Still in Raiatea…. Wednesday 06/09/2023

Just a brief update to say: we haven’t left yet. The weather has been adverse for the past few days, so it’s been a lot easier to just sit and wait it out. Since Sunday there has been a lot of rain, and with it high winds. If we’d left in that we would have been facing winds of 34 or 35 knots, with gusts of 40 knots or more – a pretty uncomfortable trip. Things have finally cleared this afternoon. I had expected to leave tomorrow, Thursday, but following the wind a band of very light wind is making its way across my intended route, so it makes sense to wait until Friday. (Typical – there’s either too much wind, or not enough!). It looks like the 540 nautical mile trip down to Rarotonga might take 5 days, with the wind fairly light some of the time. But that is not a problem – moderate winds and plenty of sunshine will hopefully make it a pleasant trip.

Raiatea has been a good place to be. Despite strong winds, this mooring field has been absolutely fine – it really is well protected by the outlying reef. I’ve gone ashore every day despite the conditions, which have meant a fairly bumpy dinghy ride – a couple of times I’ve been soaked by rain, but with a temperature of 26 or 27 degrees that doesn’t really matter. 

I’ve had a blacktip reef shark hovering around the boat for the past few days. A relatively small one, only about 3 feet long (90cm). They can reach up to 5 feet and are harmless – just curious. Wikipedia says they are “difficult to approach and seldom pose a danger to humans unless roused by food. However, people wading through shallow water are at risk of having their legs mistakenly bitten.” Haha, you wouldn’t want to be mistakenly bitten! 

I had a French guy come up to the boat a few days ago asking if he could borrow five diesel Jerry cans. He’d had a disaster – bought several Jerry cans of fuel and as he started to empty the first into his tank he realised from the smell that it was petrol rather than diesel. He was very fortunate – he had tipped only a little of it into his tank. He said he’d been told that you can have a small quantity of petrol, not more than 5%, in a diesel tank without it causing any problem. So I lent him five empty cans so he could get 100 litres of diesel. He returned with the cans about an hour later and insisted on presenting me with a bottle of wine, which was very kind.

An interesting passenger ship tied up here a few days ago. Wind Spirit is a sail-assisted vessel with four masts and carries up to 148 passengers. She had passed me during the night that I was sailing from Tahiti to here, and I could see then that she was flying a couple of sails. She’s clearly plying these islands at the moment, because 6 days later she was back. This sort of small passenger ship is preferable to the huge ships that one encounters, with a much smaller impact on its destinations than you get with a monster carrying four thousand or more passengers. 

In my next post I should be able to say something about Rarotonga. Until then…