FLYING TO TAHITI

For those of you who are as literal as Lo, we didn't hop a plane from Fakarava to Tahiti, but boy, did we FLY! 20-30 knot winds and 3-4 m seas (on average; actually got some big 5 m waves!), we were CRUISING, pushing l'il Demelza to an average of 6 knots (and much of the time with nothing but a hankerchief-sized staysail up). The crossing only took a couple of days, but was rougher than expected in the Tradewinds.

Strong winds (30 kts) in the Fakarava lagoon made things interesting for us and our friends, Helene and Thomas on their boat Cephee (a young couple from France), as we pulled up anchor together for the passage. We hadn't done a passage with another boat, and were surprised that over 250 nm of ocean, we had Cephee in sight the entire way and in fact, on one occassion, got even a little TOO close. Lo noticed on her evening watch that Cephee's red light seemed to be getting closer....and closer. When she raised Thomas on the VHF and asked their course, sure enough, there we were just our two boats in hundreds..... THOUSANDS of miles of open ocean, set on a collision course. We did some fancy maneuvering with Cephee going behind us and then us crossing back again later that night on Gary's watch. All was well when we pulled into Papeete Harbour at the crack of dawn within 30 minutes of each other, unaware of the culture shock we were about to experience with our boats tied to the quai only 10 m from rush hour traffic in a busy South Pacific-European city after the peaceful isolation of the Tuamotus.