With 60nm to go and a new anchorage to visit, we wanted to ensure we arrived early to have good sunlight, this meant a 4:00am departure. The night before, not thinking I had kept myself up past 9:00pm, totally unnecessary but thankfully I still had a good sleep and woke up refreshed. We slipped the mooring ball lines and we were off, through the pass following our dinghy track was no issues and soon enough we were headed toward the northwest. Carl headed down for a bit of added sleep while I took the first watch. Shortly after the sun rose, the sails came out and the engine noise ended. We had good winds pushing us and the upper 5 knots of speed, a welcomed sight. There were a number of passes and reefs to avoid today, thankfully all easy to navigate around. The only time that we took extra effort to contemplate was when we needed to reef the main sail and we were a mile from a reef. After looking at the satellite images, we made quick work getting the main reefed and we were back to sailing with plenty of space.
It was a great sail and other than the period before sunrise we sailed the entire way averaging 6.3 knots. Excellent. Pulling into the protected cove the wind was honking pretty good showing 20-25 knots. We got the anchor set and began to relax with consistent 20+ knot winds. Oh well, maybe I won’t be paddling boarding to shore today…
I grabbed an afternoon nap, finished my current book, and we reviewed the game plan for tomorrow. During the day, we read that our anchorage (Cukovou) has excellent snorkeling, so we planned stay two nights to enjoy the underwater world. But arriving to high winds (and more of the same tomorrow) plus Carl’s swim of only 10 meters (due to finding what looked like a lot of jellyfish) made us rethink that plan and unless we wake to calm conditions we will complete our passage to the Yasawa islands tomorrow.
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