Upwind to Tanna, 2 Oct 2014

All the while sailing north a month ago to attend the festival on Vanua Lava, I was wondering how difficult the sail would be back south against the Trades.  Between luck and patience, though, we had no great difficulty as far as Port Vila.  We had accompished one of our three goals here in Vanuatu, attending that festival.  We missed out on the second, the volcano on Ambrym, due to weather.  But the third, visiting the volcano on Tanna, remained.  The 130 n.m. from Vila to Tanna is normally straight upwind, unpleasant at best, maybe not even possible for us.  Watching the weather forecast in Port Vila last week, though, it looked like our luck might hold.  There was a prediction of calm and then light air for the several days after a frontal passage due last Sunday, so we prepared for an early Monday departure.

Until mid-afternoon on Monday, the wind was indeed calm, and we enjoyed motoring to the southeast on a gently rolling, barely rippled sea.  From mid-afternoon on, though, the wind was well above the prediction, and we slogged along, motoring, struggling for every mile, using the lee of the islands, mired in a couple of “washing machines” in the dark, eventually reaching Port Resolution here on Tanna at dawn yesterday after forty-nine hours of motoring.  Unpleasant barely describes it, but it was just possible.

But it was worth every minute of it.  We arranged a tour yesterday afternoon to Mt. Yasur, the “world’s most accessible active volcano”.  Nine of us yachties piled into the back of a pickup for the hour-long, kidney-dislodging ride to the volcano car park.  From there, a ten-minute walk up a steep cement trail brought is to the rim, where we could look straight down into Vulcan’s furnace.  Magnificent even before sunset, the display was absolutely spectacular afterwards.  Periodic explosions sent titanic showers of glowing molten rock high into the air, thudding on the inside slopes of the crater like olympean lumps of pudding.

Back on Mintaka later that evening, the loss of sleep over the past two days finally caught up with me.  Mt. Yasur could have blown itself completely into ash last night without waking me.