July 09, 2012
Near the end of our 40 hour sail from Rangiroa to Tahiti, in the middle of the night (of course), we hit the strangest squall. Cyndi was on watch and I woke when the boat motion got very odd. It was pitch black outside, raining a little, a little wind and small waves coming from every direction. We’d sailed into, well, motored into really as there wasn’t enough wind to sail, some kind of mostly windless squall that didn’t want to let us go.
We had about two to three knots of current against us and the squall was following us. It felt like the boat was caught in a fish net. We couldn’t motor faster as we were low on fuel and trying to conserve what we had by running the engine at a low speed. At one point, Cyndi turned to me and said “I wouldn’t be surprised to have this lift to reveal the New York skyline, in the year 1942!” (The funny thing is that friends got stuck in a similar squall the next night and said almost the exact same thing, right down to the 1942 part.) We had to get out of this or who knew how far back in time it would drag us. We reluctantly upped our speed and turned 60 degrees, away from Papeete, just to try to escape.
After about a half an hour of motoring the wrong way, we finally broke out and we could see these little, dense, pitch black cloud-cells all around us. We spent the rest of the night dodging them as the line of these squalls moved with us, almost all the way to Papeete.
I can’t say exactly what made them so strange. Maybe that there wasn’t much wind or rain inside, or that no matter which way we went, the current seemed to be strong and against us. (Where was all that water going? Down?) Maybe it was the incredibly confused seas for no apparent reason. The result felt like a sail through the twilight zone.
Day broke with us about two hours from the main pass at Papeete. From there on, it was pretty uneventful. OK, I guess it was a little strange to have to call air traffic control to request permission to motor past the end of the runway. It seems they have a problem with our big aluminum stick poking up into the air as planes are landing. But other that that, uneventful. Relatively.
Getting tied up at the marina was another story.
(Simulated photo of the squall – we were too freaked out to get a camera!)
