Crossed the international dateline just after dusk last night. Tayrona is officially a time machine! I guess I’ve known that for a while. Time either flashes by in a blink, say when you’re sipping gin and tonics on the trampoline watching a sunset in a secluded anchorage, or it drags infinitely on, like when you’re sailing to Fiji. In nerd speak it’s called ‘time dilation’, but it’s definitely not because we’re moving at relativistic speeds. Now we’re as far east as you can get before you’re west!
Our Garmin Blue charts break at the international dateline and you have to scroll to the other side of the world to see what comes next. So just before we crossed 180 degrees of longitude it look like we were going to sail off the edge of the earth. Here be monsters!
Last night was also nice enough to reinstate the starlight dance party on deck. It’s been on hiatus due to the ugly weather on passage pretty much all the way from Bora Bora. What’s up with that? This is supposed to be the Coconut Milk Run! It was an exciting night; as we were rounding Great Astrolabe Reef to the north a boat showed up on radar and pulled past us on a near parallel course just two miles off our port. As soon as it cleared us another boat rounded the light and came almost directly at us, passing a mile off our starboard. They were easy to see with no danger of collision, but after 2000 miles without sighting a single craft “it was all very exiting” to have the AIS squawking and the radar lighting up surface contacts in the dark.
It’s just in the last twelve hours we’ve started feeling human again. The first days on passage one feels like something akin to steamed polenta. Our four-hour shifts aren’t terrible, but it takes some time to get used to parceling your sleeping time. I’m on the 10AM-2PM, 6PM-10PM, and 2AM-6AM shift. Taking two out of the three dark shifts suits me. The boat goes through cycles of skipping smoothly over the waves like a kid on a bump-jumper, bubbles gurgling under the keels, punctuated by the wave-besieged shuffle of an army crawl. Our inner ears are winning the battle against the boat’s motion. We’re naturally bracing against anything available as we lurch around the boat without thinking about it. Miranda can read even in heavy seas pretty much the second day on passage. I take more warming up, hence all my sp#ll0ng er^gors.
A few days ago we pulled into the beautiful protected harbor of… wait, what?Papeete?I thought we were out of here!Bah!
Clearing out of the country took several days of running around to immigration and customs office, one at this end of Papeete, one at the other, all by bus and in French (which I’m getting REALLY good at faking!)I jumped flaming bureaucratic hoops like a dressed-up, sweaty corgi in a circus act.It’s all part of the fun, or at least that’s what I keep telling myself.
To leave one must give notice three days in advance then get physical clearance papers from immigration on the day you’re to leave port.They’re so anal that they indicate the HOUR of your departure.We fueled and watered the boat at the Marina Taina and then headed out into the gray of the sea.
The sharp teeth of Moorea’s peaks loomed ten miles away in the distance.Scattered rain bands swept the horizon and the wind kicked to twenty knots.No problem, we’ll just rig Tayrona to sail herself around the point, then hide out inside and keep watch in the comfort of the salon, right?Wrong!We turned on the autopilot and it promptly shrieked the beeping death warning and flashed an ominous “AUTORELEASE” message.We tried it again. “AUTORELEASE” and more death beeping.I dove into the depths of the port engine compartment where the autopilot’s hydraulic ram is housed and fiddled with the rudder position sensor.It gives rudder position feedback to the autopilot brain so the system can be proprioceptive and correct rudder angle accordingly.Long story short, it was shot, but we didn’t know it yet.We turned off the “AUTORELEASE” function deep in the configuration settings and the autopilot turned to “AUTO” and stopped the incessant beeping!Hooray!We did a happy dance on deck, at least for a moment until the autopilot swung the boat hard to port, then hard to starboard searching for the right rudder angle but without any feedback.We put the kibosh on the autopilot and our happy dance and steered by hand while we tried to figure out what was going on.
We weighed the option of sailing for the next two months to Fiji by hand and decided we should probably fix the problem while we have civilization to help. I begrudgingly put the wheel hard over to bring us back to port. We picked up a mooring ball at the Marina Taina and sat there miffed for a while.
Now we were illegally in the country!Our passports were stamped out and everything!We found Tehani from the Tahiti Crew, who helped with formalities to get into French Polynesia, and she pulled some stings and got us back in the good graces of the law.We once again fly the French Polynesian flag.
In the next days we hunted down a friend of ours on a different boat in town.Paul on S/V Georgia is a sailing guru and we figured he’d be able to help.I described the symptoms to him and he concurred with my diagnosis of a rudder position sensor failure.He happened to have the same system and over the next couple days we pulled off his sensor, and installed in on my boat.The autopilot worked like a charm when we tested it out on sea trial.I was temped to take off right then and there but he’s a better sailor than me and would surely catch us.
They’re surprisingly inexpensive Raymarine parts!$250 is a steal for most autopilot failures.I’ll take it!Oops, no Raymarine dealers in French Polynesia though.Matter of fact, the closest place that has this part is New Caledonia, some 2500 miles away near Australia!We can order it from the US but it takes ten days and $400 in shipping and customs.Owwie.
We recalled a twelve-minute discussion on the docks a week earlier with an American cruiser who was heading to California to take care of some business and would be back in Tahiti in short order.In passing she casually offered to bring anything back if we needed parts.It’s one of those nonchalant proposals sailors put out there when they know that no one is going to be boorish enough to take them up on it.But hell, I’ll be boorish for $400 and no customs crap to deal with!We shot her an email and got the okay to order parts!Huzzah!
So that’s where we are now.Sitting in Tahiti awaiting a part to come in on the 29th with a good Samaritan sailor.It’s a pretty awful place to be stranded.The green peaks, blue lagoon, fresh papaya, and Miss Tahiti festivities are dreadful.Hard time aboard Tayrona.
Well I was hoping to like Panama City more than Colón, but while the city itself is nicer, the anchorage kind of sucks. It’s packed and every five minutes a tug, pilot boat, or tourist barge throws enough wake through the anchorage to knock things off tables and annoy the piss out of you after a while. Also, the area has 4 or 5 meter tides, and heavy current associated with them. Everyone’s boat reacts differently to wind and current, so at some point in the changing tides various boats are feathered in different directions and don’t lay nicely threatening collisions.
Our first night a holler yanked me out of a deep slumber and I was on deck and fending off a boat before I was actually awake. Pulled in some chain and stayed up watching the boat doing a devil spiral like our wind generator. In the span of an hour the boat swung stern to wind, right across our stern, spun at the end of its chain, caught the wind with its hull and sailed through to the other end of its chain before flipping back around and being carried by current back toward us. Freaky. I slept on deck with one eye open.
Shipped Liza and Felix off to see their friends and do some surfing.Also brought the dinghy motor in to be service by Manuel, who works for Tohatsu motors.Our dinghy has gone from annoying to completely non-functional in the past few weeks and rowing in the hot Panama sun has been less than fun.
He started it up, as best one can do that these days, and diagnosed a ruptured fuel pump. We left the motor with him and took off an hour later bound for Las Perlas! The Las Perlas island chain is located a nice 35-mile sail from Panama City, and it was a great way to escape our less than desirable anchorage in the city.
Pretty good sailing with Mom and Denny in 15 knots of wind on a broad reach. Never thought I’d be able to share this experience with Mom. Thank you Scopolamine patches.God bless pharmaceuticals. Also cool to hear Denny’s sailing stories.
About two hours in we got a bit on my new squid lure! Denny and I hauled in a 5 pound tuna! My first catch (that I landed)! Finally!
I think I’ve been using lures that are a bit too big. It was an exciting catch, and then we set to work intoxicating the fish with a shot of alcohol in the gills and a knife to the brain. Sometimes I feel like I’ve had a knife to the brain when I’ve been passing too much alcohol through my gills too. Impressive to see how many little squid and sardines were in this guy’s stomach.
The wind died along the way, so we motored to Pacheco, the northern most island, arriving just before sunset. The wind then picked up and the current ripped through the island cut. Plus it smelled like cormorant poop. I made the call to move one island south despite the oncoming dark. I’m glad we did though we had to maneuver through a mooring ball field before anchoring south of Contadora.
In the morning we moved south again to the cut between Chapera and Mogo Mogo. The name of the island was worth going in itself! We even got to dig out our spinnaker and try it out along the 5-mile trip.
Found ourselves a tall sandy beach to swim to and lounge in the shade. Eventually we made a game of throwing crab apples at crabs the scuttled along the beach. Then after smelling the apples and finding the pleasant, Miranda took a bite of one. It tasted like sweet apple, so we all followed suit with a small nip each. A few minutes later our mouths were all fiery and scratchy. Stupid move. It went away. But stupid move.
Really interesting to deal with the big tides. Didn’t sleep hard again as we spun and feathered in weird ways all through the night.
Bagels for breakfast! It’s interesting what sort of American goodies you can find in Panama thanks to the canal. I worked on the rudders and wired the LEDs for the new inverter. Took all morning, of course. We got suited up and snorkeled right around the boat. Couldn’t go far with no motor for the dinghy and high current. But we had great sea life despite the bland, sandy bottom. Five or ten big stingrays worked the bottom, and troops of puffer fish doted on them as they fluffed the sand. Two long, green eels free swimming on the bottom, a party of 100 starfish, schools of jacks and other fish all added to the fun. The water was surprisingly cold! We’ve been spoiled in the Caribbean!
Cocktail hour, dinner and cards on a calm starry evening rounded out the night.
Motored back from Las Perlas in calm seas back to the crowded, rolling, annoying anchorage of Panama City. Did my dissatisfaction come out just then? Spending a week prepping the boat for the push to Galapagos. Exciting times and a lot of work ahead!
