October 20, 2019 Doueoulou, Lifou to Port Bouquet, Grand Terre, New Caledonia

Today was a long day but somewhat boring to write about. I will give it may best shot. We were up very early, around 4:30AM. We’re going back to the main island. Our night sail to Lifou took about 20 hours from the southern point of the mainland to Lifou. It wiped us out for the next day. Rather than do that again we decided to sail to the middle of the eastern coast of the mainland which we calculated was 60 nm or about 10 hours. We left at first light, just prior to sunrise.

We experienced rough water from confused seas at the beginning of our trip, but it got better as the day went on. We saw lots of flying fish and even a turtle swimming along the surface, but no dolphins. I have never experienced dolphins riding our bow wave and it doesn’t look like I will this time either.

I was the skipper for much of the voyage.  Actually the auto pilot (aka Otto)was the skipper, I just monitored the auto pilot, the seas and the wind.

This was the first time in any of our sailing trips that I haven’t been able to see land.  It was dark on the way over so that doesn’t count.  In our other trips we have had some long days and covered a lot of ground but we could always see land.  Here are pictures from along the way and the chart showing a passe we needed to go through to reach our destination.

We arrived in Port Bouquet at about 3, right when we had planned.   Here are pictures of Port Bouquet.

Once in the harbor we had a terrible time anchoring. It took us 4 tries, about 1 ½ hours, to get the anchor to catch, but eventually it did. We were both every tired and Rick didn’t feel like cooking so I had cold cuts and he had left overs. Definitely an early night for us!

Here’s a map of our route.