Rapa Iti voyage 2016 (part 1)
In June 2016 I set out as one of a crew of 4 on board a catamaran, Ohana, to sail from Auckland, New Zealand, first to Rapa Iti, then Les Îsles Gambier, both in French Polynesia, in the middle of the south Pacific ocean.
Ever since I started sailing 5 years ago I have set progressively more ambitious and more demanding goals for myself. This progression has allowed me to gain new sailing experiences, to keep developing new skills, and most importantly I feel, to keep answering the question “do I still like sailing enough to keep at it, practicing and learning and setting the next set of goals with it?”.
I have used the following posts to describe what it was like to be out at sea in a small boat for a month or more. I’ve talked about the dryer facts like the routes we took and the and weather patterns we had to contend with, and I’ve also tried to capture the mood on board — what was the journey like for us day by day, and what was happening outside of the windows in the sky and on the ocean. In some ways this was a much tougher trip than I expected, and in other ways its was a delight. More on both of those in the following pages, too.
By the time I’ve covered the four main sections of our trip — across the Pacific to Rapa Iti, our stay on Rapa Iti, from Rapa to the Gambier Islands, and then our stay on the Gambiers — I expect you’ll have a pretty clear idea of what a voyage like this is like to experience, and maybe even give you some inkling of whether you might like to do something similar yourself some day. Plus I expect I’ll have a pretty clear answer to my own questions around “do I still like sailing enough to keep at it, practicing and learning and setting the next set of goals with it?”
I hope you enjoy your reading, and I invite you to get in touch with any comments or questions you have about it all.
Thanks,
Mark Russell
The voyage to Rapa Iti
- Part 1 — Introduction
- Part 2 — Auckland to Tauranga shakedown trip
- Part 3 — Leaving New Zealand
- Part 4 — Trying to get into the swing of things
- Part 5 — Action stations!
- Part 6 — Now we’re sailing
- Part 7 — A very happy birthday
- Part 8 — Action stations again!
- Part 9 — Whales
- Part 10 — A day with a bit of everything in it
- Part 11 — The sky is on fire
- Part 12 — Almost there
- Part 13 — Land ho!
