11th August 2024
Haamena Bay, Ta’haa, French Polynesia – Apia, Samoa via Suwarrow, Cook Islands.
84 years ago (almost to the day) Winston Churchill said ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’. On Ruffian we have fought our own battle where ‘Never have the miles been so easy, sail changes so seldom and the sea so flat…… until it wasn’t.’
Before we could say goodbye to the verdant hills and deep valleys of Raiatea and Ta’haa we have one final pass to get through. Everything said this pass would be easy, it was deep and wide, faced west and was well marked. As we exited we were surrounded by a world of white water where massive rollers crashed on the reef around us kicking up mountains and spray and deafening us. As the minutes, which felt like hours, ticked by Ruffian found herself in the open ocean with miles waiting for us.
Pointing Ruffian at her distant destination we set the poles, unrolled the sails, sheeted on and cleated everything in place. For mile after mile, hour after hour and day after day, this is where everything remained. Ruffian simply looked after herself as the miles slipped by as quickly as the pages on our books.
In the middle of this vast ocean we we heading for a tiny spec of land that was no more than a few palm trees on a fringe of land and with just a few miles to go it slowly appeared. This tiny spec of green in a world of blue looked otherworldly and felt even more so as we rimmed the reef, dropped and anchor and were just about the only humanity for 100’s of miles.
The only other humans around were the park rangers and after checking us we we realised why we were all alone. The protection that Suwarrow gave from the weather in this vast ocean was scant at best and non existent in reality. As we checked the weather, looked at our surroundings we had a tough decision to make. Should we endure the expected weather near the dangers of land, or head out to sea where our comfort would be compromised but our safety confined.
A mere 4 hours after completing the immigration process for entry, without even having time to step on shore, we now had 2 exit stamps on our passports, we headed out to sea where the miles wouldn’t be easy, the sail changes frequent and the seas far from flat.
Right on cue the wind shifted, started to build and Ruffian was turned into a bucking bronco. Everything was difficult on board, cooking was impossible, getting to our bunks fraught with obstacles and all this to a cacophony of water rushing over Ruffian’s decks, her rigging staining and the wind whistling through her sails.
Ruffian was put through every sail plan. We puts reefs in and shook them out, we rolled sails out and put them away. We did everything we could to keep Ruffian powering through the large confused seas , but all this power was having a toll downstairs. Our autopilots were making some worrying noises.
Taking to the quadrant with an expectant ear and a set of feeler gauges Iain tried to work out what was going on in the bowels of the steering gear. He quickly worked out that the ‘fix’ that we’d instigated in Raiatea wasn’t a fix at all. The bracket that we had fabricated and fitted wasn’t up to the job, the gears were not quite aligned and when the autopilots were in full force they were deforming and binding the quadrant.
The more the autopilots worked the more ‘bound’ the steering became and the harder they worked. After many miles the teeth on the gears inside the first autopilot had worn away and so we flicked the switch to our spare. The nasty noises were gone, but the problem persisted. The gears on the second pilot couldn’t last forever and we just hoped that they would last until we arrived in Samoa.
The inevitable then happened, the second autopilots gears started grinding, Ruffian started veering off course and we made the painful decision to push the ‘standby’ button and steer Ruffian ourselves, helming manually. The toil was of the wheel was relentless. For 2 days and nights we sailed, stuck at the wheel in 2 hour shifts, staring resolutely at the instruments, keeping Ruffian on track and the wind in the sails.
Slowly the twinkling lights of Samoa came into view and we could almost feel the sanctuary that the harbour offered. Just as the sun was rising over the island we called port control, they approved our request for entry and we waved goodbye to the big seas, big winds and painful toil of the previous hours. We now just had to anchor.
For months anchoring had been tricky. We were always seeking out small patches of sand for the anchor, trying to avoid chain catching on coral bommies or anchoring on steep shelves where we were always mere inches from being aground. In Apia we simply motored into the bay, watched the depth slowly decrease and then dropped the anchor in the most glorious thick black sticky mud.
The previous miles and never been so hard, the toil of the wheel so arduous, and the relief of anchoring so all encompassing.
* We never got to deploy Peter the wind pilot. He was installed and ready to go, but we were too concerned to “test” him in such large seas.
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