The storm track

We had a wonderful time in Fiji but it is time to go to Tuvalu. A 600 miles passage awaits us, we have been checking the forecast and everything looks clear for the coming week. No sign of instable weather so we set sail! The passage starts very calm, the boat self-steering, while on the second day Keturah picks up speed, the sails are reefed while still moving fast towards Funafuti.

After four days and just 200 miles from landfall the wind completely changes direction, motoring not an option as the wind is getting stronger and the waves are just too big to go against. It is decided to wait and drop all the sails apart from the mizzen, the rolly motion is unbearable, we try to sleep in the hope that the weather will pass. There is no way for us to obtain a new forecast (we now do!), so after 24 hours we have enough of being shaken all over in such awful weather and we turn Keturah around heading back to Fiji. As we do, we have only the well reefed jib open on the jib-furler. The wind increases even more, until the sail is forced completely open while in a matter of seconds the tack breaks off and we have it flying from the top of our main mast like an enormous kite. There is no time to waste, a thing like that can rip our mast straight off, and the violently flapping noise that it makes is horrifying. Francesco is climbing up the mast with the added stress of those giant waves, while I am at the winch holding the safety line. I am terrified to tears, exhausted, and I want to see him back down in the cockpit with me as soon as possible. With a knife he cuts the head of the sail and for a moment there is just silence.

He is back in the cockpit shaking for the strain of climbing up on his arm and leg power alone, but as usual he’s perfectly calm. We open just a little bit of the main sail and we put out a proper storm jib on the staysail. The weather just seems to be getting worse and worse. I am incapable of handling the steering, I simply don’t have enough experience to handle such conditions, I am out of the game. For the next 36 hours Francesco is at the wheel without interruption.

I am there constantly with him, providing company, passing some water, cookies, orange wedges, while he just talks to me about is life, trying to distract me from the situation we’re in. He is now steering down the face of 45 feet high waves, and gusts of wind of up to 65 knots: every single wave seems so enormous, the wind so impossible in the horizontal piercing rain that each one feels like it could be the last. Giving up is not a survivable option, so he keeps on steering down one crest after another, until the storm overtakes us and conditions improve. He will always be my hero after those fateful 72 hours.

By the time we reached the harbor the weather has gone completely still, so that we even have to motor. Once back in Savusavu – which is considered a “hurricane hole” – we notice that there has been a landslide, the fuel dock is destroyed, the docks ripped out, and we finally regain the lucidity to assess what we have been through. Having survived at all, we feel very alive and electrified, drunk from our own energy. Eventually we discover that the tropical storm was so unexpected that even people close to land with access to forecasts did not receive a warning, the tropical storm came out of nowhere so that even boats that could have taken shelter in a couple hours got washed on the reefs. I feel very lucky to be alive, and since then I have developed a deep respect for the power of the sea.