With the restart from Bora Bora looming it was all change on Offbeat. Lucy, who had been with us across the Atlantic in 2018 and 2023 and on the World ARC since the start in January was flying home and our middle son Jamie was flying in to Raiatea for the coming legs.

Picking Jamie up from the airport was the second time in French Polynesia we had been to an airport with a dinghy dock. We walked 50m from the terminal to the tender and then had a short 10 minute ride back to Offbeat at anchor. Jamie had flown in from his home in Australia fully armed with a rather lethal looking spear gun. Lucy left by the same route two days later to fly home via LA.



We then took the short 20nm sail across to Bora Bora to meet the World ARC fleet and prepare for the crossing to Niue (a tiny country smaller than the Vatican) then on to Tonga.

After all the hype Bora Bora, whilst spectacular from afar, was actually slightly disappointing. Yet another pretty island surrounded by a coral reef, with decent but not spectacular snorkelling and rather stroppy Gendarmerie where we had to clear out. We had a couple of days anchored off the Bora Bora Yacht Club (more a bar/restaurant than a club) which gave Jamie his first opportunity to embarrass himself with the obligatory audience participation with the Polynesian dancers! 🙂

There was a little anxiety in the fleet as we set off shortly after on the leg to Niue and then on to Tonga as the forecast was suggesting a decent breeze at the start, then a calm patch then trade winds but then a potentially nasty depression and gale. The leg to Niue was about 1050nm (only a thousand miles we all said, getting somewhat blasé after the 8 thousand miles we’d sailed already. We were due to have 2-3 days in Niue before sailing on to Tonga (another 350nm).

I spent the days before trying to get my head round the likely scenarios and our options and when we started we executed our plan to dive south-west to get back into the trade winds quickly, albeit at the cost of an extra 100nm sailing. Once again our dive south policy paid off. This time the large Farr 65 Celeste was the only boat to go with us. Gordon and Sharon on Take Two this time stayed closer to the rhumb line. As a result we pulled out a lead of nearly 100nm over the “fast” fleet. On this leg due to lack of space at Bora Bora the fleet had been split into first and second groups based on likely speed.

Unfortunately at this point and for the rest of the leg the weather forecasters failed us completely. At each update the ECMWF and GFS models disagreed and wouldn’t converge to the same conclusion. ECMWF was predicting a very nasty depression with a secondary low (often violent and difficult to predict). There was a lot of discussion in the fleet and we were asked for a lot of advice from the less experienced crews about how to handle the situation, defensive courses they could route themselves on and heavy weather tactics.

In the end the first fleet had a really rough trip with large confused seas and winds in the 30-40 knot range and the second group setting off three days later had it even worse with one boat experiencing 60kt gusts. Fortunately we managed to get ahead of the depression which formed above us as we approached Niue and missed all the more extreme conditions.

All the fleet behind took routing advice and headed south to avoid the worst of the wind and waves. No one was hurt, which is fantastic, but several boats experienced serious problems: broken steering cables, engine failures and the worst had a failure of both upper and lower stays on their mast but fortunately their rig stayed up and they were eventually able to make a jury rig to support their mast and made it to port.

In the end the authorities in Niue closed the port as the wind would swing to the west and their moorings are untenable. Last year a yacht was lost in poor conditions and they really didn’t want a repeat. If you watch the first 5 mins and last 5 mins of this Vlog from the well know YouTube bloggers who sail on Delos you can see why.

Unfortunately this meant that poor old Jamie had to tolerate another 2 days to arrive in Tonga, but at least we were nearly a day ahead of the next boats in the fleet and in the end over a week ahead of the tail enders. He really didn’t enjoy his first serious offshore passage but certainly enjoyed the beer on arrival.

The arrival itself at Vava’u ,Tonga., through drizzle, was reminiscent of sailing up the English Channel. The headland looked almost identical to St Albans Head on the the way from Weymouth to Poole! On arriving we had to wait about 2 hours for a US Coastguard vessel and an inter island ferry to clear the Customs dock but by early afternoon we were safely on a mooring and able to recover from a difficult leg.