Force Majeure
A crack at sunset, an island I was not allowed to touch, and seven hundred miles by hand.
Leaving water, Raiatea. The last look at French Polynesia, all glitter and no warning.
We cleared out of Huahine on a quiet afternoon and made the short hop across to Raiatea, and that night, with the paperwork done and the boat loaded deep, I took my last sleep in French Polynesia. I had played with the options and in the end I pointed us west, with Niue and Fiji in mind and nothing you could call a hard plan. It felt like enough of a plan at the time.
We left in about ten knots of wind and had a couple of days of easy sailing and great weather, the kind of miles that make you feel like you have this whole thing figured out. Then the seas started to build, quite steeply, and once again my instruments began to fail, and I lost any proper reading of wind speed and direction. By now that was not surprising and not something to lose sleep over. But a new element had entered the program: the autopilot would quietly stop working, and I would reset it and carry on, and it would happen again. I did not know it yet, but that was foreshadowing.
