Explore Sailing Voyages in Vanuatu 🇻🇺

Fast first day and next, tailed off to a day motoring then 2 days champagne sailing then 3 mental days of 3.5m swell and 20-35kn, then entering GBR, half a day of motoring into swell then the most beautiful afternoon of sailing and seeing whales

Motored around thunderstorms leaving Vanuatu, then pretty calm for 2 days. Reasonably good sailing, though a bit bumpy. We double reefed the main and triple reefed the jib to make a smoother ride. Still made around 8 knots for a couple of days. Caught the tide race wrong coming in via Hydrographers Passage through the Barrier Reef. At one point, we had the engines at full throttle and were making 1.7 knots SOG! Water speed was 8.5 knots. That’s some tidal flow! The border control folks laughed about it and said a lot of folks don’t know about it and get caught out like we did. They said that it’s not in any of the usual reference materials, charts, etc and you don’t find out unless you look for it specifically. Then laughed again. I guess it’s some kind of rite of passage (pun intended). Had one of the PFDs deploy at 4 in the morning! We left it on the bench in the cockpit and it got submerged when we had a wave break over the side and flood the cockpit. Good to see it deployed correctly. It needed to be serviced next month anyway, so no harm done, and we got a few good laughs! Tied up in Mackay watching the tide come in- today is about 14’ from low to high tide. Which explains the amount of tidal flow we experienced.

Run north to Luganville today. 12-15?knots on our tail. Occasional gusts to 22 made flying the ParaSailor a bit risky. OCEAN doesn’t like DDW very well without the kite, so it was a bit of a slog with the sails slapping and the tackle banging about. I guess it can’t all be perfect, but we can dream… Check out of Vanuatu tomorrow. Next stop- Mackay in Australia. Weather window looks good for a crossing.