It’s 19:16 board time at MaRe, which is 04:14 UTC, and abeam on STB is the atoll Pukaru. It’s an uninhabitated atoll and also not fully charted. Most likely it is fully encircled by a coral reef without a pass to enter.

As the island is about 10 NM away from us, we wouldn’t have seen it even in daylight. Only at the radar screen we see 2 blips. This should be 2 parts of the island, high enough to reflect the radar beam.

With passing this island we have sails 442 NM since lifting the anchor in front of Mangareva’s E side at the Gambier Islands.

To Fatu-Hiva we have 472 NM ahead of us. The current ETA is 23-07-15 17:54. This time it’s calculated by the Axiom chart plotter based on the actual speed. Thus this will vary greatly.

Because we are approaching a bay from W, we ideally would be arriving shortly after noon to make the landfall. More about this in the next days.

For tomorrow we will use only reef 1 in the main to gain speed and NM left in the wake behind us. Thus, around 0700 we will change MaRe’s night gown for her day working dress.

I just had the luxury of a hot shower, drink a cup of tea, Shigeo prepared before and do my normal night watch routine. Among other things it’s a radar check every 20 min and have a look around the boat, watching the instruments for TWS, heading of the boat as we use wind vane mode, watching the pilot screen for alarms by wind shifts of more than 15 deg, downloading the latest weather forecast from the ECMWF, the European worldwide weather forecast with an excellent level of accuracy, and, most important, stay awake until 2000 when Shigeo takes over.