The wind and waves grew overnight. We put a second reef in the main and reefed the jib just after 1AM. We’d been waiting for a forecasted wind shift that never came, so we jibed back and forth until sunrise. With the push of the waves at our stern, Sabado was flying! 

A loud creak developed in our starboard head. Our biggest complaint about this boat is how the furniture is put together. As the boat flexes, the interior panels rub together and, after a few days, sound like a chorus of nails on a chalkboard. Ray typically stays on top of them, cutting up pieces of thin, flexible plastic cutting boards or wooden shims and wedging them in the problem areas to quiet them. He does whatever is the quickest and most effective solution on passage, but we’ll try to make it look nicer later. 

The wind decreased in the afternoon, so we reset our sails accordingly. The waves continued to boost our speed. 

We’ve settled into a routine for this passage; our days look something like this: 

12AM-3AM: Holly is on watch, and Ray is asleep.

3AM-6AM: Ray is on watch, and Holly is asleep. 

6AM-9AM: Holly on watch, tidy helm area + lines. Ray is asleep until ~8:30AM, then makes coffee for us and plays music over the speakers. 

9AM-12PM: Ray on watch, Holly asleep until ~11AM, cook brunch for us + do the dishes. 

12PM-3PM: Holly is on watch, and Ray does inspections, fixes things, checks the weather, etc. 

3PM-6PM: Ray is on watch, and Holly writes, edits, cooks dinner for us, and does the dishes. 

6PM-9PM: Holly is on watch, and Ray is asleep.

9PM-12AM: Ray is on watch, and Holly is asleep. 

Every passage looks different for us; we try to stay flexible and take care of each other above all else. Since it’s just the two of us, a rigid schedule isn’t necessary: if we start to feel too sleepy during our watch shift, there’s no shame in waking the other person up. If it was a particularly rough night and neither of us slept well, we’ll take longer shifts during the day to get some meaningful rest. Typically, the longer we’re underway, the longer our shifts get, but this is the general routine currently working for us. While on watch, we listen to music, audiobooks, or podcasts. We’ve been keeping the inverter off most of the time, but when it’s on, we message friends and family and update our social media. It’s so fun posting and hearing from you in real-time! Doing these daily passage diaries reminds me of our Pacific Crossing, they’ll be so fun to look back on one day… this blog and our YouTube channel feel like our digital scrapbook; it’s still so cool to us that other people have tuned in. Thanks for joining us! 

The wind shift we’d been waiting for finally arrived this afternoon. We’re now on a rhumb line to our destination. We’ve decided to make landfall at Niuatoputapu rather than the more popular main port of Vava’u. It has become a well-known warning amongst sailors that to check in at Vava’u you’ll need your wallet, passport, and a fiberglass repair kit. They require boats to tie up to a dock that is falling apart and charge you to use it. After hearing stories of people’s fenders getting stuck and ripping out their stanchions, having to use their dinghy to hold their boat off the dock because of protruding metal pieces, and being forced to raft up against other boats, we decided it might be worth trying to avoid. If you’re heading this way, having a few jumbo round fenders to put space between you and the dock would be ideal, plus a fender board setup. Or, if our plan works to avoid it, we’ll let you know. Our understanding is that you can check in while anchored in Niuatoputapu. You dinghy the officials out to your boat if they require a search. Sailing between Tongan islands requires a domestic clearance, so we’ll still have to check in at Vava’u when we visit, but the domestic clearance doesn’t require the boat to be docked. Then, we hope to check out of the country from Pangai. I’ll let you know how it works out, we still have ~5 days to go.

I managed to shower and wash my hair today, officially exiting zombie mode. We had dinner together and put another reef in the main, anticipating higher winds tonight. Are you tired of sunset pictures yet? It feels like a crime not to share them. Ray teases me for taking so many, but I genuinely do look back at them in my camera roll! It wasn’t all that long ago that I worked in a laboratory with no windows… Here’s tonight’s view:

Goodnight!