Hiva Oa was a easy short sail, less than 10nm, and we were in before noon. The bay was crowded but we found a spot tucked all the way in, where it was quite shallow. Only about two feet under the keels at low tide. We put out bow and stern anchors, like everyone else in that area.
Scott joined us here. He is a friend of Don and Celeste and lives in Hilo Hawaii. He is a sailor, surfer and Dr of Chinese medicine and acupuncture. He gave me my first acupuncture treatment! Having Scott on board will be great for the passage to the Tuamotus. And he’s just a great guy to have around.
I have not had good luck with stern anchors and this was no different. The first night was ok, but we were close to another boat so the next day we reset the stern anchor. Four times… it kept dragging. Eventually we got a good set and went to bed. 6am I got up and found that the anchor line had badly bent a stanchion. My aft cleats are forward of the aft stanchion, so if you run a stern anchor off one, you have to run the line inside or outside the stanchion. With the wind and current pushing us to stbd, the stern anchor was to port, so we ran the line off the stbd cleat, inside the stanchion through a low friction ring on a strop, then to a winch. This made it easy to adjust to tension on the anchor line. But during the night, the wind shifted, pushing us to port so that the line was now hard against the stanchion and it bent it about 4 inches. Earlier we had used a bridal, but this gives us very little ability to adjust the tension, and with the anchor dragging so frequently, we needed the adjustability.
After resetting the stern anchor a couple more times (with a bridal) the next morning we awoke to see the line wrapped multiple times around the stbd rudder. I was in the water for nearly 3 hours with Scott in much of that time, getting it unwrapped. Scott finally finished the job after I was too cramped up to stay in the water. Luckily there was minimal damage to the rudder, mostly paint taken off.
We are trying to leave for the Tuamotus ASAP. It’s about 500nm and provisioning there is supposed to be difficult. Many islands struggle to support the locals and don’t have much left for cruisers. So we need to get most of what we will need for the next month before leaving Hiva Oa. We are in great shape for non-perishables. Peggy did a great job there.
We need fruits, veggies and bread. And the most critical is gas for the stove. We have been using propane but butane is what they have here. It should work fine in our stove but there are two issues.The tanks here have a different connector so we need to get the right fittings. After a lot of running around, we have a hose that will connect to our tank and to the tanks they have here. Then we hang the full tank upside down above ours and the butane should flow into our tank.There is no gas available. We tried to buy in Nuka Hiva, no luck. Same in Hiva Oa. And we are about two days from being completely out. We have two tanks and one ran out when we still had a week to go in the passage from Mexico. Butane supplies have been erratic recently so the locals pre-buy everything coming in on each ship. Saturday we were told “maybe Monday “ then on Monday, maybe in two weeks, maybe not!!!
There is a big line of empty tanks waiting to be filled at the chandlery. We got in line. Then we looked at each tank and found that one large tank was full. The chandlery did not know about it but said we could get filled from that tank. So we got really lucky, jumped the line and got filled. We also found a tank in town that was full but has a different connector (different from ours and from the others here – we are told it’s the new style). We can’t use it to fill our second bottle because the connector has the regulator built in but we think we can dismember part of our current system and hook it in. It will hook in where our gas solenoid won’t be in the line so we will need to remember to turn it off at the tank.
So, with the cooking gas sorted, we bought some fresh tuna, some fruits (including an entire stalk of bananas) and veggies and pulled anchor just before noon, May 31. Tuamotus here we come!
