Greetings from Musket Cove, Fiji! After a passage of just over seven days we arrived to Fiji from Auckland after a rather uncomfortable time at sea. If you didn’t follow along, or would like to see our posts from the passage, please follow this link: https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/SV_Atlas/

I’ll try not to recount the entire passage here other than to say it continued the theme of the past two months: hard. This is not a complaint; Melissa and I felt immense pride upon our arrival, but we’ve not shared a rather large and important detail regarding our experience with the boat that has, unfortunately, clouded our entire experience. I won’t be sharing it in this post and it may be many months before we do, but it’s colored every experience aboard the boat and made us question everything about our adventure and reminded us just how awful humans can be. So, upon our safe arrival, Melissa and I felt relief rather than elation. We’re still numb and hesitant to fully open ourselves up to this boat and, thusly, our adventure. Right now we’re hesitant, rather than bold, and I fucking hate that. We’re working hard to push out of that. We’re healing in a way and trying to get our mojo back.

The way we’ve chosen to do that is to make a routine. We’ve found that it’s helpful for all of us aboard once we have a routine, and it’s certainly useful for our homeschooling. The kids absolutely THRIVE once they’re in the schooling groove with a sense of accomplishment that sets the tone for the rest of the day. Melissa, too, soars when she’s kicking ass with the schooling. Obviously the inverse is true when things aren’t going well, but no one wants to read about that, right? Anyway, we’re trying to re-establish the routines that help ground us and then build from there. Unfortunately the routine that helps so much also has a tendency to get me anxious…

Why? I’m not good at sitting still. I know we need to rest. I know we need to have some sort of a routine. I know that I’m absolutely wrecked and need to recharge, but I struggle to balance that with my innate drive to keep moving forward. As I sit in this lovely anchorage, where we’ve now been for five days, I see boats coming and going daily and am crawling out of my skin because we’re not doing that. We’re static. No bueno. But I don’t think we’re ready yet—soon, but not yet. We’re also inclined to stay here in the hope that a kid boat or two will soon show up. We haven’t been able to link up with any yet and we’re disappointed (but not surprised) how many fewer there are here than in the Bahamas. Plus we’ve got the better part of four months here and an extra week of inactivity isn’t going to kill us. So long as I can remain calm and present, things should be fine!

But back to the title of this post…our passage! After weeks of extra time spent in Tauranga having to deal with the myriad of problems this boat continued to present us with, we finally saw an opportunity to leave. It reminded me of our time at RCYC, prior to our departure, waiting for the locks to open. While we didn’t see a good weather window to get directly to Fiji, we saw an opportunity to get away from Tauranga for a shakeout sail and took it. We planned to go north to Opua, where we would wait for a window that might be developing to get to Fiji.

Our plan was to go directly to Opua from Tauranga, a passage of approximately 30 hours but on our planned day of departure, Thursday, June 16 we didn’t love the forecast and it seemed like Friday would be the better night to be at sea. After cancelling the departure, I had a bit of an emotional fit and—with some advice and encouragement from others—unilaterally decided that we would leave the dock anyway and head 30 miles away to spend the night at Mayor Island. This proved to be a most excellent decision and Melissa, after years of practice, calmly accepted my brash change of course and rolled with it.

Our sail over to SE Bay on Mayor Island was our first sail, ever, on a St Francis 50. It was informative! And the crazy weather of New Zealand didn’t disappoint. We left Tauranga, hoisted our sails in 12 knots of wind and, after 45 minutes of faffing about (I took things very slowly and methodically to ensure things were done safely and correctly) we were finally sailing along at a spirited 9 knots in 12 knots of breeze. Then 14 knots of breeze. Then 18 knots, wait, no, now it’s 20…22, 26, 28, shit that’s 30 now. This happened in minutes and we had a full main and full headsail up. Yikes! Obviously this wasn’t forecasted and it’s not like we were behind land and suddenly left a protected bay. It just happened. But we’d noticed this day after day over the past five weeks in Tauranga, so it wasn’t shocking. But having that much sail up in those conditions wasn’t ideal, so it was time to reef! We got the headsail in (boy, I miss powered winches!) before I tackled reefing the main. Once that was done the wind settled down to a lovely 8 to 10 knots. FML.

SE Bay on Mayor Island is tiny and we thankfully had it to ourselves. It’s tight in there and we were nervous about our anchoring technique in what were many firsts for us: deep water, catamaran, unpredictable winds, bigger boat, higher freeboard, etc. Thankfully all went well, as we were able to draw on our years of experience. The cove was gorgeous! With high walls of rock surrounding us except for the narrow(ish) entrance. It was really striking, though a bit nerve wracking, as there wasn’t any room for error if we dragged or if the predicted winds didn’t behave (though we were mostly confident that they weren’t going to start coming from the completely opposite direction where we didn’t have protection).

We enjoyed a lovely celebratory meal of charcuterie and drinks on the bow of Atlas, a place that hadn’t seen much enjoyment thus far in our ownership. It was a lovely warm(ish) afternoon before the sun disappeared behind the steep rock walls and we retreated to the warmth of our cabins. The next morning, we had the anchor up just after dawn as we had a planned 27 hour passage to Opua and wanted to time our arrival with tides and daylight. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned as a few hours into our passage (under motor) we discovered a rather serious issue with our alternator and battery charging system. The day was spent communicating (from offshore with poor cellular coverage) with the electricians who had spent many days aboard this boat helping us try to rectify many of the electrical issues we’d encountered. We decided the prudent thing to do was to bail out of our planned destination of Opua and make for Auckland. This required a real push to get to a safe anchorage prior to nightfall and we didn’t quite make it. Anchoring in deep water, right next to a rock wall, in the dark isn’t fun. It was impossible to judge just how close we were to shore, it was hard to have a sight on shore to gauge if we were dragging while trying to set our anchor, and it was hard to stay married as we negotiated all of this. Despite all of that we (mostly) nailed it, but I would have preferred our first night anchoring experience to be somewhere familiar.

The next day we left again at dawn and spent eight hours motoring to Auckland, where the electrician would meet us (on a Sunday, driving 3.5 hours north to get to Auckland). When life gives you lemons… while disappointed that we weren’t going to make it to Opua, it was exciting to visit Auckland. Melissa and I last visited in 2003 and it was very exciting to take our own boat and family there. We also, thankfully, secured a berth in an ideally located marina that would allow us to leverage our limited time in Auckland.

Why was it limited? Well, we finally saw a weather window opening up and soon the call went out to our crew who would be joining us: We’re going to leave in 48 hours! Get to Auckland by tomorrow!!! Plans were changed, flights procured and a flurry of activities done under high anxiety. We were going to sail for Fiji!

Auckland was awesome. We were so grateful to be in such a boat-friendly location. Sailing is a huge part of what NZ does and the trades, services and availability of items within walking distance of this marina (the largest in the Southern Hemisphere) were amazing. We did more repairs, provisioning, boat schooling and sightseeing, in addition to planning routes, looking at weather models, and on and on. It was incredibly intense.

The night before departure we were joined by Pam and Sam, both of whom have been helping us since we first started looking at this boat while we were in the Bahamas. We had come to trust both of them and felt like everyone’s personalities would work well for a week-long passage. Melissa and I were so grateful to have them aboard to help us, we didn’t feel confident that we could do the entire passage alone and we were right. Pam and Sam were absolute rock stars. We enjoyed them enormously and they were extremely competent, patient and kind.

Rather than recount the passage day by day (which I mostly did on our satellite tracking page) I’ll use photos instead and add some caption commentary.

Briefly, the waves were never scary, nor was the wind. I think the biggest waves we saw were around 10′ and the highest wind we saw was 34 knots. What made the passage so unpleasant was the confused state of the seas. 2m to 3m waves from 3 different directions, all on a short period, while rocketing along between 6 to 10 knots is extremely uncomfortable. Not something we’d like to repeat.

As the seas became rougher, sleeping in the cabins became rather unpleasant. The boys (and Melissa) ended up spending every night (and day) in this location. I nicknamed it their Rabbit Hutch. It became rather gross and stinky. Truly, the boys barely moved from here for the entire passage. Everyone was really uncomfortable.

So the passage was a success, though uncomfortable. We learned a lot about this boat. It confirmed for us that this design is absolutely fantastic and the build of these boats is robust. Our particular vessel has “quirks” that will need to be sorted, owing to its previous ownership history. Such is life. As my beloved mom used to say, “the only way out is through.” The sail plan is fantastic and it’s a delight to have no gaps in our sail angles due to an insufficient sail plan. The stability of a catamaran is awesome, we have no regrets on that front. We think that if we had undertaken this passage aboard our last boat, it would have been the end of our adventure.

We’re now in Fiji until late October. We need to repair our wind instruments that failed due to an improper installation (notice a theme here?). It will require someone to spend at least an hour at the top of the mast, with tools that we don’t have as they’re still making their way to Fiji (can you believe our stuff is still in the USA?!). So we’re going to have to find someone to go up our rig and hopefully do the job right. That will happen in the next few weeks. We’re seeking kid boats and we will be heading a bit north to explore the Yasawa Islands in the coming weeks. We’re extremely happy to be here, we’re enjoying being on anchor and we’re happy to be back doing what we love.

We continue to post brief updates on our Instagram account. Give it a follow if you’d like something in between these longer (in duration and frequency between) posts. We so appreciated those of you who reached out to us before/during/after our passage. It truly brightened our spirits. Cruising can be isolating and lonely sometimes. We’re grateful each time one of you texts, video chats, emails or comments. Thank you. We love hearing from you. We hope you enjoy these posts and following along. While this blog is ultimately meant for us we do know many of you like checking in on us. I have been, and continue to be, a consumer of other cruising blogs so I hope ours provides some sort of inspiration, education or entertainment as others have for me.

Also, if anyone would prefer a different type of content, please let us know. My favorite blogs are the technical ones where problems and solutions are written about. I rarely go in depth regarding our repairs, thought processes on spares, systems aboard, etc. I’m happy to write about that stuff occasionally but when I imagine myself revisiting this blog 5 or 10 years from now I’d rather read what I currently write about, not fixing shit and spending money on spares.

A few more pics to end with. Each day is getting better after the tough experience in New Zealand. The Hills are happy.

Thanks for following along. Drop us a comment and say hello. We love hearing from one and all.