In Tahiti, and Ready for Sea

Columbine moored “Tahiti style” in Papeete.

Columbine is once again ready for sea. This time for a really long passage. We now have onboard more fuel than we have ever carried, as well as full kerosene containers, propane, and are at capacity on water. We have taken on additional food, and have replaced the house batteries. We now also have spare line, which we desperately needed on the San Diego to Marqueses passage.

We will be communicating with another boat that will be doing the same leg from Tahiti to Hawaii. They will be starting a week later than us but are faster, so we will probably arrive at about the same time. Except we won’t be stopping there.

Tahiti was "built for superyachts."  Here are some of our neighbors...

 We will be taking advantage of a weather routing service, which will alert us to potential weather conditions long before they can become a problem. We also have Grib files and Fleet files available through the SSB radio and modem. These files offer predictions of wind and sea state as well as overall barometric pressure surface analyses. Between all these, we should be able to avoid anything really nasty.

Replacement of the house battery bank was one of those fortuitous events that makes me believe that this is what we are supposed to be doing. Our batteries had been going bad for the entire trip. They finally died completely last week, and we have had to run the engine multiple times daily just to operate our normal equipment – refrigerator, electronics, etc. That was burning a lot of fuel, so we decided to get some new batteries for the trip to Seattle. We looked at all the marine stores, but they didn’t have much. So we decided to just buy some car batteries from the local gas station. They would not be ideal, because they are not designed for this type of use, but are readily available. And they are really expensive here.

Yesterday, I spotted a truck driving down the dock with a battery logo on its side. I decided to go see what he was delivering. Turns out he had a load of 6V deep cycle batteries for another boat. Just what we needed! Long story short, last night he delivered a load of batteries to us at the dock, and this morning I installed them. Now we have the battery power we should have. There will be no problem running our navigation electronics all night long (we had been just switching them on periodically) and we can run the SSB radio to email family and friends and to post blogs.

We will be sailing a bit slowly at the start. We are so loaded down with fuel, provisions, etc., that our waterline has dropped a full two inches. We have gotten several comments from people who thought Columbine was sinking! It may turn out that we have more than is necessary, but that is much better than not having enough to make it should the trip take longer than anticipated.

Cynthia with our additional food stores, including 40 cans of tuna for Nemo, and over 12 dozen eggs!  Notice the old batteries to the right, waiting to be discarded.

In all, I don’t think we could be any better prepared for this passage. There will likely be some uncomfortable spots, but nothing that would endanger the boat or crew. We are really looking forward to putting this stage of the cruise behind us, so we can start preparing for the next. Columbine has a lot of sea miles left in her, and we do as well. Stay tuned!