Leaving Mangareva (and squalls)

MFT: Napping!
LFP: Forgetting which line is which!

Hallo, so yesterday we finally left Mangareva and the Gambier Islands. We are now making our way north again towards Hao, an atoll in the Tuamotus, enroute to Papeete, Tahiti! The end of the trip is in sight. It was interesting being back at sea after a hiatus of 5 days! All of us are having fun remembering which line belongs to which sail (it’s amazing how quickly you forget when you don’t have to use them!).

I spent some of my time during afternoon watch writing up all my field notes and making sure that everything is well documented! The new thing is that the students are now entering “Phase 3” or basically they now run the watches. So we now have a JWO for each watch (Junior Watch Officer) who organizes all the jobs we have to do during watch and gives instructions for setting sails or striking them or avoiding squalls. It’s a busy job! Margaret was the first JWO for B-watch during Dawn watch this morning. We all thought it might be a quite watch (it usually is) but due to squalls we ended up tacking 4 times (first time we’ve actually tacked! normally we just jibe instead) to avoid the stormy weather (sorta worked). On the other hand, we saw some truly gorgeous rainbows! I did not sadly get any pictures of the rainbows but I’ll try to steal some photos from other people.


It was a long day (hard to get back into the swing of 5-6 hours of sleep at a time at most). But overall it went pretty well. We have four and a half days of sailing till we get to Hao and then after that (we leave about 20 hours later) another 4 days of sailing till Papeete. So things are moving along pretty fast.

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