Back to Tarawa

We departed Aranuka with a marginal weather window which would require us to do a big, long tack in order to make it back to Tarawa. The wind wasn’t supposed to be too strong, so beating upwind would be tolerable, plus we were supposed to have a slight wind shift from NNW to WNW which would help a lot with the tack. We weighed anchor in the afternoon at high slack tide and followed our track across the lagoon and out the pass. We headed west out of the pass and then north through the gap between Aranuka and the next-door island of Kuria. Once clear of Aranuka we headed NE just barely clearing the tip of north of Abemama and then luckily, we did end up getting that slight wind shift which helped us tack back to Tarawa. So, a half day passage turned into a 28-hour passage, and we arrived back in Tarawa just after dark. Since we were already familiar with the pass and the harbor, we had no trouble re-entering at night.

Most of the northbound fleet had already departed for Majuro, so at that point it was just us and EOS II in the bouncy Tarawa harbor. We just kept telling ourselves, “Well, at least it’s on the nose!” We spent a day getting diesel and doing light provisioning. I went back to the egg farm and scored about 28 eggs, and I was so glad not to have to share my score with the entire fleet! We cleared out on the day our visas expired, but it wasn’t a good weather window to leave, so we hunkered down in the harbor and evaluated our options.

We couldn’t head for Majuro just yet, because of hurricane Pali, which was knocking around just north of the equator to the east of our path. It was apparently the earliest ever hurricane the central pacific had ever seen. Here’s a link with some info about Pali: 

The long-range forecast showed that Pali would go right between Kiribati and Majuro, so there was no way we were going to set off until it passed. So, we decided we would leave Tarawa and go up to Abiang. We had already cleared out, so we were hoping that the existence of a hurricane would be a good enough excuse to stop without permission. EOS II left the day before us, and we had coordinated to meet up in Abiang, but the morning’s forecast had a drastic change in it. Pali had dissipated! No more hurricane risk! So, EOS II decided to not stop at Abiang but instead kept on going to Majuro. We still didn’t like the forecast for a passage to Majuro yet; even though there was no hurricane there was still 25 kts on the nose forecast, which means it will probably be more like 35, and that’s just not our style.

We departed Tarawa that evening with plans to stop at Abiang the next morning, but as we approached the pass, we decided to go ahead and hang a right, pulling an EOS II and continuing on bound for Majuro. The weather forecast was still crappy, but it wasn’t looking better anytime soon, and we didn’t have permission to go to Abiang anyway, so we decided to not even bother. It was a squally morning with erratic winds, so our plan was to motor sail east for the day before we started heading north. East might seem like a strange direction given that Majuro is actually to the west of Kiribati, but the thing is with sailing, sometimes you have to go in the wrong direction in order to get where you want to go. The whole strategy was to get east in order to have a better wind angle once we got up into the northeast trade winds. (Spoiler alert: this strategy mostly worked.)