The Western Pacific - Pacific Crossing Notes: A Sailor's Guide to the Coconut Milk Run - page 377

Lessons Learned in the Southwest Pacific
Crossing an ocean on paper and on a boat are two vastly different exercises. In the years we
spent dreaming about and then planning a Pacific crossing, we spent many an hour poring
over charts, measuring and re-measuring distances, reading books and blogs. Foremost in
our minds were the longest passages: 3,000 miles from the Galapagos Islands to the Mar-
quesas, and 1,000 miles from Tonga to New Zealand. In comparison, the western end of the
ocean seemed like a piece of cake. Only 500 miles from Fiji to Vanuatu, and a pesky 300
miles from Vanuatu to New Caledonia: mere stepping-stones that fall well within the span
of a reasonably reliable weather forecast.
But the ocean is not made of paper; it's a liquid world that shifts and changes with every
puff of wind, every change in air pressure. And the southwest Pacific, at least in our experi-
ence, is quite a different beast than its distant cousin to the east. We learned many a lesson
along the way, one of which was that the southwest Pacific can be considered an ocean of
its own.