Makatea
Moonshiner
Fri 21 Jul 2023 18:58
The next destination is Makatea. It’s the only Taumoto island that is raised, having cliffs up to 100m high. Famous for climbing, we thought we should visit and put to use all that climbing gear we’ve been hauling around. It’s a fairly high stakes place to sail to in that it’s 125NM from Toau and there’s only 3 mooring buoys on the whole island with absolutely nowhere to anchor because it’s so deep. So essentially if we turn up and there’s no available moorings, it’s another 125nm to Tahiti. This wouldn’t be such an issue if we weren’t hand steering! Anyway we decided to chance it given the perfect wind forecast for our conservative sail plan in order to nurse our D1’s.
It’s been a pretty dark and roly night…so roly that I got hit on the head with 4000 Yorkshire tea bags…surprisingly heavy! We could have really done with a main sail but we can’t hoist this due to our jury rig in place to support the D1’s. We did 3hrs on 3hrs off but Ben did a big chunk of the night to begin with as I was still feeling ropey.
I’m writing this on the sunrise shift 6-9, I can see the island 20miles away which has finally given me something to steer at instead of our compass (the light has failed AGAIN). A boat we met the following day had just sailed from here and said they saw a couple of whales so we’ll keep our eyes peeled. It will be difficult if there isn’t a mooring, we’re both pretty knackered and not really up for another 24hrs…fingers crossed!