Flotsom and Jetsom

The atolls that we are visiting have passes and enclose a massive amount of water. As tides ebb and flow, you get a bottleneck at the pass as all that water shwishes in and out. Kauehi has a tide of 0.5 metres in the lagoon, so 9 x 12 miles x 0.5 metres = roughly 138,240,000 cubic metres (tonnes) of water at the command of the moon's gravity and the rotation of the earth. Nothing more than a useless fact, unless you want to float a boat through that pass safely. In some passes currents can go to 9 knots with evil standing waves and strange eddies and pools. Apparently there are a number of factors that make crossing into the lagoon more or less dificult including Voodoo and luck as far as I can tell so far. The trick is to sneak in and out during slack tide (ideally the point when the tide through the pass reverses) but figuring out when slack tide happens is an elusive beast in these parts. We went in at full ebb at Kauehi becuase it looked fairly benign, we were there and we were tired of being at sea (and even still we squeeked by with a whoppping 0.3 knots over ground against the current at one point). Its not something that we can count on moving forward (in or out). Timing becomes a bit tricky when you want to go to another Atoll that is only 30 miles away.

Our plan is to get the tail end of the tide leaving Kauehi at dusk and do the same at Fakarava at dawn'ish. There are 80 small islands in the lagoon of the 'Rava and we don't really want to run the risk of running that guantlet without good light.

So, we have 6 hours of sailing to accomplish in 12 hours to be as safe as possible. We've got a pretty dogleg scribled on the chart to kill some time and we'll lay up off the coast if there is any more time killing required.