The storm we were currently riding through at Buliya Island messed with that plan. It had been blowing out of the East-Southeast at thirty to forty knots for a week, which heaped up three to four-meter seas coming from the same direction. That was way more than the one-to-one-and-a-half-meter maximum I had been hoping for. Complicating this was that once the worst of the easterlies was over, the center of the low pressure would pass over Fiji. That would give us almost two days of westerlies, which is quite rare in the tropics. Our best option to get to Vulaga by far was to use these westerlies to sail there in an almost straight line, even if it did mean we would have to put up with the big waves left over from the storm.
The specific timing of the wind shift was sub-optimal for us. Normally, for a two-hundred-mile sail, we would leave mid-day, spend two nights at sea, and then reduce speed as necessary the second night so that we could arrive in good daylight on the last morning. This time, however, the wind shift at Buliya was forecast to occur in the middle of the night. To make the most of the westerlies, we needed to be out of there as soon as we could see where we were going. The good news was that if the westerlies were really as strong as they were predicting, we could potentially get away with only having to spend one night underway, arriving in Vulaga the next afternoon.
The midnight wind shift was a real problem. At sunset, the wind was still howling out of the east, with the big swell breaking on every shore facing that direction. By sunrise, it was supposed to be the other way around, but with slightly smaller seas that haven't yet had time to fully develop. Moving at night in such a reef-strewn area would be asking for trouble, so we decided our best option was to stay where we were and ride out the last few hours of darkness in the new winds.
I like to get up well in advance of departure time to make sure I have time to take one last look at the latest weather and still be able to get everything else ready with plenty of time to spare, just in case something unplanned comes up. When my alarm went off in the dark, just a few hours after going to sleep, the wind had just cleared the headland to our north and was now hitting the anchorage unimpeded. It was high tide then and with the chop from the wind added in, the motion on board was starting to get a little too annoying to sleep anyway.
As I was going over the weather, the motion gradually went from annoying to uncomfortable. Then it started to get occasionally scary. The ten to fifteen-knot onshore breeze in the forecast arrived as a steady thirty knots, with gusts to thirty-five. The reef to the west was four miles away, which was way too much fetch to offer any protection from the quickly building seas. Begonia was on the other end of her swinging circle, pitching over the waves, with her stern hanging over the deep edge of the coral field behind. If our ground tackle didn't hold, we had about five boat lengths to drift before we would find something shallow enough to hit. I got worried enough about it that I interrupted my weather analysis to get everything ready outside; instrument covers off, fuel valves open, so that we could have the engines running in five seconds if we needed them. Then I did my best to return to the weather charts and concentrate, despite the terrible knot in my stomach.
When I was done, it was an hour before I had told Maryanne I would wake her up the night before, and also still very dark outside. The occasionally scary conditions had deteriorated even further to only occasionally NOT scary. I couldn't take it anymore. I woke her up.
"Sorry, Maryanne," I said. "It's early, but we have to get out of here NOW!"
She was totally on board with the idea. Within three minutes, she was on deck, shining a spotlight through the spray, and directing me where to steer to take the strain off the chain. It took both engines running at 2000rpm, which would normally drive Begonia at four to four-and-a-half-knots in calm conditions, before we were even able to make headway against the wind and waves.
Once the anchor was up, my plan was to very carefully follow our inbound track out of the shallows of the anchorage and into the deep water beyond. Then we could just hover in place if we need to until it was sufficiently light outside to continue our route out of the reef.
That didn't turn out to be necessary. By the time we got to the deep channel, we ended up having about twenty minutes of darkness left. The headwinds were so strong that, even at our normal cruising rpm, we were only making one-and-a-half to two knots of headway against them. At that speed, we would arrive at our next area of concern, depthwise, well after sunrise.
We exited the Herald Passage, which wasn't nearly as rough as we had expected, then turned across the wind for a fast sail to the half-mile gap between North and South Astrolabe Reefs. Once there, we turned another seventy degrees away from the wind and all was calm again. A four-meter swell was coming at us, but it had by the been softened into a long-period swell like a smooth sine wave. Further into even deeper water, it reduced some more to two meters and slowly fell in line with the wind direction.
We sailed fast under normal working sails through Maryanne's night watch. By then, she had shaken out all the reefs and suggested I may want to switch to spinnaker for my watch. Do I ever?
Well, sort of. I checked the forecast to make sure there were no new shenanigans afoot. There were not, so up it went, at least for a while.
The winds were forecast to strengthen and slowly move forward. We were sailing to the windward side of the rhumb line as a hedge against it, but I knew I would probably have to change back to working sail before the end of my watch.
During the night, Maryanne let out the main and took-out this poor petrel which presumably wasn't expecting the giant mainsail to suddenly slap it out of the air. It landed on the deck, stunned. Maryanne let it rest for a while until it recovered and flew off looking quite healthy (huge relief)
A rare wind angle allowed us a near direct route to Vulaga this time
As daylight approached, we were making such good headway that I was wanting to wait until the very last minute to make the big sail change. I knew it was folly though, which would probably only cost us half a mile to do, so I decided to complete the task a little early, when the job would be less stressful.
It was a good thing I did. As I got the head (top) of the spinnaker down on deck, I noticed that the halyard was chafed about halfway through its diameter. If that line had parted, I (probably we) would have had a whole big mess to deal with as we struggled to retrieve a giant, sodden sail that the boat had run over.
Normally, when we are not using our spinnaker, we stow the halyard to starboard by clipping its shackle to one of the boards mounted between our stanchions on that side. In that position, it was interfering with the jib, so Maryanne moved the shackle to the base of the mast to get it out of the way. Since there was an empty cleat on the port side of the mast, she attached it there. Later on, when I went to hoist the spinnaker, I assumed that since the halyard was attached to the port side of the mast, it must have been gybed over, as we do when we gybe the spinnaker while using it. Since the halyard attach point to the mast is above the forestay tang, this has to be done by walking forward on the trampoline and passing the halyard around the front of the jib/roller furler to get it to the other side. This is pretty hard to do with the jib sheeted way out, and it can be a bit treacherous in rough seas. I'm sure Maryanne intended the task to be a temporary solution only, no need to go to all the trouble above, only to have to do it again in reverse later. In the same circumstances, I almost certainly would have done the same thing (and thinking back on it, I'm sure she mentioned something about the spinnaker halyard when we switched watches... Hmm...)
The real problem came many hours later. When I went to hoist the spinnaker, I had a quick glance to make sure everything looked right up there, but I didn't really look at it. Had I done so, I would have noticed the head of the spinnaker seems a little bit low because, instead of the halyard running straight out from the mast block like it should have, it was going straight down and passing under the forestay tang first, which caused the line to chafe quite badly. Had I left the spinnaker up like that for another half hour, the line would surely have worn through. It turned out to be a good thing I brought it down earlier than I had wanted, and I got to learn a very important lesson in the process...
With the working sails back up and everything looking like it really was supposed to up there, we made quick work of the last few miles to Vulaga. Boats were using the weather to get here from all over and Begonia ended up being fifth in a string of boats that transited the pass more or less at once.
Our timing at the pass wasn't great. We missed high water slack, and low water slack wasn't going to occur until after dark. This left us with a fast ebb to deal with.
Entering the pass at Vulaga
Fortunately, the water was flat, but a few minutes in, it became clear that our normal cruising rpm wasn't going to cut it. I pushed the throttles hallway from where they were to the stops. That sped us up to a nice, consistent two knots over the ground, which would get us through in a few minutes, but those poor engines were really screaming with the effort. It was a relief to make it fully into the lagoon, where I could bring them back into their normal range.
Our plan was to go to the anchorage at the end of the path for the main village of Mauna-i-cake (pronounced Mauna-ee-thacke). We would do our sevusevu in the morning and then decamp to our favorite, double-secret anchorage in the boonies to the west.
Of course, that double-secret thing was back in 2019. We found it by carefully sighting our way in through large areas on the chart that were either unsurveyed or measured to likely be too shallow for our draft. Since then, good, widely accessible satellite imagery has made it much easier to find a good route to places like this. Possibly even because of our comments on a previous blog entry, our one special, remote spot is now on the rotation for those in Vulaga that want a change of scenery from the big, more easily accessible anchorages. One of those vessels had made a note about a direct, previously unknown to us, footpath between this anchorage and the village. Since all the vessels ahead of us had turned left after clearing the pass, Maryanne suggested we skip the main village anchorage and instead turn right to stake out our favorite spot while the getting was good.
Alas, our previous exact location was occupied, but there was enough room for us to sidle past them and anchor in the shallows beyond. That also had the benefit of making for a shorter row to the trail in the morning. Whew! We're here in plenty of time for sunset and the place is just a beautiful as we remembered.
Safely at anchor
Anchorage location >> On google maps
