Wednesday 4 February – another hectic day!

We left as soon as Rowan woke up as we knew it was going to be a long passage, all being well we could get to the atoll that Rowan wanted to go to just in daylight. I was not keen on going to the atoll as it was a windy forecast, and the reviews have not been that great. Someone thought that they have been blasting the coral, no fish, obviously heavily overfished. We got the sails up immediately and had wind in the right direction so we were very happy to be having a good sail and covering good ground. We kept a beady eye out for the squalls. We managed to skirt an enormous one mid morning, as it got into our 2 mile radar range we got all the sails down and motored for a little while letting it pass. We got a little rain and some gusty wind but nothing much over 20 knots. We got the sails back up and enjoyed the quiet sail with no engines on.

It was all too good to be true. We were just wondering if we would make the entrance in daylight, we were over an hour away. Rowan put both engines on to speed us up. Suddenly an alarm went off and our auto pilot said it wasn’t working. Thank God we have a second one and it was easy enough to switch over. We hadn’t gone much further when another alarm went off, our gps position packed up, then it was just a succession of alarms as wind, depth, and every bit of info except speed over ground died on us. Ugh this was going to prove a real nightmare going through a narrow passage into an atoll with windy choppy seas. It was 5pm and now it was a race against time. Thank goodness Starling powers our phones which give us brilliant satellite pictures, so we thought we could just manage. We got into the entrance to the atoll and the water was furious, wind was obviously meeting high tide, I was up front looking out for reef, but looking straight into the last rays of the sun was not making it easy to see anything, besides getting splashed by the waves. Halfway through the long entrance Rowan decided it was going to be foolish to go without depth, we got halfway round when he suddenly remembered our friend Chris Thomas the engineer had remarked how interesting it was that our depth gauge had bluetooth accessibility. Rowan called me back from the front and I went into the guest cabin where the depth gauge is under the bed. I picked the signal up and was able to read Rowan the depths as we were going through. I couldn’t go back upstairs as it then lost signal, I had to stay close to it. We finally got through and went to the nearest anchorage, a nice sandy patch we needed the anchor well hooked in a this wind. We were rolling around in the waves, but at least we were facing the wind and were relatively comfortable and most importantly safe. We are not so keen doing the night passages with so many Fads about, we have heard so many boats having trouble hitting them and not being able to get untangled.

Ugh what a nightmare. Our inkling is that we have electrical problems from the lightning storm in the Solomon Islands. Two of the 13 boats like ours have been struck, one boat twice. Their electronic things just slowly stopped working. Rowan was contacting all sorts of people, including another boat that is heading our way, they had been refuelling with Andy in Pasarwajo and Rowan had been talking to them. They very kindly have offered to meet us and buddy boat to Flores Island, our destination. They are doing a slightly different route to us, but it is reassuring knowing there is another boat not too far away. Between ChatGPT and some local contacts it looks like the main electrical connector of all the various bits is having a problem. We need to get somewhere safe and switch everything off, then put things back on one at a time. We did not want to do anything here in the atoll, besides it was too bouncy and Rowan was tired. We opted for an easy supper and to sleep on all the issues.