An Easy Sail to Huahine in the Leeward Society Islands where we rode out storms under anchor

Hello friends, my name is James and this is my 1965 Albert 30 Sloop Tritea. We are on a mission to sail around the world and see as much of this beautiful planet as possible. We are currently working our way through the South Pacific and I can't wait to show you everything we see. Goodbye magical Moorea. Truly, truly a magical place for sure. Very, very happy that I got to visit here even for only one day. Memories I'll never forget. Now we are bound for Huahine in the Leeward Islands. We have a passage of 85 miles and pretty stoked to be on the move. So time to get to the helm and get out of the pass. We have just enough wind to be sailing. We're doing like three knots. Once we get outside the Lee of Moorea, we shall see what the winds are doing and go from there. If the winds are light still, then we will shake out the first reef that we have in the mainsail. And if it's too light, we'll motor sail. We can always use a little bit of extra charge on the battery so that's no problem. We get plenty of fuel. But as always, I would much rather be sailing with no engine and it is a beautiful clear day and I'm looking forward to making landfall on Huahine. Finally got outside the Lee of the Islands and into the real winds. We're in acceleration zone when we had the end of Moorea on our beam and it's pretty gusty but now it's stabilized and the seas have kind of gotten regular. It's blowing like 20 knots and we're running with it so pretty comfortable. We're making crazy good speed. We're doing like six knots regular and then seven knots when the big waves make us surf. So we'll have to slow down the middle of the night to make sure we don't get in in the dark. But pretty easy sailing and yeah this is probably what type of sailing we'll be doing for most of the rest of the season until we get to PG. So almost got splashed. Yeah just gonna settle into a book, relax, keep my eye out to try to see if we see some whales and enjoy the sail. It's like 6 30. The sun just went down. Big following seas. It's really hard to keep her on course. She's just getting kind of thrown everywhere. The winds dropped down to 14. It feels like they came back up though but yeah we just keep driving all over the place. Makes for wobbly sailing. Hopefully it'll normalize now that the sun's going down. And we can try to stay on our course. We're only like 50 miles from the bottom of Huahine so but these big seas, big following seas just make her go all over the place. It's like three in the morning. Little squall kind of passing over. She has us sailing kind of in a wacky direction. Winds got real light I don't know probably an hour ago and it's just been the seas have just been making everything very noisy and we just kind of been getting tossed around by the seas but I didn't, I don't want to start the motor and run the motor to get us going because I don't want us to get in before the sun comes up so we're just kind of going with it. We're sailing in a weird direction because of the squall because the wind shift but it's fine. Just been getting up every hour. Seen a number of fishing boats throughout the night and there's one sailing boat that's ahead of us heading in the same direction as us. Other than that pretty mellow night. Good morning. So we hove to at like 3 30 because of squalls and because we were so close to the island. So let's pop out and take a look at Huahine. Now that it's light out we can actually get back underway. Super stoked to be here. You can see the spray from the waves hitting the outer reef. There's the reef break right there. I've been watching this reef break. It's like a mile offshore which is so crazy. It would be very easy to hit that if you didn't have GPS satellite navigation. We're just creeping along the coast trying to make our way into the pass here off of Huahine. Approaching the pass. There's two passes next to each other. We're doing the second one. I can't remember the name of it. Two and a half miles from our current location. A little light rain storm just passed so hopefully it'll stay dry until we get anchored. One of the reasons we had to peace out from Moorea after only one day is because there's big thunderstorms coming tomorrow. So that's when I want to go ahead and get the passage knocked out over here. Get anchored and set before these storms hit. So we're going to be anchoring in a place called The Flats near Village Fair and Huahine looks absolutely beautiful. Big boy. Wow. I can hear them. Those are big big dolphins. Very lazy in the morning. So glassy. We got anchored in 25 feet of water. We got four scope all chain out. Actually five scope all chain. Have 100 feet out. I floated the chain because there is I can see coral heads and I don't want to damage them. It's beautiful. Beautiful island. I'm excited to explore it and there's a lot there's like more anchorages out there. You can see the shallows by the reef and it's very warm and now it's time for me to make a very large breakfast because I'm dying of starvation. But happy to be here. This is the Village Fair so we're definitely going to be scoping out that village and yeah get to know Huahine a little bit. It's like 4 a.m. at 3 30. The wind's got up to I don't know over 30 knots for a long time. I'd rigged up the spare cockpit shade as like a wind scoop and I guess I should have taken it down in the night but that's when the rain's coming. I was trying to use it for the cockpit but it got oh got blown out on one side. The winds are fluctuating now between I don't know they're kind of steady at maybe 20 knots and then they'll gust up to 30 35 but they were 30 35 sustained for a while. Had one of these blows yesterday afternoon too that lasted a while but yeah it was too loud to sleep so I got up made coffee and just get my day started. So I want to read a passage from the book I'm reading to you guys Mint Against the Sea about Captain Bly and his completely insane voyage with 18 of his crew in an open launch after they were marooned by the mutineers of the bounty. They were put into the sea near Tonga and sailed all the way to Indonesia in this open small open boat and in this passage they are I think they're inside the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia. It's kind of hard to follow where exactly they are because they use different names for things. I don't want to read this to you because it's bonkers and I'll read a little section to kind of set up the scene and then I'll go to the part I actually wanted to share with you. It says they had three leagues to the north northward of this inlet we found a small island where we decided to spend the night. The sea was rough the wind was now making up in gusts and there was a strong current sending to the north. Though well wooded with low scrub the island appeared the merest the merest pile of rocks with only poor landing in a lee of the point. A shark of monstrous proportion swam alongside the boat for some time as we approached the land and as we rounded the point some of the people saw a large animal resembling a crocodile pass under the boat. Bigger than the launch he was said Cole when the captain questioned him with four legs and a great long tail a crocodile ye can lay to that sir. So that's the scenario that they're pulling up on. They cruise up to this island they've only got to sleep on land I think maybe twice in all the time since they've been in this scenario. They throw out their anchor to try to anchor it's all coral and there's like a strong current running and as soon as the anchor caught the road snapped and they lost their anchor and um they had to row as hard as they could against the current back to where they thought the anchor was and uh captain Bly was like they said he um captain Bly didn't even turn around to look he just said okay stop because he knew the exact pacing as to where they had lost the anchor um this is Bly was peering down to the water ahead hold on here he ordered without turning his head there was something ominous about this place and with the wild red sunset the thought of the monsters we had seen so short a time before would have deterred most men from doing what Bly now did he stripped off his ragged shirt and trousers seized the end of the grapple line that's like the anchor road and plunged into the cold gazed after him anxiously then seeing that people had stopped rowing for a moment in their astonishment he roared out pull I say do you want to drag the line out of the captain's hands pull damn your blood he was paying out line as he shouted and gazed earnestly down in the water captain Bly came to the surface drew three or four long breaths and dived once more nearly a minute past before he reappeared this time he swam to the stern of the boat pull himself aboard for a moment or two he sat on the gunwale breathing rapidly by god sir I remarked I am glad you did not ask me to dive he laughed grimly I was none too eager to go down but I'll ask no one to do what I fear to do myself the thought of the monstrous shark was never out of my mind he shivered Nelson what was the other thing that we saw a crocodile I have no doubt about it Nelson replied Captain Cook saw what he believed were crocodiles in these waters Bly shivered in spite of himself I'm I'm as glad to be on the boat again I'm at I'm as glad to be in the boat again he said we are in a bad position here these currents are the devil they seem to set us four ways at once you were fortunate to get down to the grapple sir I'm Mr. Peck over the Indians of Oh Tahiti are the men for that work I managed to get the lion rove through the ring before I had to come up and blow but one of them would have stopped down and bent it on we whites are good for nothing underwater so gnarly gnarly and that is like the smallest inconvenience of this whole book like seriously this book stresses me out so much but it is so good if you enjoy the content on this channel and would like to contribute you can consider joining the patreon crew thanks for watching fair winds until next time