0800 Position 20-16W 158-04S. 110 miles from Rarotonga. Days run 241 miles.
The last twenty four hours have been some of the most unpleasant sailing I can recall. It reminds me of my daughter Kara's and my passage to Tahiti in 2011. It blew harder as the day progressed yesterday with rain squalls hitting us every hour or so. Not that it mattered. The boat was soaked anyway by breaking waves. There was a southerly swell left over from some storm down there that combined with the southeast swell our current wind pattern is making to produce chaos in the ocean. We are headed southwest so we leap over the south swell with a jerky motion, and the southeast swell is trying to round us up. The peaks combine right next to the cockpit once every few minutes to produce a few buckets full of water on our heads. It is days like this that make me vow to never sail on another transoceanic voyage in a small sailboat. I've made that promise a number of times but have a hard time keeping it.
I seem to have some kind of a bug too. My head aches and I go through periods of nausea that disappear and reappear for no apparent reason.
Everything on the boat is wet. Clothes, bedding, towels, pillows, hair, and the floor. Doc took a spill this morning on the wet saloon floor that scared the shit out of me. Fortunately he landed on his back and is fine.
Last night at 10PM the jib furling line broke in a thirty knot squall instantly turning the double reefed jib into a full size one. Rob and I had to go forward in the pitch black and spray to figure out how to deal with it. We ended up tying the broken ends of the line together to get our double reef back in, but we have lost some turns on the drum so it won't furl completely. We will figure out how to solve that issue today in the daylight.
At 4AM this morning I came on watch to find Rob and Piers staring at the chart plotter anxiously. Van Diemen was in the middle of the 23 mile wide channel between Mauke and Mitiaro, two islands in the southern Cooks, when they encountered the Paul Gaugin, a 600 foot cruise ship, headed in the other direction. Van Diemen would turn north to avoid the Gaugin, and the Gaugan would turn north. OK, let's turn south. The Gaugin turned south. This game of chicken went on too long for Rob's comfort but in the end we passed about a quarter mile apart.
Today looks like a better day. We've only been rained on once in the last two hours, and we have been able to slack sheets a bit after clearing the islands for our final run into Rarotonga. I'm feeling better, and the boat is starting to dry out. Unfortunately, it looks like we will arrive off the island just after dark tonight.
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