This is an email I sent out to friends and family, and I’ll just include it here rather than re-write about this incident:
Yesterday was a lovely day until about 5 pm. We were invited to a picnic here with the people from the island of Kioa. Kioa is in Fiji, but it is not inhabited by Fijians. 67 years ago, a small community from the island of Vaitupu in Tuvalu purchased the island of Kioa and migrated there. Now, there are many people who migrate back here to Funafuti, either permanently or temporarily, and they make up one of the small sub-communities within Funafuti. They even elect a community leader, and they have many social gatherings, like this picnic yesterday. Why were we invited? Call it being in the right place at the right time. When we were in Rotuma we met another boat called Navire with a very nice couple from New Zealand. Well, they had a passenger with them, called Kailopa, and they were giving him a ride from Kioa to Funafuti so he could visit family. Kailopa is wonderful man, and we enjoyed getting to know him a bit in Rotuma, and now that we are in Funafuti he is including us in all the festivities. Also, he has a grandson who is 17 years old named Joseph, and Joseph is being very good to Alex and Brenden, and he’s even been out to Exodus for some dinghy surfing!
So, the picnic yesterday was great, I would say about 50-60 people including lots of kids. They cooked a pig in a lovo, and they also BBQ’d chicken. They apologized that there wasn’t any fish, but they said the boys who normally do the fishing were practicing rugby and didn’t have a chance to go fishing. Alex was OK with that. The picnic was down at the very southern tip of the island, about a mile away, so we took Navire and Exodus down there and anchored off the beach. It wasn’t a great anchor spot since it was steep to, so we were close to shore without a lot of chain out, but as long as the wind direction and strength stayed the way it’s been for the past week, nothing to worry about.
Navire heading down to the picnic with Kailopa and Joseph on board
Taking the pig out of the lovo
Quite a feast
After lunch everyone piled into the back of a pickup truck and headed to the stadium for a big rugby game. Tim and the boys joined them, but I stayed behind “with the women”. Shortly after, I noticed that the wind was blowing from a strange direction, from the NW, so I headed back to Exodus. With this wind direction we were laying exactly perpendicular to a lee shore facing the fetch from across the entire lagoon. But the wind was only 11-12 kts, so I set an anchor alarm with a tight tolerance, and sat down to do some writing without worrying. I actually thought to myself, “If it were blowing 25 kts, *then* I’d have something to worry about.”
Piled in the truck headed to the rugby game
The storm rolling in
Well, pretty soon it was blowing 25-30 kts and we were hobby horsing in 4 foot wind chop. Exodus was doing fine, but I kept my eye on Navire, which was unattended because David and Janet also went to the rugby game, and after about 30 min of these conditions I could tell they were dragging back after a few particularly violent up and down movements of the boat. I started thinking about what I could do, and quickly concluded that I couldn’t really do anything. First of all getting to Navire would be difficult in these conditions, there’s no way I could drop our dinghy by myself so I would have to swim, and not being a particularly strong swimmer, that didn’t seem like a smart thing to do either. Plus, I would have no idea what to do when I got there. *Maybe* I could figure how to start the engine, but maybe not. And I’ve never driven a monohull, so would I just be making a bad situation worse? Plus, and this was really the decisive factor for me, I couldn’t very well leave Exodus unattended. We were also in a precarious position and I could just imagine getting to Navire and then Exodus starts dragging, and I’m on a boat I have no idea how to save while I watch the boat I *do* know how to save drag onto the shore. I wished to myself that it *was* Exodus that was dragging, because then I could do something. I got on the radio and called for assistance, but that was really an impractical thing to do since we were away from the main anchorage so I would basically be asking someone to dinghy down to help, but still, if by some chance someone was willing and able, I had to try. Then I looked to the shore and was so relieved to see everyone on the shore getting ready to head back to the boats. They had seen the weather rolling in and had come back early.
Navire got their anchor up first, and wow, did the waves toss them around as they headed out of the anchorage. I joked that even Lady Carolina had never provided such a show during our adventures together. Exodus tried to follow quickly, and we got the anchor up as the wind was still blowing 30 kts and the rain was pelting down (being the princess of the boat I got to stay dry under the helm bimini driving the boat, but don’t think that driving Exodus in 30 kts of wind is easy!) Not long after the anchor was up Alex started yelling that a surfboard went overboard. So, Tim jumped on a paddle board to retrieve it, and my job was to keep Exodus pointed into the wind while drifting back slowly to pick him up, since there would be NO way he could paddle back upwind to us. Alex kept a visual on Tim the whole time and let me know when he was near the back step so I didn’t engage the engine. At this point it was imperative that they got both boards and Tim on board very quickly, because without propulsion, Exodus is at the mercy of the wind and will get pushed back rather quickly towards the shore. The boys managed this operation flawlessly, and we were off again. I’m not kidding, not a minute later, our large plastic tub, which was full of rainwater to do laundry, slid overboard. Tim sees it slipping but can’t quite get there in time. So, he yells, “diver down!” and he’s back in the water. If we weren’t in such a serious situation, it would have been funny. Perhaps with time we’ll laugh about this. (Spoiler alert: it’s now about 6 months later and I *am* kind of laughing about this.)
So, by the time we’ve completed our man overboard drills it’s completely dark. We follow our track back to the main anchorage as Exodus bounces all around and things fly around the salon and galley, like books, apples, wine bottles. As we approached the anchorage we were able to make out all the anchor lights and one of the boats was broadcasting AIS, which helped get us oriented to the layout of the anchorage in the dark. We were able to make it close to our original anchor spot, but out a little further in order to have more room. We put out plenty of chain and got the anchor set and shut down the engines. At this point the squall passed and the wind died down.
This was one of mother nature’s reminders that we cannot get complacent and we have to be prepared for the unexpected. We are not in the tradewind belt anymore; we are up in squall alley, and a squall can blow in any time. Plus, in addition to squalls, the general forecast is somewhat less reliable. Down in Fiji during the cruising season, the weather is mostly caused by systems far to the south, the highs and lows as they travel across the southern latitudes cause the tradewinds and then the periodic backing winds as a trough from a low goes over. Since the systems causing the weather are relatively far away, errors in the forecast of the tracks of those systems result in relatively small errors in the wind forecast up in Fiji (land effects aside, of course). However, up here, the systems causing our weather are closer and less stable, so forecasts are all over the place and much less reliable. After thinking all of this over, I now have a full appreciation for how difficult it will be to pick a weather window for our next passage north.
As a follow up, it turns out that the “squall” that hammered us that day was a trough passing over us from the north. When I figured this out it was somewhat comforting news, in that it *was* forecast, of only I had been watching the right weather products. We had another such trough go over us several days later, and because I had been on watch I knew approximately when the rainy, squally weather would start, and I knew approximately when the axis of the trough would pass over. Thank you NWS-Honolulu.
Gresham Family Exodus 