November 3 – 6, 2024
After nearly seven months we had run out of time. Over six thousand nautical miles and three countries, but this time it wasn’t immigration expiration deadlines…cyclone season was now upon us.
We had long been lamenting the fact that we seemed to have been pulled into the gravitational pull of New Zealand like hundreds of other sailors. Following the herd was never our way, yet we had simply accepted heading there to escape the cyclone season as “the practical thing to do”.
New Zealand certainly has its appeal as a prospect to visit. However, it seemed more realistic for us to visit by plane than boat. The reality was that our true goal to was to eventually reach SE Asia, and that lie in the exact opposite direction. Sailing nearly three thousand nautical miles round trip to spend six months in anchorages with water too cold to swim in without wetsuits, under the constant threat of hostile weather (after all, almost every bit of scary weather we had been monitoring for months had come from that area), quite expensive living conditions, and hundreds of other boats simply seemed like a pill we were forcing ourselves to swallow. Most of the other sailors whose opinions we valued had ended up storing their boats to rent camper vans – something we did in Australia fifteen years earlier but not something we wanted to do now.
Up to this point two things had molded our thinking and dictated our options regarding our immediate future: a common sense realization that staying where we were during the cyclone season would be a pretty fucking stupid display of faith in sheer luck; as well as a exceptionally unambiguous geographical box that had been provided to us by our insurance company with an ultimatum. “Come December 1, if you are inside this box, Exit has ZERO insurance coverage of any sort…period.”
We had already tried to appeal with an option to potentially stay in Fiji, which would have been acceptable to the insurance company only if we paid $5000 for a cyclone pit in a marina that Exit would have to physically be sitting in for the entire cyclone season…expensive, hot, uncomfortable. It sounded like a miserable way to spend $5000. And even more expensive if we didn’t stay aboard the boat. We took the idea off the table.
Time had all but run out on us. We shared a generally ominous feeling about the premise of making a passage to New Zealand. Reports had trickled back to us of other sailors who had made the journey. Some had benign experiences. Some had gotten the shit kicked out them. One sailboat was dis-masted. One had their prop shaft seize up and, for reasons that we never fully comprehended, the people aboard actually ended up scuttling their boat!!! The New Zealand reality hung over us like a dark, gloomy storm cloud.
We had been listening to too many other people for too long. Herd mentalities. Horror stories. Damn.
There had to be another option; but to untangle it from all the confusion and uncertainty would require us to stop listening to what nearly everyone else was saying. Separating from the masses and taking path least travelled had worked for us repeatedly in the past.
But we had to nut up and return to literally thinking outside the box…outside the cyclone box, that is.
And then we spoke to Ben and Sophie on S/V Kuaka, a custom built expedition capable aluminum sailboat. We had first met them a number of months prior in French Polynesia and immediately got along really well with them. Not only was Kuaka remarkably similar to Exit in its construction, their situation was also very similar to ours. Ben and Sophie were currently facing the same ticking clock as us. They too had to be out of the exact same cyclone box as us to satisfy insurance requirements, and their deadline was even sooner than ours. But they had come up with a different plan. They were headed north…
Wait.
What the fuck? North instead of south?
They were the first people we had spoken to who had even thrown that idea out. They were now only days away from departing.
Headed for Wallis and Futuna.
Where? Never heard of it…
Then past Tuvalu.
Huh? Never heard of that either.
They planned on not stopping at Tuvalu in favor of pressing on to Kiribati.
Kiribati? It’s actually pronounced “Kir-a-bas”. Okay…but neither of those sounded remotely familiar.
Ben and Sophie invited us over to Kuaka – to look at a guide they had, entitled Landfalls of Paradise, and talk things over. Copy that…we’re on our way!
It appeared that almost no one passes through the area we were discussing. A few dozen sailboats a year, maybe. Mostly on the way to the Marshall Islands which, in this direction, represents the first really recognizable destination to the north to steer towards outside of the cyclone belt. About the same distance away as New Zealand, but a more reasonable path if your intended destination is Palau, Micronesia, the Philippines, Japan, or any number of other appetizing possibilities.
Palau, Micronesia, and SE Asia in general were all along the trajectory we really wanted to be going in the long term. However, what was already very apparent to us was that, coming all the way from Mexico, the six month window outside of the cyclone season had undoubtedly been an insufficient amount of time to properly experience French Polynesia, Tonga, Fiji, and any detours in between. We had not even gotten to Fiji this season.
For us, the real appeal of sailing to New Zealand was the option of returning to Tonga and Fiji to pick up where we left off after the cyclone season had passed. It was feasible to sail in both directions. And while getting to the Marshall Islands was not that much different than New Zealand in distance, the prevailing wind and currents would mean that a round trip by sailboat was a much more difficult, if not unrealistic, prospect.
For Ben and Sophie, this was not an issue. They intended on pressing onward from Kiribati to the Marshall Islands, followed by Japan and eventually…Alaska. Wow! Ambitious, but not appealing to us.
For us, the idea of heading north was like a light bulb turning on…ding! But we really wanted the option of turning around. And so we had to take the seed they had just planted, and carefully nurture our own plan.
Repeated exchanges with our insurance agent, who at this point seemed rather perplexed and a bit flummoxed at our theoretical about face in direction, especially in this eleventh hour (and fifty minutes), eventually illuminated a bit better understanding. In one month’s time – outside of arriving at New Zealand, or Australia (only south of Brisbane), or having Exit actually sitting in an approved cyclone pit in Fiji, or sailing all the way back east of French Polynesia – we would have zero insurance coverage…with one exception…
We would be okay if we were north of the latitude 10°S.
To us, the northern edge of the cyclone box provided by our insurance agent looked more like 5°, but we weren’t going to argue the official answer from the insurance company against an illustration we were looking at.
Hmmm. Latitude 10°S.
This meant we had to at least make it as far as Tuvalu…about eight hundred nautical miles north of Tonga. Half the distance it would be to get to New Zealand.
We calculated that Wallis and Futuna would be a bit less than four hundred nautical miles away. Almost half way.
Instead of an imminent departure with fifteen hundred brutal miles to New Zealand, we could saunter to Wallis and Futuna and relax there for a short while, knowing that we were only an additional three day sail away from Tuvalu. Once there, all the pressure of the December 1 cyclone season deadline would be lifted.
Technically, Tuvalu is not completely out of the theoretical realm of possibility for cyclone activity. But it offered enough security for our comfort level as well as satisfying the damn insurance stipulations. If, after arriving in Tuvalu, it turned out to be an unrealistic stop for six months, we would have to reconsider our anticipated return south to Tonga, as well as visiting Fiji.
As remote and off the beaten path as it seemed, we immediately understood it would not be a hub of civilization for consumption and available resources. But we were good with that. They would have the sheer necessities of fuel and basic food stocks. Given a boat full of provisions, a functional dive compressor and gear, and a tropical location near the Equator, we felt confident that we could rough it for half a year.
We still had a lot to learn about places we had never heard of only days before and only a short time before we needed to leave…but suddenly we felt good.
This was doable.
Normally, planetary polarity shifts happen somewhere between every ten thousand and fifty million years. Apparently, the actual process theoretically takes approximately a thousand years to occur. Ironically, for us, a polarity reversal had required only a few days.
No fucking around.
sv-exit.com 