommies to anchor, the other reason you can only re-position during daylight. We floated the chain because there was lots of coral within our swing radius. The point is to not damage the coral, and also to prevent becoming hopelessly ensnared where there is no diver available to untangle us. In fact, there wasn't another soul anwhere on this side of the atoll.

[J.Madison]

This is the bouyed chain from the water. We jumped in to check it out, and right after this picture two reef sharks came out of the haze and became very interested in us. We stayed calm and tried to look big, as we read that they can sense your heartbeat and know if you are scared. The reality is we were probably bigger than them, and reef sharks don't attack humans. We were prepared to see them, but we were not prepared for them to be so interested in us!



Several of their buddies joined and the entire time we were there they circled under the boat, never seeming to sleep. Those dots around the dinghy are sharks, probably about 4 ft long. Not man-eaters, but looking in their eyes was a bit un-nerving anyway!



We decided to do our snorkelling from the beach of the nearby motus.



I love christmas tree worms. You snap your fingers and they instantly dissapear back into their hole.

[J.Madison]

This was definitely starting to be one of our favorite places. Explore the islets, swim among the corals, have a cocktail, watch the sunset, repeat.









Just look at the absurdity of this island! Hard to imagine such a place existing. The atoll is big enough that you just can't quite see all the way across. So it looks like deep blue rough ocean in one direction and calm turquoise ocean in the other direction, with a ribbon stretching into the distance seperating the two.

[J.Madison]

I hope you wanted a whole bunch of glory shots of Julia and the scenery.

[J.Madison]

Here, and in many other places we went later, there were little shacks used during the coprah harvest. Or at least used at some point.



First place I've been that the metal degraded to nothing before the wood showed any weakness. I tried not to think about the fastenings deep in my bilge....



The hermit crabs were everywhere. If you sit on the beach for a while, eventually it all seems to stand up and start walking around. Whit wanted to collect some shells, but they were always occupied. The crabs seemed to have excellent taste in picking their homes.

[wizbang 13]

thanks for the photos!
I actually apply 90 weight gear oil to the lines where they pass through my monitor.
they can be the hardest werkin strings on de bote...and of course they pop at night....in the rain

[Garret]

More great photos & commentary! That is an amazing place.

Lake Champlain has boat lifts similar to the one you showed - though of course they are at the old camps, not the fancy new places...

[Woxbox]

Great story -- thanks for the update.

[auscruisertom]

Beautiful place although those gaps in the structure are concerning. I don’t believe I’ve ever observed that phenomenon in any atoll before.
When we sailed the Tuomotus the Atols where generally considerable higher than the water level.

[Rich Jones]

Our daughter went into labor this morning and I just spent a wonderful couple of hours reading through your thread as we anxiously await news.

Thanks for taking us along on this marvelous journey!
Where will your bowsprit be pointing to next?

[pez_leon]

Your underwater pictures brought back a whole world of memories. Thanks for taking us along!

- James

[nrs5000]

Great photos, thanks for sharing!

[The Jeff]

Really enjoying your updates! Great photos and the videos are really well done too. As soon as one episode is done I'm looking forward to what'll be in the next. Kind of hoping you keep going west and keep the content coming for another five years!

[John B]

I'd love to get there some day, hard work from here , either upwind for 3 weeks or down into the high 30's or 40's for a run and the long way around.
I know this is probably redundant , but do note Beveridge reef when you head to Tonga.

[DavidS]

Great story and pics!

I’ve been to Mo’orea and Bora Bora. Stunningly beautiful, and amazing scuba diving too! We didn’t sail there but would love to. Would also love to get to Rangiroa or Fakarava someday.

Cheers!

[AJZimm]

Been following the dot and imaging something like this but the reality is even better than my imagination. Thanks again for taking the time to write this and share it here.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[J.Madison]

I actually apply 90 weight gear oil to the lines where they pass through my monitor.
they can be the hardest werkin strings on de bote...and of course they pop at night....in the rain

Good idea. I might try to find something like that. Don't have any gear oil on board, hydraulic transmission....

Our daughter went into labor this morning and I just spent a wonderful couple of hours reading through your thread as we anxiously await news.

Thanks for taking us along on this marvelous journey!
Where will your bowsprit be pointing to next?

Congrats! The bow is pointed westward! When leaving Mexico, our plan was just 2 months in French Polynesia, then head north to Hawaii and then home via Alaska. This would have been an absolute race against the season changing farther north, we'd probably be in Hawaii right now making a quick pit stop before setting out again. A lot of sea miles....We decided not to force it so hard and just keep going with the wind for a while.

I'd love to get there some day, hard work from here , either upwind for 3 weeks or down into the high 30's or 40's for a run and the long way around.
I know this is probably redundant , but do note Beveridge reef when you head to Tonga.

We would love to stop in Niue, and Beveridge reef as well but unfortunately they are still fully closed to all yachts. As is Tonga, which is a major bummer. American Samoa and Western Samoa are closed too, maybe opening up 1st of Aug but that is aimed at airline passengers and will be about a week too late for us. They are still in full covid mode- curfews every night, closed restaurants, mandatory masking, etc.... This next stretch of the world is just about the most closed and locked down anywhere outside of china.

The Cooks are sort of open, you can currently visit the island of Rarotonga, but that is just one anchorage in the commercial harbor and a lot of miles toward those scary southern waters! We have thought hard about it, even bought a Cook Islands courtesy flag, but I think we are going to head direct to fiji.

[J.Madison]

We pulled the anchor from our private little beach resort on Kauehi and headed across the lagoon to the pass.



It was a bit sloppy getting through but not too bad. We left late in the afternoon, for an overnight passage to the next atoll. Picking these passages is super tricky, you need daylight to safely cross the lagoon to the exit, you need to hit slack water mostly right, then you need the exact same conditions entering the next atoll. Unfortunately they are 20-40 miles apart so you probably arrived after dark or at the wrong tide, etc... For this reason we did not head to the south pass on Fakarava like we had wanted, but aimed for Toau. This was mostly because it was farther away so we wouldn't arrive in the middle of the night.



They call this the Dangerous Archpeligo and you can see why. Some atolls have no land at all for a large portion of their circumference, just awash reefs. The depths change so dramatically that you have no warning you are approaching a reef. There are so many islands, and the area is big enough that you cannot transit it all in daylight. When relying on celestial navigation this must have been a terrifying place. The guidebooks still recommend only transiting the area with a full moon.

GPS really did change all that. People still hit the reefs, but it is much more common to hit the bommies inside the lagoons than wash up on the outside of the reef on a dark night. We used multiple GPS devices with different charts, and confirmed our distances from the reefs with radar when possible.

We headed into Otugi pass on Toau at first light. It was our hariest entrance pass crossing yet, and a pod of dolphins were playing in the standing waves in the entrance. We couldn't decide if we were early or late, but made it in without much water on deck so it couldn't have been too bad.



As the sun was still low we headed to a close anchorage and slept for a few hours. When we woke up, we decided to go to a "secret" anchorage that some friends had visited, in a little pool behind several reefs. They sent us some waypoints that were to the best of their memory of the route in and we figured we'd give it a try. We had slept a bit too long, so the sun was now a little in our eyes. We thought that if it looked bad we would just stop and anchor outside the reefs. When we got to the first entrance gate through the reef (this is all inside the lagoon, so no currents or swell to worry about) it was wide and easy, so we marched right on in. Then things started to go downhill rapidly. We needed to make two 90 deg turns at just the right moments. But it did not look clear at all, just bommies everywhere with no obvious path through them. Whit was up on top of the main boom for more height, and we slolomed through the course at slow speed. Unfortunately the lighting was getting worse and it was very hard to distinguish between a safe bommie and one that was just below the surface. We had one very bad one that was fully awash that we saw way too late. I put the helm down hard and we inched around, just praying that the ones next to it were deeper. If it had been a dock I could have stepped out onto it as it passed along the starboard side, the wavelets were just rippling through the top of the coral. This continued for 15 more minuets until we decided we must be about in the clearest spot. We dropped the hook in 15 feet in a field of 7-8 ft bommies, floating the chain. It was the closest we had come to major disaster since starting the voyage. This is the "anchorage."

[J.Madison]

Determined not to make that mistake again we set about charting the route from the dinghy. We have a water "resistant" tablet with navionics on it, we rowed around, marking safe water and plumbing the depths of the coral heads with a dive weight on a rope. It took several hours, and we marked dozens of dangerous bommies and a very convoluted path to freedom.



This is good snorkeling. Not good sailing.



This is our approximate route, from space. Hard to tell at this scale, but there are hundreds and hundreds of individual coral heads across the entire bottom. None of the reef is above water, from deck level it all looks good unless the sun is high. Most bommies along the ideal route are deep enough, some are not. Get off the ideal route because the lighting is difficult.....



When the sun was right the next day we extricated ourselves and felt quite relieved as we broke free into deep water. Wow. Lessons learned.

We anchored up in the old spot, suddenly it looked pretty darn nice.



We enjoy the shocked then amused looks we get from other boats when we sail around in the dinghy. The outboard powered RIB is universal on all other boats out here. Even just rowing in to shore will cause lots of comments about how hard rowing must be. Its not that hard, if your boat is shaped like a boat.....

[J.Madison]

Before too long we headed back out to go to another location on Toau. Anse Amyot is a false pass, meaning it would be a pass if the inner end wasn't completely choked with coral. This is an ideal situation, as the coral also blocks most of the tidal current so the anchorage can be entered at any state of the tide. This area is now a UNESCO natural heritage site or something similar, and they have installed very nice mooring bouys that are free to use, to protect the coral.



The snorkelling is excellent, the coral is healthy and varied. Fishing must be prohibited as well, as the fish were large and plentiful.



I love the clams with neon lips. There are electric blue, green, yellow, and even neon brown if you can picture such a thing.

[J.Madison]

There is one extended family that has a couple houses on the adjoining motu. Apparently the matriach will cook a group dinner for cruisers, but they were in Fakarava on business so we didn't get to experience that.



We spent our days exploring the adjacent islands, swimming, rowing around and swimming some more.





We had a bit of a deadline looming, besides our dwindling visas, Dad was going to be flying into Tahiti in just a few days. We really wanted to visit the unique island of Makateo on our way to Tahiti. This island is not an atoll, it is basically a rock lifted straight out of the sea. It has cliffs all around and a flat top. It is one of those way off the beaten path kind of places. You grab a mooring in very deep water that is only a boatlength from the reef. There is no protection from swell if it is from the wrong direction. Apparently taking a dinghy into the little basin involves surfing the waves and then hoisting it above the waves at the pier.

But then a nasty system deep in the southern ocean started rolling in a 3 meter swell from the south, and we determined that the mooring situation would be untenable. So we headed off to Tahiti a bit early, trying to get in before the worst of the swell reached us. Its about 200 NM from Toau to Moorea, our intended destination.

Dolphins escorted us out of Anse Amyot.



Winds were brisk, so we sailed under jib and mizzen for the downwind run. This rig can be fully doused from the cockpit, in case of night squalls.

[J.Madison]

It was decent sailing, but rolly enough that sleeping the first night was not easy. It never is, but rolling makes it worse.



The second night the lights of Tahiti were visible all night. It was strange to see such a huge glow, as the Marquesas and Tuomotus are barely lit at all at night.

The next morning we were in a whole new island group. The Society Islands are basically like the Marquesas and Tuomotus got combined. They are high, green islands with dramatic peaks and lush valleys, but instead of dropping off deep into the sea they have a lagoon and then a surrounding reef just like the Tuomotus. I guess they are the intermediate stage, geologically. This is the best of both worlds, as there is enough land for large populations and the agriculture to support them, but the anchorages are completely protected by the outlaying reef and the white sand beaches and coral lagoons add a lovely element not found in the Marquesas. This has been the base for Pacific exploring since the earliest days. Tahiti, to be frank, has pretty much been ruined. At least in the vicinity of the city of Papeete. So we headed next door to beautiful Moorea to kill a few days waiting for Dad's flight.





The pass was very easy to enter. So much of the lagoon is taken up with the island, that the tidal flows are very light.



We did some hiking on shore, through quiet and lush neighborhoods and out to the pinneapple fields.