Beach House Ship\’s Mini Blog & Position Report – En Route Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands to Rairoa, Tuamotu Islands……

AIRMAIL YOTREPS
IDENT: N6ABC
TIME: 2016/05/21 23:25
LATITUDE: 12-34.31S
LONGITUDE: 139-46.79W
COURSE: 183T
SPEED: 6.0
MARINE: YES
WIND_SPEED: 11
WIND_DIR: 053T
SWELL_DIR: ENE
SWELL_HT: 1.0M
SWELL_PER: 8
CLOUDS: 20%
VISIBILITY: 20
BARO: 1012.6
AIR_TEMP: 33.9C
COMMENT: Beach House -En Route – Hiva Oa to Rairoa – Tuamotu Islands – Day 1 – 165 nm (254 nm to go)

The first day was overall quite nice and remains so. We\’ve been able to sail much further EAST than we thought possible which is a really good thing.
The winds that were supposed to shift from the ENE – East to the ESE and SE will arrive sometime late this evening instead of tomorrow late afternoon as the weather files have been saying for the past three days! Hopefully, they\’ll yet again change their minds as this is the most fickle set of GRIB files I think I\’ve ever seen since a hurricane formed in the Indian Ocean.

Due to the expected wind shift, we\’re staying very far east and trying to get south as fast as possible. Tonight, we\’ll roll up the big reacher before dark and set the genoa which is very easy to put away.

We\’re currently sailing a course of around 175-185 true which is effectively due south. When the winds shift, we\’ll have to change course to around 220-230 deg true and we want to keep that new wind as much on our beam or behind us as possible.

Friends on \”Jacaranda\” and \”Blowin\’ Bubbles\” are a day behind us and hopefully our wind will not get up to them before it changes back to the East. We just don\’t get to know yet.

A lovely smooth day with the odd squall going by, but nothing of note…so far!…:-) We do expect more squalls this evening. Hopefully they will be like last night and much ado about nothing. The full moon really helps to see them coming as well.

We should be at the entrance to Rairoa Atoll\’s pass on Monday morning. It seems the current should be down around 8-10 a.m. for us, so good timing..we hope.
More on the passes tomorrow.
KIT,
Scott and Nikki