Day 6 Bora Bora to Tonga no longer via the Cooks – Sorry to disturb you but…

Day 6 and come sunrise we agreed we’d hoist the spinnaker pole and try goose-winging. That notorious sailing method of pinning your main sail to one side and poling out the genoa to the other side. So Tom had to wake Susie barely an hour asleep with a “Sorry to disturb you but…”

It’s hard enough work getting a spinnaker pole up in the flat waters we experience back home in the Solent and then there are several of us doing it. Now it’s just the two of us and a sea state trying to catapult you off the boat. Susie handles lines at the mast and in the cockpit while Tom staggers around the bow of the boat. And there are quite a few lines to deal with. Of course we shout at each other now and then but that’s just to help ease the stress a little. “Why is that line not coming?”, “Because it’s twisted!”, “Hurry up”, “I’m doing my best – just be patient!” – all lines well known to our friends on racing boats. We always go back to the cockpit, try and work out anything that went wrong and how we can improve, but fear not any shouting is quickly forgotten and we sail on.

Twenty minutes later, the wind shifts. Flick over the main sail – doesn’t help much. “Susie, sorry to disturb you but…”. Now the pole has to come down, the lines need to change and back up it goes on the other side. That works, we have a nice point of sail. Meanwhile we’ve been watching the forecast and it’s confirming our fear – we have westerly winds coming and we’re heading west. Perhaps yesterday we shouldn’t have tempted fate saying sailing upwind into waves is our least favoured point of sail. Smash, smash, smash through the waves. But worst off all we had hoped to stop at Palmerston and that wind direction does not favour a stop. Palmerston, part of The Cook Islands, is an atoll with no access to the lagoon but the locals have put some mooring buoys on the west side of the atoll. When westerly winds blow it means your boat gets precariously close to the reef and some yachts have come off the buoys and ended up wrecked. A little sad to miss it but given the forecast the sensible thing is to keep sailing. We always try to remain positive and so now declare to ourselves we are now just over halfway between Bora Bora and the next island Niue. Another five days of sailing ahead. To give some scale we’re now sailing the equivalent of Spain to Greece.

In the meantime the wind shifts again. Let’s try the parasailor. Down with the pole, change all the gear, up with the parasailor. “The halyard is wrapped around the radar”. Down with the parasailor, solve problem, up with the parasailor. Of course in the promotional material they make it look easy – maybe we should do a video as we crawl around the front of the boat struggling away as the boat lurches side to side. Off we go again – great guns now! One hour later “Sorry to disturb you but…” A big black squall on the horizon and unless we want to be pinned to the ocean, the parasailor needs to come down sharpish. Two very exhausted people.

And overnight we get more than a fair share of those black Pacific squalls – they make the Atlantic ones look tame. Black, black and laden with rain so we motor through them. Oddly around midnight the sea calms and we get some nice winds and a very pleasant upwind sail.

Safe to say we’re sleeping well at the moment, just waiting for that dreaded call…