At anchor once again...just!

Exciting is the understatement of yesterday if we were to summarise the past
24 hours. In fact to be fair we should go back 2-3 days and fill you in on
what's been going on... and leave the best (and worst) till last.

After our exciting adventure across Tana Island in order to go through
Customs, we followed up with a day of working on the boat, fixing a few bits
and pieces and relaxing. In the afternoon "The Volcano 5" (Richard, Byron,
Sophie, Veda & Peter) took off to go and see the Volcano whilst Gavin and
Nathan explored the local hot springs, and hiked up to the top of the
lookout. We rendez vous'd well after dark for a crew dinner and another
Moksha cook book specialty - Cous cous and tofu chocolate cake! A great way
to end another great day.

We woke the next day to some fairly grim weather, but decided the time had
come to move on, so we weighed anchor and headed for the small island known
as Aniwa - we had fairly strong winds on the way over and weren't even sure
if we would be able to anchor once we got there. To make things more
interesting and "Fun" as Richard calls it, our charts (paper and electronic)
were totally useless to a point where our chart plotter was showing us as
being on land when we were sailing and surveying the area for a decent
anchorage at least 200M offshore!

Luckily a boatload of local fisherman came past and a simple hello and a
wave was all it took to get some advice as to where to anchor... the
anchorage was deep and required us to let out all of our 70M or so of chain
as well as another 30M of rope - this was all done in time for dinner and we
settled in for a quiet night's sleep. The morning was overcast and weather
reports downloaded via mailasail confirmed that we had a storm headed our
way but it was still some 24 hours off... we put faith in the forecast and
went off snorkelling, fishing and relaxing.

We all skin dived, saw Turtles, white tipped sharks as well as
countless schools of tropical fish and of course loads of coral! Sophie
decided to use the leftover noodles as bait and caught a couple of tropical
fish - more than all the rest of us put together... nice work Soph!

We all went to sleep early, knowing we had to be up at five to get going to
our next destination. The first signs of the forecast not being 100% correct
appeared at around 2:00 am when Moksha started rocking and rolling. A quick
scan of the instruments read that we had 10-15 knots of northerly wind
instead of the predicted Sou-easter. By 6:00 am that had turned to an
onshore westerly - exactly the opposite to the prediction?!!

We got going as soon as we could and within 1 hour we could see some nasty
clouds chasing us... the wind kept on increasing and the barometer continued
falling too fast for comfort. We decided to alter course to a safer
anchorage than the one we were initially heading for... shortly after that
decision we furled half the headsail and put in the second reef in the
main - things were hotting up, swell was up to 3 metres or so and wind was
gusting up to 30 knots... we were in control and sailing well... the wind
and seas continued to build and soon we were seeing constant 35+ knot gusts
that eventually built up to a constant 35 knot wind with constant gusts up
to 45 knots.

We took all of this in our stride and Moksha was handling the conditions
beautifully - the seas continued to build and some of the waves were easily
in the 5-7metre range - biiiig walls of water, luckily not breaking very
often.

Things were going well, we were in control, Byron steered a boat record of
14.06 knots boat speed with 2 knots current added to that making it 16 knots
over the ground! Gavin had been steering earlier and after Byron had enough,
Gavin jumped back on the wheel... but the fun wasn't over yet... soon after
jumping on the wheel, Moksha got rear ended by a fairly chunky wave and
rounded up, as soon as she had been brought under control she seemed to run
away again and this time there was no correcting her - "Our steering is
gone!"  was all that Gavin said... As soon as everyone registered what was
going on, we all jumped to our stations, Gavin and Byron furling what was
left of the headsail (we were already sailing with significantly reduced
headsail) and Richard engaging the hydraulic autopilot which bypassed the
steering mechanism and quickly allowed us to regain control of our
direction. The emergency tiller was brought up on deck for good measure, but
wasn't used.

We settled Moksha down and all sat down to contemplate our next move... the
wind was still blowing over 40 knots and the waves continued to build in
ferocity. We decided to go for the safety of the lee shore of  Erromango,
which is where we are safely anchored now. We put in a third reef and still
managed to 'limp' towards our destination at over 5 knots, with spray flying
everywhere and the occasional wave giving us a good kicking on the beam!

Everyone was calm, and the preparation that Richard has put into Moksha paid
dividends today. Since anchoring we've had a good look at the problem - a
snapped steering chain link and are confident of being able to repair it
this morning.

And so the adventure continues!