Weather Window
We left Papeete on a Thursday at 04:40 with the last of the outgoing tide and a forecast I had read four times and still did not entirely trust.
The weather window for the Tuamotus in late April is a specific creature. The rainy season is winding down, the southeast trades are filling back in but not yet steady, and the pressure gradient between the South Pacific high and the residual ITCZ disturbances gives you a window of five to eight days at a time of manageable wind and negotiable swell. Between windows you get squalls that come from directions the chartlets do not admit, and you get the short, steep northerly slop that makes a motor-sailing trawler roll in a way that breaks things you had not thought were breakable. I had been caught out twice in my career in that swell. Neither time had improved me.
I had planned the passage in three legs. Papeete to Makemo, direct, roughly 450 nautical miles, three days at seven knots. Makemo to Napuka, another 220 miles, a day and a half. Napuka to the sector the chart indicated, around 85 miles east-north-east, one long day with careful lookout and a mid-water stop if we needed one.
Then the return, by whatever route the situation on Isla Verde allowed.
*Maeva* is a forty-six-foot steel cutter, displacement twenty-two tonnes, built in the Netherlands in 1998 and sailed by three owners before me. She has a Yanmar 4JH4 that I had