Palmerston to Niue Passage, Oct 1 - 4

We left Palmerston in the morning with no wind to speak of, but we knew some was on the way and had decided to motor towards Niue (pronounced Noo-way) until it arrived. We motored along for a day and a half until suddenly a strange grinding, rattling noise began. When we put the engine in neutral the noise disappeared. Put it back in gear and we had the noise again. Oh dear. We opened up everything below to take a look at the shaft and the shaft coupling inside the boat and all looked well in there. There was still very little wind so the sea was quite calm, so Fred decided to jump in the water and investigate the shaft and propeller. He found that the cutlass bearing had come loose. On the God Spede the propeller shaft is supported by an external strut between the hull and the propeller. The cutlass bearing allows the shaft to spin inside this strut. Fred found that the bearing had slid up the shaft towards the hull so the noise we heard was the shaft rattling around inside this strut when we put the engine in gear. So, no more putting the engine in gear until we could get that fixed. Fred came back on board and we pulled out Nigel Calder's book (which is our bible for boat repairs) and began reading what he had to say on the subject. It seemed that the prop would have to come off to replace the cutlass bearing, which meant that we would need to have the boat hauled out of the water somewhere to make the repair. Now, at home that would not be such a big deal, but here in the South Pacific places to haul out a boat are few and far between. We had no idea whether there was such a place in Niue or in northern Tonga, where we had planned to visit after Niue. We did know there is a Moorings fleet of charter boats in northern Tonga, so we hoped we could haul out there, but we weren't sure and began discussing how to figure all this out while we were in the middle of the ocean.

We knew one source of information would be the Anzac net. This is an SSB radio contact group we got introduced to in the Marquesas by other boaters who participated. Basically, everyone turns to a particular radio frequency once a day and boats on passage can check in and report their position and the weather there (it's very helpful to get these reports, particularly from the boats that are ahead of you). Also, if a boat was in some sort of trouble they can come on and request assistance from others who may be near them. We knew many people on the net were currently in Tonga and Niue and hoped they could tell us for sure about the availablity of services in those areas. Fred also sent an email to Tom asking him to look things up on the internet as well.

In the meantime we are bobbing around with no wind, but we knew from Susan, our weather router, and from the reports given by nearby boats that we would soon have 25 - 30 knots of wind, which is a bit more than we really like - 15 is my personal favorite number. So, since it would be dark soon, we went ahead and put two reefs in the main sail, which is the harder sail to reduce. We left the genoa (the headsail) at it's full size since it's on a roller furler system and is therefore easy to reef from the cockpit.

About midnight the wind picked up to 15- 20 knots and we were finally moving again. I came on watch at 3 AM and Jeff went down and wrote up his watch report then layed down and had just gone to sleep when the big wind arrived. It came so strong and so suddenly that I didn't want to turn the autopilot on to reef, so I called down to Jeff, and both he and Fred came up and tried to reef the genoa, but alas, for the first time ever, we had trouble with the roller furler so were unable to get the genoa all the way in. We could roll it up a lot of the way, past the second reefing mark, but that plus the double reefed mainsail left us with more sail up than we wanted for the wind which had come up to 30 knots with gusts to 38. We ran downwind with it for a bit hoping for it to calm down a bit, it finally did about a half hour later and Fred went up to the bow, which is quite an adventure in these conditions. He found the problem with the genoa reefing, but it seemed we'd need to unroll the sail completely to fix it and we did not want to do that, so we dropped the mainsail instead and sailed along with the small genoa only. This was close to the right amount of sail, but we were now moving right along in pretty big seas and felt that it was too much for the autopilot to steer through, so we were back to hand steering. And so began Mr. Toad's Wild Ride to Niue. Unfortunately, the wind continued quite strong for the next day and a half until we got into Niue. We had decided to stop there even though the news we recieved on the Anzac net didn't seem promising for hauling out there. We thought we could at least get a rest and see if there was anything at all we could do from underwater to improve the boat's situation and we were also loathe to skip Niue, which sounded quite intriguing in our guide books. We are glad we did stop because Niue turned out to be one or our favorite spots, but more on that later.

Luckily the approach to Niue looked to be easy enough for us to handle under sail power alone. Niue is a raised coral atoll, which means it's looks like a normal island from above (ie NOT a ring of little islands with a lagoon in the middle). It also does not have a reef around it, so there were no passes we had to go through. Niue's bay has a nice wide opening and no tricky parts, and because it is quite deep quite close to shore, they also have mooring balls installed, which would make our life much easier as we came in under sail. The only worry was that it was so rough we were still unwilling to try going to the bow to repair the roller furling, which we had hoped to do before we got there, so that we could sail in under the main alone. Since sailing in as we were would be a bit tricky, and since assembling the dinghy from it's ocean passage storage would be also be tricky with the big seas we still had even in the lee of the island, we decided to get on the radio and see if any of our friends in Niue could come out in their dinghys to give us a push onto the mooring. We talked to one guy and he apparently talked to some other folks as we sailed in, so when we arrived four guys in three different dinghys came out to help. We were quite grateful, but not all that surprised because we've seen that cruisers really come to the aid of one another down here because there just is nobody else to call. We tied the dinghy with the biggest motor onto the side of our boat and using his power and a push on the bow from another dinghy we were able to come up into the wind, which was quite strong still even though we were in the harbor, and unfurl the genoa completely and drop it onto the deck. Then we got pushed up to the last empty mooring ball and the third dinghy handed the line from it right up to us. Hurray - we made it in without a struggle - with a little help from our friends. Big thanks to Randy from Swingin on a Star, Jeremy from Thulane, Steve from Independent Freedom, and Manix from Ino (who we hadn't even met yet)!