Gresham Family Exodus

Next up is a little over two months in The Marshall Islands where we will sail on a traditional outrigger canoe, harvest some copra, and even take a short vacation to a small town in the U.S., and no we didn’t fly home. (Hint: Think Army base.)

Also, we’ll still be with EOS II for a while, so you’ll get to see more of this cute face:

Kiani at The George in Tarwawa

We anchored at the northwest tip of Marakai, and the first night it was reasonably calm, since the wind had more east than north in it. In the morning we were visited by the man who owns the boat we rescued, and he gave us some bananas and coconuts and invited us to shore. His name is Taukarawa, and his English was very good, since as a young man he worked on merchant ships. In fact, when he was telling me how to spell his name, he used the phonetic alphabet (tango-alpha-uniform, etc.)

Taukarawa said we could stay at the island as long as we wanted, even though we didn’t have formal permission to be there. He said it didn’t matter, since we brought back “some of their own”, we are welcome. Unfortunately, by the second night the wind had shifted to have more north than east in it and we were bouncing and rocking and rolling pretty much as if we were underway. So, we pulled away from Marakai and said goodbye to the Nation of Kiribati at about 10 am the morning of 18 January.

We anchored near the “Council Guesthouse” icon. No, that’s not a hotel.

For 3 young men in a small fishing boat, it turns out that we made a very, very good decision when we decided not to stop at Abiang. After battling light wind, no wind, squalls, and big swells, we hadn’t actually made it very far by the late afternoon. When we were about 13 nmi SE of a small island called Marakai, the guys in the skiff approached us. They didn’t speak any English, so it was hard to get their story, but we parsed together that they had been out fishing for 8 hours and now they were lost. It was overcast and there were big swells and they didn’t know which direction their island was or how far it was. Tim got out the iPad and showed them on the charts, but then it turns out that they were also very low on gas. Their first question to us was if we had gas, but they have a 2-stroke outboard and we have a 4-stroke, so we don’t carry “premix” on board.

So, we ended up doing the obvious thing and gave them a ride back to their island, towed their boat, and fed them dinner. We arrived at Marakai just as it was getting dark, and we ended up anchoring off the village on the northwest side. Unfortunately, there is no navigable pass into the lagoon at Marakai so we had to anchor on the outside, and we were hoping it would be a tolerable spot and maybe it would be our ticket to wait for a better weather window to Majuro. Anyway, I shudder to think about the fate of these guys if we hadn’t crossed paths.

Getting a ride back to Marakai

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.)

A couple years ago we were in La Paz, Mexico for Tim’s previous 39th birthday, and our friend Dan on Dazzler gave him a cleverly wrapped bottle of rum. He used a nautical chart as the wrapping paper, and we liked it so much, Tim never unwrapped it. We’ve carried it around the Pacific all wrapped up and it became known as “The Dazzler Emergency Rum”.

Well, while we were in Abemama we ran out of Captain Morgan spiced rum (Tim’s favorite), so New Year’s Eve we finally busted into the Dazzler Emergency Rum

Thanks Dazzler!

New Year’s Eve – Getting ready to open the Dazzler Rum

Once again, I cannot overstate how much we enjoyed Aranuka. When we made the somewhat abrubt decision to leave on a marginal weather window, we spent a couple hours walking around the village and visiting people we had met in order to say good-bye. Everyone was so welcoming; I can’t tell you how many invites we had for lunch that day!

Good-bye to some of the kids of Aranuka

While saying our good-bye to Ruteru, we found out that he has an SSB radio, so once we were underway we did a radio test with him and everything seemed to be working, and he joined us for a couple of our daily nets. That was definitely a first for us… SSB traffic with one of the islanders! (Spoiler alert: it won’t be the last! Up in Marshalls one of the islanders is actually a net controller.)