Feb. 7, 2000; 2 days since departure

Source: Sam Low

At 4 a.m. comes the order to get under way--we had stopped sailing for six hours last night to wait for enough light to see our way through the dangerous low atolls of the Tuamotus. And what a night! We watched Orion pursue the Pleiades almost directly over the mast, as the Southern Cross arced upright and the Scorpion rose from the sea.

"I think the islands are right there," Nainoa says to Shantell this morning, gesturing toward the horizon where a rosy haze of clouds rises thousands of feet into the sky. "The eastern swell is gone. Something is blocking it. It must be the Tuamotus --Rangiroa is 40 miles wide."

We are reaching the end of the first leg of the trip--from Tautira to the Tuamotus. It has allowed the three student navigators to test their skills. If they can find their way through the Tuamotus, they can begin the next leg north to the doldrum zone with more confidence.

Yesterday the wind settled down out of the east and blew steadily at 10-15 knots. The squalls have disappeared.

We hoped to see Makatea in the late afternoon on Sunday, but the winds forced us to the west, so we passed the island unseen below the horizon. Not being able to sight Makatea as a stepping stone makes the navigation less certain. "But it's a good lesson," Nainoa reminds the three student navigators. "You often can't steer an ideal course, so you have to make changes in your mind all the time."

At the sunset navigator's meeting last night, Nainoa posed three questions to his students: "How many miles from Tahiti were we at 6 p.m. today? What is our latitude? Where are the Tuamotus and what is your plan for approaching them?" Earlier Nainoa, Bruce, and Chad concluded we were 30 plus miles west of Makatea and on a course and heading to intersect Mataiva during the night. "There is no moon and a little salt in the air, so it'll be difficult to see Matativa, even though there are plenty of trees on it. We should probably heave to around 11 p.m. tonight and wait for six hours, then set sail and go through the Tuamotus during the day."

Shantell, Ka'iulani, and Kahualaulani, calculate that between sunrise to sunset, we sailed 124 miles toward Na Leo Ko'olau (NNE). Makatea lies 124 miles from Tautira in about the same direction, so the canoe should be at the same latitude--15 degrees 50 minutes S. The winds pushed the canoe off the reference course to the west--32 miles west, they calculate. "So we are about 50-55 miles from Mataiva," Shantell reports to Nainoa. "Good, your dead reckoning position and mine are about the same, but I think we are about 49 miles from Mataiva." They agree that we should sail 25 more miles and heave to, then wait till just before sunrise to sail through the Tuamotus.

During the evening the wind shifts, and we sail NE, Manu Ko'olau, so this morning we sight Tikehau rather than Mataiva, and keep sailing. Before noon the atoll sinks into the ocean behind us and we trim our sails for the long voyage across an empty sea to Hawai'i.