The sailing adventures of SV Meriwether and her crew
Finally getting a weather window to depart the Tuamotus, we took it with zeal. It took an hour and a half to motor our way out of our last atoll and into the open waters of the Pacific Ocean where we were able to raise the sails and shut down the old Perkins. For the next 300+ nautical miles we...
We moved from the island of Tahiti to the next island to the West – Mo’orea. Cook’s Bay, on the northern side of the landmass to be specific. It was a simple 45 mile, 9 hour, passage. All of which we motored as Tahiti itself gives a large wind-shadow to the prevailing westerly winds. Why come here? Well, mostly to...
By this time our French Polynesia visas were nearing their end. From the day we arrived in French Poly we had only 90 days to complete our travels and get to a place we can officially check out of the country and promptly leave. We could have checked out on Tahiti, but then we would have had to sail right...
Forty miles west of the last largely populated islands in French Polynesia is a small volcanic island surrounded by an atoll-like ring of land protecting the inner waters from the sea outside. This little island is known as Maupiti, and is home to roughly 1200 people. To enter said protected waters one must thread the needle between breaking waves and...
When we left French Polynesia we had anywhere between a single overnight sail to thirteen-plus nights. There is 1300 miles between us and our next major destination of Tonga. How long we would be at sea was fully dependent on the weather from day to day. No forecast could be trusted 13 days out, so we planned our route to...
Once the weather gave us a good window to leave Beveridge Reef, we set sail to arrive in the island nation of Niue, just 140 miles to our North-West. The passage was an overnighter, which have become quite mundane nowadays. Just to make it more difficult-slash-stressful on me, I opted to leave the mainsail down and did the entire passage...
If we had only known what Tonga would give us, we would have come here sooner and stayed longer. Getting here was no big deal, just 49 hours at sea to transit the 250 miles between island nations – of which nothing of note took place. We ate. We slept. We sailed. In fact, we sailed all but the final...
