We continued on and, like at Toau, we told ourselves we would have a look when we got there and abort if we didn't like it.
It seemed fine – certainly no worse than when we had entered the other pass a few days earlier. We decided to continue. At the roughest part, a local boat overtook us, crossed to the western side of the waves and looked to be having a much smoother ride than we were. This is great! Now we have someone to follow. We tucked in behind them and a few short minutes later, we were in smooth water on the outside lee of the atoll. That's when everything started to deteriorate.
Luckily I'd prepped our food before we reached the pass, as the sailing was work enough for a whole day once we departed the atoll
The forecast had been for northeast winds of twelve to fifteen knots. That's what we had in the anchorage and for the hour it took us to get to the pass. Now that we were on the outside, the forecast was only right about a third of the time. For the other ten minutes out of every fifteen, we had everything else. We had strong gusts from the north, then south. Then it would be calm for twenty seconds. We would get a few seconds of tailwinds to get us moving, then get blasted by strong headwinds. Most of the time, the direction changed faster than we could react by steering the boat. The leftover chop made for such stochastic seas in the lulls that the slatting sails seemed less interested in producing propulsive force than trying to turn our rig into a shower of metal rigging parts pinging off the deck. After patiently trying to wait out the first of these lulls, I quickly learned to pull down all our sail as soon as I saw the wind speed start to drop. The bobbing was annoying, but it was better than being shaken to death. I ended up doing the full hoist/douse routine a dozen times on my watch. When Maryanne came to relieve me, my briefing was, "Good Luck! She's your problem now..."
Her watch was just as bad as mine. When she woke me at midnight, we were supposed to have been almost a hundred miles closer to Tahiti, but we had made it all of fifteen. Our track was very squiggly.
It wasn't until dinnertime, when I was finally able to sit through my whole meal without racing out to trim the sails or swing the wheel hard over, that things finally started to improve. I can't recall the last time we have had such a frustrating and miserable twenty-four hours of sailing.
After dinner, Maryanne flew the spinnaker. When she woke me later, I assumed it was to quickly run out and help her get it down before an approaching squall. It turned out it was just regular ol' midnight and no, I won't be crawling back into bed in ten minutes.
Conditions stayed ideal for the spinnaker and we were eventually able to make up all the time we had lost the day before. We rounded the headland into the flat water behind Point Venus just after sunrise on our third day and dropped our anchor onto the clean, black sand of the bommie-free bay. The steep, green mountains of Tahiti Nui made an ever-changing backdrop, as clinging clouds blown by the trade winds continually hid and then revealed them. In the other direction, the jagged island of Moorea juts steeply out of the sea to the left of the tropical sunset. We had planned a few buffer days to make sure we arrived at Papeete when we wanted, but we didn't end up needing them. That allowed us to take a few slow days at Point Venus to enjoy the spectacular scenery.
Beautiful conditions as we approached Tahiti
At Point Venus we spent a few days at anchor and catching up; very chilled. We didn't go ashore this time around but have been before
Anchorage location >> On google maps
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