Beautiful weather and conditions today, sunny with wind on the beam. Our noon to noon distance was just shy of 200 miles ? 198.1 miles.
This evening after dinner as the sun was setting we spotted Rarotonga in the distance.
A straight line course from Tahiti to New Zealand passes only a few miles from Rarotonga, which is part of the Cook Islands and is administratively part of New Zealand. Yesterday we crossed the line from French Polynesia to New Zealand waters, but unless there is some sort of emergency the difference is pretty academic.
We’d plotted a course to pass North of Rarotonga in case we wanted to stop there, it only added a few miles to the whole trip. It is a natural breaking point in this trip, and if we had concerns about the weather facing us it is a great place to duck into to wait for better conditions.
But the conditions so far are good and there is nothing nasty on the horizon yet so we are pressing on.
Although Rarotonga is supposed to be a lovely place to visit, the harbor doesn’t sound too great. With more time it would be worth a stop over, but we want to get to NZ and get ourselves settled in there before the regional weather patterns start to deteriorate for the cyclone season.
