To Fakarava

Osprey was up a little earlier than we were and pulled anchor to head to Fakarava as we were finishing up breakfast, so we hurriedly put things mostly away in the cabin and hoisted anchor to catch up with them--we wanted to watch them go through the pass. The wind was decent enough that we caught up with them and reached the pass first. While scoping it out we saw that the tide was perfect for leaving Kauehi but there was quite a bit of boat traffic. A little open fishing boat was anchored in the middle of the channel, two sailboats were coming through the pass and another was outside of the pass waiting to head through. We heard a little radio traffic and the one waiting was having engine issues. Even though the winds were perfect they didn't want to sail the pass. (Apparently only crazies do that and Ben's crazy).

Once we went through the narrowest part of the pass Bri and Rob noticed the gorgeous reef just outside the pass so they jumped in with snorkel gear to go check it out. Once they swam away we realized we hadn't come up with a plan about how/where to get them back in the boat. Ben and I tacked around near the pass trying to see where they swam to, but it's really hard to see swimmers even in 3-4 feet of swell. When we did catch a glimpse of them we tacked in the direction of a mooring nearing the mouth of the pass because it looked like they were headed that way, too.
They were swimming towards the boat hard when they looked up and realized we were sailing straight for them. At just the right moment Ben tacked without moving the headsail over (steered to backwind the headsail but flirted with a luffing main) which effectively hove-to Kyanos. It takes awhile to lose some of her speed, but I threw out a floating line for the swimmers to grab and ran forward to get a fender, which we use as a swim ladder. Even hove-to Kyanos is speedy: we were doing 3 knots while Bri and Rob fought to get back in the boat. They hauled themselves in and up on deck pretty quickly, given the speed of the boat. It went so smoothly enough that everyone was stoked: they saw some really awesome reef with sharks and we had some exciting sailing.

Once we got out of the pass and onto the course to South Fakarava the winds were on our beam/aft of the beam so Ben put up our super-racer symmetrical spinnaker. (The spinnaker has more square footage than my apartment). I didn't hear them take it down and put up the genoa since sailing puts me to sleep.

The pass into Fakarava was so much more low key than Kauehi, even with two dogleg turns to get through the reefs. Our buddies on Set Me Free warned us about all the coral which makes it hard to anchor. That was helpful info since the sun was going down and made it really tough to see anything underwater. Once the sun went down though, the water was clear enough to see the bottom by moonlight. Since we were anchored in more than 40 feet, we figured it was 50+ feet of visibility.
While we cleaned up the boat and put sail covers on we watched all the fish and sharks swimming around the boat while Ben made pizza. Nothing tastier than pizza after a day of sailing.

We haven't decided how long we'll stay here before heading to North Fakarava or Tahiti. All I know is that I want to try that drift-snorkel. It's possible to dinghy to the middle of the pass, tie the dinghy to someone and float through the channel while checking out the reef. When you've had enough, or the current gets strong enough to make swimming uncomfortable, you can hop back in the dinghy. We'll check the tide tables and hopefully hit an incoming tide so there's no danger of being swept out of the motu.