It wasn’t exactly flat, but it wasn’t exactly uncomfortable either at our roadside anchorage at Onotoa. We laid low the first evening and the next morning we were welcomed by a massive squall with lots of rain and winds from the South. We rode it out and the rest of the stay was pretty pleasant.
Satellite image of Onotoa
We were visited by two local policemen who were dressed in a very official manner and who were extremely professional and polite. We invited them aboard, offered them some cookies, and basically told them the truth. We were headed to Funafuti and had planned to stop in Tarawa, which is the only official port of entry, but the wind was good, so we kept going, and now the wind is not good, so we needed to stop. They took down our passport numbers and told us we could stay and even gave us permission to go ashore to the village. We knew they would likely report us to the officials in Tarawa, and after that they might have to tell us to leave, but since it was Friday afternoon it was likely nothing would happen over the weekend, so we could relax for at least a couple days, and hopefully there would be weather to leave by Monday.
Tim and Brenden took them up on their permission to go ashore, and they met some very nice people and were given a tour of the village. Brenden said, “they had an *amazing* rope swing!” During our couple days there, Tim was invited spearfishing with a couple of the local men, some of the boys came out to Exodus to play, and Alex and Brenden tried to surf the reef break near where we were anchored. Under different circumstances we could see ourselves staying quite a bit longer there. On a bit of a down note, we lost the blue paddle board when we left it in the water at night. The boys noticed it was missing, and they tried to find it, but being parked roadside, it was long gone far out into the Pacific. This was really disappointing, but *spoiler alert* we will end up coming very close to losing the dinghy during our final visit to Tonga, so in hindsight losing a paddle board isn’t too bad.
A view of the village at Onotoa
Surfing the reef break
We ended up staying a total of three nights at Onotoa, since by Monday morning we had a favorable forecast to head south. Just as we had made the decision to leave, two men from the village came out to the boat to say hi. They brought us some coconuts and asked if they could take some photos, since they’d never been on a yacht before. For good measure, Tim ended up fixing their outboard, so needless to say we got a bit of a late start.
This passage south from The Marshalls to TBD in The South Pacific was as difficult to plan for as the passages to and from New Zealand, with an equator crossing thrown in for good measure. When we left Jaluit, we weren’t sure where we would end up, but we figured a probable next stop would be Tarawa, which meant it would probably be about a 3-day passage. The first day out had highs and lows: we managed to hook 3 Mahi Mahi, keeping only one, but we also had what amounted to a 5-hour squall from hell with max wind speed of about 37 kts.
The first two days of passage are mostly a blur for me as my usual sea lethargy was broaching into the full-blown realm of sea sickness. There are very few notes in the logbook other than at 6:05 am on the second day we had 2 reefs in the main and 1 in the genoa with 29.6 kts of wind from the NE. Considering we were trying to head SE this was a whole lot of yucky conditions.
On day 3 I finally emerged from my funk. There are lots of notes in the logbook, and I sent the following email to friends and family back home:
“I finally came out of my sea sickness funk about mid-morning. After being pretty much non-functioning for the better part of two days, I ended up having a really great day at sea today. I spent much of this afternoon at the helm listening to music, watching the waves, and counter swaying to the motion of the boat, enjoying just being out here, in a way that I can’t remember since our Pacific crossing. I guess after being so low for two days, just a regular day at sea seemed like a high. I really need a shower, though.”
We still had the reefs in the sails, and we were still seeing 15-22 kts from the NE, but the forecast said we were going to have wind for another couple days and then it would die for a while. A 2-3 kt current from the East had emerged which made it hard to get much easting, but as we approached Tarawa, we decided to press on hoping to make it down to one of the islands in southern Kiribati. Alex was happy we weren’t going to stop, because he really liked passages at this point in our journey. He liked them because he was pretty much left alone to do whatever he wanted all day, which meant alternating between reading, listening to music, playing guitar, and watching movies or TV shows on the computer. Brenden, on the other hand, hated passages, and he was the only one truly disappointed that we weren’t going to stop in Tarawa. He just wanted the boat to stop moving. Tim and I both would also have loved for the boat to stop moving, but we knew if we stopped we would miss out on a couple days of wind and then could be stuck in Tarawa for a while. So, we sucked it up and pressed on.
The next day the current from the East got even worse to more like 3-4 kts. Exodus has a hard enough time pointing upwind and compounding it with this current from the windward was like some sort of cruel joke. We started to wonder if maybe we should head to Vanuatu after all. The only good news at this point was that we caught a yellow fin tuna, so our freezer was at that point stocked with Mahi Mahi AND tuna, so we were good to extend this passage for a while. Funny though… with fresh tuna in the fridge available for sashimi or seared steaks, we opted for hot dogs for dinner. Cruisers are a strange breed sometimes. Fresh tuna was a ho hum experience while hot dogs were a novelty.
We crossed the equator for the third time in the wee dark hours of the morning on Thurs, 7 April. I slept through it again. (If you missed our spectacular first equator crossing, you can watch the video here.)
On day 5 we started having some engine trouble, and of course it happened early in the morning when I was up alone on my morning watch. The batteries were low, so I decided to run an engine for a while to give them a little charge. (I don’t like to run the generator when I’m up by myself in bouncy sea conditions.) I checked the log to see which engine we should run but when I pressed the button to start the SB side, nothing happened. So, I started the port side with no problem and let it run for a few minutes before trying the SB again, since running one engine will charge the other engine’s starter battery. This time SB started. Of course, Tim’s response when he got up was that it must have been operator error.
The next morning after being greeted by a pod of tiny dolphins, we made it within 3 miles of the island of Onotoa before the wind died down. Of course, when we went to start the engines, the SB wouldn’t turnover, and this time it wouldn’t even start after running the port for a while. We eventually started it by turning the switch to start the SB engine off the port engine starter battery. But while we were distracted with all of that we got hit with a 25 kt squall straight from the south. Which meant to get down to where we could anchor at Onotoa we had to motor bash directly into the wind. For a while we worried we wouldn’t be able to anchor. But the wind died down and we picked a spot roadside, on the outside of the atoll. With all the squalls we weren’t exactly comfortable with the idea of being stuck inside a shallow, difficult to navigate atoll without previous waypoints or waypoints from another cruiser. Plus, we didn’t have permission to be there, so we didn’t want to be too pushy.
We departed Jaluit (Marshall Islands) just after noon on Sunday, 3 April. (In retrospect, I wonder did we leave on a Sunday for a weather window or just to avoid going to church? Most likely both.) We thought we would stop in Tarawa, Kiribati, but marginally favorable winds kept us going and we ended up making it all the way down to the small island of Onotoa before the wind died. We took a three-night breather there before continuing the journey, this time bound for Funafuti, Tuvalu.
Once again, we proved weather is king and with all of us tasting landfall in a familiar place with friends waiting for us, we made the decision to press on hoping to ride the top of a low pressure located way down by Fiji all the way to Apia, Samoa. We finally rolled in to Apia after dark on Wed, 20 April, only to find that the low-pressure way down by Fiji that gave us a favorable wind direction to make it to Samoa was forecast to turn into a full-blown cyclone that was headed our way in only a couple of days. (Spoiler alert: we survived.)
The upcoming passage would be the second longest of our entire cruising adventure, and one of the most trying as well. We will make just one stop to wait for weather, surprisingly bypass both “major” ports of Tarawa and Funafuti, play bird doctor only to be disappointed, and eventually make an ill-advised nighttime arrival in Apia, Samoa just in time to experience the final cyclone of the South Pacific cyclone season.
We entered Jaluit through the southwest pass, and it’s hard to imagen a more beautiful pass entrance. It was a winding pass, but very wide and easy to navigate and see the reef. We motored across the southern tip of the atoll and dropped anchor near the main village called Jabor on Jaluit Island. There are a few coral heads in the lagoon, so we navigated upwind by eyeball across the lagoon, and the anchorage was deep with many coral heads.
It was a Friday afternoon when we arrived, and we did our usual ritual of safe arrival drinks and a boardgame, this time scrabble. We were the only boat there at anchor, but unlike most of the previous outer islands we’d been to across Tuvalu, Kiribati, and The Marshalls, the local villagers paid eerily little attention to us, and we decided to wait until the next morning to go ashore.
Southern tip of Jaluit Atoll
Satellite image of Jaluit Southwest pass
The village of Jabor was a relatively large one, and unlike Ailuk, there was no smiling welcoming committee of children when we went ashore. It’s tempting to think the people of Ailuk must just be more friendly, but the cynical side of me wonders if the kids of Ailuk were just used to cruisers bringing them lollipops, so they are conditioned to rush us when we arrive.
We tied up the dingy at the concrete wharf, where there were some kinds hanging around, so we asked them if we could tie up there and if they would watch it for us. We had already cleared out of The Marshalls, so technically were stopping here illegally. We were taking advantage of the total independent operation of different government offices. We had our approval form to visit Jaluit from The Ministry of Internal affairs, which we got while we were in Majuro. So, we took that ashore to show as our permit to be there. Meanwhile, as far as customs and immigration back in Ebeye were concerned we had left the country. Breaking the rules like that isn’t something to brag about, but sometimes it’s necessary as a cruiser given that official ports of entry/exit are often dead upwind. You have to be careful about where and when you take this sort of risk, but this time it wasn’t any big deal.
We asked the first person we came across where we could find the Mayor and we were told he was off island in Majuro, but maybe the councilwoman could help us. Her house was right near the wharf. She directed us to the courthouse, and since that was closed, we ended up at the Police Station, and eventually someone was able to fetch the council clerk, and we paid him our fee and he gave us a receipt. We explored the village a bit, but mostly the local people had little interest in us and kept their distance. We chatted a bit with some women who were operating a small desalination setup. We walked through the school (on a Saturday) and made our way out to the windward side of the island. We didn’t wear out our welcome and headed back to Exodus so Tim and Brenden could do a little spearfishing in the pass. According to Tim he fed the sharks a large grouper in an epic display of shark ball.
Yikes! We never found any danger.
We stayed only 2 nights at Jaluit before deciding we should continue our journey south. We made a mid-morning departure through the Southeast Pass, which is right near the village. Since Tim and Brenden had spearfished the day before they had some pass condition intel that made our exit pretty smooth. They had seen huge breaking waves in the pass when the current was outgoing (wind against current), so we timed our departure to be close to slack tide, but on the side when the current is still going in. We hugged the island of Jaluit as we were going out, and it was quite calm.
I must say that bashing upwind in 12 kts is a whole lot nicer than 25 kts! Mostly, the passage was uneventful, and we are all comfortable enough. We didn’t catch any fish, but there were rainbow runner taunting Brenden from behind the boat. He just couldn’t stand it. He grabbed a pole spear, clipped on, and tried to spear them from the back step. Rainbow Runner: 1, Brenden: 0.
The Rainbow Runner were taunting Brenden
Sing-a-long with Alex at sunset on passage to Jaluit
Passage from Kwajalein to Jaluit
When we left Kwajalein, we really didn’t know where we would stop next. Tim kind of had his heart set on Ebon, but I was reluctant since that would take us further to the west only making our battle back to the southeast that much more of a bash. In the end, we decided to hug the lee sides of both Namu and Alingalaplap for brief respites from the choppy sea state and made it to the atoll Jaluit.
After clearing out we checked the forecast and decided to make a break for it south. We might have a window to get to Jaluit or Ebon. We raised anchor and headed across the lagoon to exit out the South Pass without issue, in fact, we were able to transit out under sail. The problem was that during the lagoon crossing Tim started feeling sick, like really sick and had to lay down. We were reluctant to head out on an ocean passage with him out of commission, considering the weather forecast was suspect at best and there was nowhere on our path for a long way with any sort of medical facilities. It was better to stay near Ebeye and Kwajalein. So, we dropped anchor on the outside of the lagoon, north of The South Pass off the island of Ennylabegan.
It was precision anchoring at its best, even with Tim weak and nauseous. We dropped in about the only little sandy patch amongst densely scattered rock and coral. It was actually a beautiful spot, and Brenden was sent into the water to check the anchor but with his speargun in hand he forgot his primary mission and was off trying to spear something for dinner.
We spent one rolly, rolly, night out there. When anchoring in the lee of an island on the outside of an atoll, the usual problem is ground swell coming in from another direction than the wind. But that wasn’t the problem this time. This time the issue was that we were too close the large pass and we were getting serious wind chop from the pass bending around the island.
We ended up making an abrupt decision to leave the next afternoon. Tim was feeling better in the morning, but the morning forecast was still pretty bad. When we checked it in the afternoon, it wasn’t that much better. It still had an unfavorable wind angle, but at least the wind velocity was pretty light, so we went for it.
Clearing out was a ridiculous exercise, but not an atypical experience. I’ve learned to be nice and to appear patient, and this attitude served me well once again.
As usual, I tried to plan ahead and went to all the relevant offices the day before to ask questions about the process. It sounded straightforward: just go to customs and immigration, which was easy since those two offices were right next to each other. I even took the forms with me from customs so I could have them already filled out ahead of time.
Of course, the next day when I actually went to clear out it wasn’t quite so easy. There were several curveballs thrown including 2 additional offices I needed to go to (local government and port authority) and the suggestion of a boarding party for a visual inspection of the boat. I was patient, I was nice, I walked around town and did everything I needed to do, and that paid off, because in the end the customs guy waived the onboard inspection, and in his own words, “he’ll just trust me that we don’t have things to declare.”
In the end, here is what I ended up doing to clear out:
1. Paid $25 fee at local government office (government building, upstairs)
2. Cleared out with port authority. The port authority office is down by the wharf, upstairs from the post office. I found it by asking several people. There was no fee, and the paperwork was almost identical to the customs paperwork, but whatever.
3. Immigration office, which is downstairs at the government building. (The government building in Ebeye is at the south end of the island and houses the following offices that I know of: Customs, Immigration, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Local Government.) There was no paperwork, they just stamped our passports.
4. Customs office. Filled out forms and obtained outbound clearance paperwork.
So, we ended up doing our provisioning in Ebeye, which is a small island to the north of Kwajalein (still in the Kwajalein atoll). Anchoring at Ebeye was a bit of a pain. We scoped out a large area south of the commercial wharf, and in the end, we parked in a sandy spot off the south tip of the island. It was fine at low tide but very rolly at high tide. We just stuck it out since we weren’t staying long. We never did find a good place to tie up the dinghy when going ashore. I just had the boys drop me off either at the main wharf or in the tiny small boat harbor on the south end of the island. Once ashore it was like being back in The Marshalls again, and it was a bit of a relief. Social pressure of being around American landlubbers was gone, and we were back in exploratory mode. There was a small grocery store near the main wharf where I was able to do most of the provisioning.
Although there are a lot of taxis, Tim and I walked pretty much the whole island, and people were mostly shy and not very friendly. Ebeye is very crowded and I can think of no real reason to visit there unless there is something specific that you need. It seemed as crowded as Tarawa; however, the roads were better and there were far, far fewer trees. As we were walking, we noticed a little girl petting a dog, and it occurred to us that you don’t often see dogs being pet in the islands. They aren’t usually treated like pets like we are used to back home, but this little girl seemed quite fond of the dog. There are no ATMs in Ebeye, so luckily, we had enough cash for everything we needed.
We intended to buy a bunch of rice and flour for the next atoll we planned to go to, Ebon, but then found out that missionaries just took them something like 200 bags of rice, so we figured they were OK. We went ashore on a Friday with the intention of clearing out so that we could make a break for it over the weekend if the weather looked good, but it turned out to be Good Friday, which is a national holiday, so all the government offices were closed. So, we stuck it out over the weekend in the rolly anchorage. Tim took advantage of the time to finish a few projects like fixing the starboard macerator pump and finishing the sewing on the new stackpack (cover for the main sail when it is down to protect it from the sun.)
Satellite image of the densely populated island of Ebeye
An unexpected treat while we were at Ebeye was meeting the family from sv Cloud Nine. They had been there for months, and their cruising journey was taking a markedly different trajectory than ours being that they were missionaries. We told them we had heard about them from our friends from sv Sweet Dreams, who we had met back during our summer in Mexico. They came over to Exodus one evening, I can’t remember if it was for dinner or just drinks, and it was refreshing to be with cruisers again. In typical cruiser fashion we rapidly moved the discussion past typical small talk pleasantries and discussed how we have grown accustomed to their cruiser lifestyle, their roles as missionaries and the impact on the local cultures (both positive and negative) and our own personal religious position, or lack thereof. The kids hit it off, and Brenden even remarked how much he enjoyed being with cruising kids again. I paraphrase from memory, but he said something like, ‘It’s so much easier. You don’t have to worry about anything, and you can just have fun.”
Passage planning to leave Ebeye was a ridiculous exercise in picking the least bad weather window we could find. Weather forecasts were wildly different from day to day, which meant picking any window was mostly a gamble. In the end we decided to clear out and then lay low until we got the weather window we wanted. That way we could leave on very short notice.
Provisioning at Kwajalein was like some sort of cruel joke. There was an American style grocery store with familiar brands and cheap prices. The only problem was that it wasn’t accessible to me. It’s a military base, and the provisions there are for the folks that live there, not for folks passing through, and they were very strict about it. The first evening Meagan took me with her, and there was someone at the door checking ID’s and I wasn’t even allowed in the store! Although apparently that was a bit of an anomaly. Perhaps they heard we were there. Meagan did take me a couple times to the store, and I did buy about a shopping cart’s worth of stuff, but it hardly made a dent in my provisioning list for a passage all the way back to Tuvalu, and I felt scrutinized the whole time. Like I said, it was a cruel joke. I was a kid in a candy store without any money!
Gresham Family Exodus 