Friday 2 July Night passage to Huahine

We've had a week of bad weather, gusting winds, big seas and rain squalls, as a low front clashed with a high pressure cell. Each day we listened to the weather forecast for better conditions to make the 85 mile crossing to Huahine. Yesterday was better, but not good enough. Today is a good to go day.


85 miles is too far to make in one day and arriving at a new island in daylight is much safer so we do an overnight passage along with the 6 other boats who've also been waiting to go. As the sun was going down the air was filled with the sound of anchor chains being hauled and cheery 'fair winds', 'see you down the line' from the boats who were staying. A lot of these are people with seen from place to place over the last 4 months – we're all going the same way along the same well trodden path.

We had a very good sail; wind on the beam at 15 to 18 knots all night, kind seas and no rain squalls. Lucky for us the wind continued to blow because sometime in the early hours I was down below and happened to glance at the fuel gauge. Empty. What? How? Last time I'd looked we'd had nearly half a tank. Surely we can't have used 300L to run the generator and we would have seen a leak. Still the gauge was at the bottom of the red. What if the wind dies before we reach harbour? Of course, we're a sail boat, we'll sail. Slowly.

As the sun came up we were at the south end of Huahine with 12 miles to go to the pass at the NW of the island and the wind was still moving us along nicely but now we were sailing upright and not heeled over. How much fuel is no fuel? One way to check is to use the fuel tank dipstick, the perfect low tech instrument which can't lie. Guess what? It showed we did indeed have 300L and it was the gauge that had a fault. Phew. In the end we sailed in through the pass in the fringing reef into the anchorage at Fare, Huahine.