Six days at Sea.
We sailed from Tuvalu to Tonga. It took six days, or maybe more, days tend to slide into one another at sea. The weather forecast had said almost no wind to start with building to almost too much by the end. Well. Yes. So much for that theory. (Everyone was grumpy that we were leaving Tuvalu early and that we were not even going to attempt to stop at Wallis and Fortuna along the way, except the captain, of course, who'd made the plans, because he was stressed about something else, and he was, well, stressed. The mood overall was not particularly positive. And I forgot to take my preventative sea sickness meds and was dreadfully sick for the first few days.) Back to the weather... We'd assumed we'd be motoring for a few days to start with but as we pulled out of Funafuti into the ocean the wind and waves were high and rising so we raised the sails at once and killed the engine, which was great, for about 30 minutes, until, BBLLIZZZSRT, the main sail - with one reef in already due to a huge rip - ripped again, a huge tear, from side to side. Yikes. We scurried to put another reef in it (so the new rip was rolled up along the boom at the bottom out of sight) but it wasn't a procedure we'd practised and it involved a lot of yelling of instructions amidst noisy flapping sailcloth and dangerous flailing ropes. Not much fun in other words. And it sort of set the tone for the trip. Each night there were vicious squalls coming through, sudden strong winds accompanied by beating rain. The captain, worried about more damage, was being cautious - with respect to the sails, not our beauty sleep - and so each night some of us would be up once, or twice, or even more than that, lowering the jib as a squall rushed in, and then, an hour or so later, raising it again. It takes at least 3 people to put the jib up or take it down, and 4 is better, plus one on the helm, and at night it was dark because the moon wasn't up and it was often raining and always there was salt spray dousing us as we worked on the foredeck. Yeah. Joyful. And it was all for nought anyway as the jib developed a huge rip despite all this and had to be swapped out for the much smaller storm jib and then there was yet another massive rip in the main sail leading to three permanent reefs in that which left us with so little cloth up that most of the rest of the way we motorsailed. (I think its time for new sails.) We had more squalls, we had weather so calm the sails were flogging, we had days of almost unbearable sunshine and days of endless beating rain... but overall it was OK, and, as most of us napped a lot during the days, it seemed a very quiet and uneventful - though endless - leg.
Oh, and we did see whales once, always good!
