by Delphine
Went to bed at 3 and got woken up at 5 to put up parasail. Good wind and if we moved quickly we could make it to the pass in Fakarava in good time. Otherwise we had to stop at another island which has a narrow and difficult entry.
Strong wind and choppy sea and Grant ended up hand steering the whole time from 6:30am which required extreme focus. He’s exhausted. Wind was getting stronger (over 20 knots) and we were moving at 9-10kt. There’s a small tear in the parasail and we kept checking it to make sure it doesn’t rip bigger. I went down to salon to charge Grant’s phone and girls doing something else. All of a sudden, we heard Grant whistle. We ran out and Maui our parasail was gone completely!!!! O no!!! The sail fell to the port side of the boat shredded into pieces. Crazy! We brought the sailbag down and ran around to untie the sheets from the winches. We let Maui go to the stern and we pulled him in. Grant said the wind kept getting stronger and stronger, and the sail popped and ripped from the top. So scary. Sad that Maui's destroyed but he's done well and crossed two oceans with us.
We kept motoring with our genoa sail at good pace. We monitored squalls and kept missing them. In fact we haven’t encountered any squall during this passage. It started raining a little. I went to cockpit to have a lie down. Then I heard noises and felt wind and rain blowing hard. Woke up and saw massive waves and super strong wind and heavy rain. Rain was hitting us horizontally. Arabella and I went up to flybridge. As the squall hit us, Grant tried to furl away our genoa but the furler got stuck and the sail was half open flapping in the wind. Fortunately Grant managed to reset the circuit. (Grant will write a separate post explaining in more technical terms of this scary experience)/.
Never saw so much rain and wind on our boat. The sea was quite mesmerizing with the white shades and undulating light and shadows. Finally the squall passed. Maximum wind 48kt!
Took forever to get to the pass even though it looked so close. Faraway so close... We were hit with another squall before arriving at the pass. Less strong and scary than the first one. Crossing the pass was quite easy and we were all so relieved to finally arrive at the calm anchorage inside the atoll.
What an intense, eventful and exhausting passage!! Even though it was just for four days, I found it harder than our Atlantic and Pacific crossing.
Grant crashed and went to bed at 5pm. For some reason, I had an urge to make marlin fish balls for the girls and the dragonfly kids for dinner. Everybody loved the fish balls.