Nanumea has a narrow, shallow, man-made pass, therefore the current in the pass can get quite high. It’s on the south side of the lagoon, and our navionics charts were pretty far off for Nanumea. The pass entrance is approximately: 05 40.380 N, 176 06.368 E.
We arrived at about 10:30 and found True Blue V standing off, waiting for a more favorable tide conditions. So, we dropped the dinghy and Tim and Craig went to recon the pass at close range. They found about 3 kts of current flowing in. It was so much current that the hand held depth sounder wouldn’t work. We did not want to enter with so much current, so we decided to wait until later in the afternoon, closer to high slack tide. And what did we do floating around with time to kill? We made pizza of course! I had dough and sauce in the freezer, and since it’s hot as hell, these things thawed out in about 15 minutes.
We went in when we estimated it to be about high slack tide, and there was negligible current in the pass and the minimum depth we saw was 13 ft near high tide (on the lagoon side of the pass).
Both sides of the pass are lined with lighted markers (port to port when returning to port), so lining up for a straight approach was easily accomplished.
The tricky thing about this pass was that we had a ground swell coming in from approximately south causing waves to break on the left side of the pass entrance (as you are facing the entrance). True Blue V went in first, so Leann had passed on the info that the swell will push you to port. We tried to time it between swells, but we ended up doing a bit of surfing into the entrance, but Tim was ready for the swell to push us off center to the port side and he counter steered perfectly.
From my perspective, our ride, was, well, exhilarating? I watched the video I took as we went through and as we surfed a wave into the pass you can hear me say, “we’re gonna end up on that reef right there,” and then, “Oh my god, I’m so scared!” Meanwhile, at the helm, Tim’s yelling, “woo hoo! Surfin!”
However, while we were there, two other boats hit the reef in the pass. One was on entry just a few days after us with similar conditions and only by a stroke of luck did they not lose their boat. The other was while exiting the pass with the swell coming from the other side so that while exiting they got pushed to port.
Gresham Family Exodus 