Welcome to the Maunie of Ardwall blog

This is the blog of Maunie of Ardwall. After a six-year adventure sailing from Dartmouth to Australia, we are now back in Britain.

Saturday 1 June 2013

The Anchorage on Fatu Hiva

 
This is our first view of the anchorage in Baie Hanavave – really impressive cliffs and rock formations, with waterfalls tumbling down from the cloud capped mountains above us. There are 10 yachts lying at anchor here, including Stormvogel and ourselves and the water gets deep very quickly so we've worked in close to the southern most cliff to anchor in about 11 metres of water.
 
We're about to go ashore to explore a little but looking back on our voyage we feel that we can be proud to have completed 3067nm in exactly 20 days. The horribly extended motoring of the past 4 days has coloured our views a but the first two weeks were pretty fast. It's been amazing that we've kept within about 4 miles of Stormvogel for the entire passage – our twice-daily chats on the VHF have kept us all sane when times were tough and humour hone through in our conversations even when we were all feeling a bit low. Keeping together proved remarkably easy – we had to make relatively few sail adjustments to keep our speeds the same so the biggest challenge was adjusting our wind vane steering systems to keep the boats on similar headings.
 
So, for the next couple of weeks we can enjoy our exploration of the Marquesas without the fear of 4.00am calls to go on watch – wonderful!!

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