The Western Pacific - Pacific Crossing Notes: A Sailor's Guide to the Coconut Milk Run - page 378

Westward Bound
Even with a three-year sabbatical, we are always mindful of a ticking clock in our cruising
- particularly, the November onset of cyclone season in the Pacific. After two packed
months of wonderful Fijian hospitality and scenery, it was time to move on for the last of
our island landfalls: fascinating Vanuatu, then New Caledonia. Eventually, we would head
on to Australia to sit out cyclone season out of the tropics. Leaving Lautoka at noon one
fine August day, we threaded through our last Fijian reef. Namani's bow pointed west into
the setting sun for what would be a four-day passage to the island of Anatom in southern
Vanuatu. We'd long since learned to treat GRIBs with a grain of salt, and sure enough, the
wind was significantly higher than predicted. With twenty knots of wind from the south,
we were humming along at six knots on a rhumb line course of 250°.
Nothing to complain about - except for a contrary southwest swell. We knew to expect
that, too, but somehow hadn't imagined it being quite so uncomfortable, with regular dous-
ings of our normally dry cockpit for the first forty-eight hours of the passage. Splish! One
wave would try to sneak aboard from the starboard quarter. Splash! The next would bowl
us over from port. All hatches remained sealed tight, the cabin a stuffy refuge from the ele-
ments. All the crews checking in on our informal SSB net were equally miffed. What
happened to the pacific part of the Pacific?
It was the short period of the waves that did it, not the size (six to eight feet). Like the Inuit,
who have multiple terms for different types of snow, I'm convinced that master Pacific
navigators of old had a special name for this kind of swell: something with lots of vowels
and a melodic Melanesian sound. My version, however, had just one syllable and four let-
ters. The only way to achieve a more comfortable motion was to fall off the rhumb line by
fifteen degrees. This is a recurring dilemma aboard Namani : whether to pay our dues early
in a passage, or to gamble that we'll see easier conditions later. What to do? We gritted our
teeth, hung on, and zipped our foul weather jackets tight.
By noon of the next day, the wind was up to thirty knots and we caved in, putting in a third
reef and choosing a more comfortable westward heading in squally conditions. The slender
arc of a beautiful crescent moon gave us something positive to focus on, its lazy lean a re-
minder of our latitude at 18°S. Back in Fiji, we had crossed the International Date Line and
were now firmly in the realm of east longitude, another reminder of how very, very far
we'd come from our starting point in Portland, Maine (70°W, for the record). Another
sunny point in those cloudy days was the positive attitude of our son, who'd pop up on