382: Surviving a Cyclone and Capturing a Rare Underwater Phenomenon

Hey guys, we are in Tahinea at the North Pass. Well, actually it's more like the East Pass. We moved over here because today is the start of the four days of elevated winds. We're expecting 30 plus knots of wind and maybe into the 40 knot range for gusts. It's going to shift to the north here. We've been getting east wind and we've just started to shift to the northeast now and then we'll go north and then we'll go northwest. So we are going to get in the water and move the anchor to a better spot and to do that we're going to jump in the water with this and drop that in the perfect spot. The float will come up and we'll know exactly where we need to drop the anchor. That's the plan anyway. See how it goes. That's what we're going to get in and do now. Brown's just doing his workout out front and then we're getting in the water. All right, we're off. We have just set the ball out there and Brown just took all of the floats off the chain. So hopefully the chain is not underneath the bommie. Here we go. Anchors up. We are on the move getting out of this crazy area with four huge bommies. We did not know they were going to be so big until after we dropped chain and we're headed to the little orange float over there. All right, we're in. Let's hope we put it in the right spot and we're far enough away from all the bommies. It looks pretty good. We're a bit deeper and we definitely have fewer big bommies around us. We should be swinging into deeper water so that's good news but the east wind is still pretty strong and constant and we just got to wait till that finishes. We've got a few more hours of the east wind and then we've got to hop in and just check the chain to make sure when we make the move to the north that nothing gets caught underneath the water. We have a couple places where things could get caught. One other boat here with us. The Atoll otherwise is completely empty. It's a French boat. We've made it through one night and we are currently snagged on a piece of coral. Looks like we got wrapped. The wind was not super strong last night. Today and tonight will be a different story but there's the chain off of there. All right, the hero. Man, that is deep. Too deep? Yeah, I need my weight belt. All right, well done. I'm just taking in 20 feet of chain. Move the bridle forward a little bit so that we have less chain. We're almost over the anchor now. Oh good. Anchor's right there. Day two coming up. This is the day with 40 knot winds so we're glad that we found that early on. Well, here it comes. We can definitely see it. We got our chain aligned fine. I think we're good. It's gonna be a rough day but we're catching water. That's the key thing. We're halfway through our second day of this storm coming through and it's pretty calm right now. We are not stretched fully on the chain. We don't have huge winds. We had a couple of big gusts come through and that was it. It has been raining quite a bit but other than that it's been pretty calm. The most annoying thing is just the fetch coming from the northwest. That's it. So, so far so good. It is forecasted to get really bad tonight so I'm not sure what that's gonna look like but really thankful that right now it is not too bad. Should be over in a couple of days. We are super vigilant here on Blown Away especially during storm time and we are gonna have a whopper tonight so we want to make sure that the chain's properly set up that it's hanging right it's not snagged. We have the lovely Admiral Eileen getting ready to go into the water to check it out because if your chain and your anchor are not right you're screwed when the big storm comes because then you've got all kinds of pressure on the chain if it's wrapped and it's impossible to unwrap it. You could damage the coral or snap the chain so that's not good. So Eileen's going in. There's nothing like getting an eyeball on it plus she's making up for not having gotten in. I got in this morning she's just feeling a little guilty. Don't worry I'll make sure you gotta come in too. I'm sure I'll find a problem. I'm used to that from you. The problem's probably gonna be you. Right? All right. I'm used to that. That is a couple talking who've lived on a boat for a long time, five years, and it's just a little banter back and forth. It is so good. So good of you all to watch us here today. Please hit that subscribe button. Hit the like button. You've heard it from everybody else. Share, comment. We love you. Thank you so much. We don't have enough chain right now so Brad's gonna let it out. Probably about 10 feet, 15 feet. I was relieved to see firsthand that the chain looked good with the floats in the perfect spots to keep the chain off the coral. The only thing I didn't like was the length of chain before the first float. I would have preferred double what was there but the bommies prevented us from making any adjustment. Garden eels are one of the ocean's quiet wonders. Anchored in sandy patches near coral slopes they live in individual burrows clustered together forming an underwater meadow that sways with the current. As they stretch and twist to feed their bodies shimmer turning the scene into something that feels like a tiny disco party beneath the sea. Facing into the flow they let plankton drift straight into their mouths extending farther out when the current is strong. Startle them and they disappear instantly only to slowly re-emerge if you stay still and patient. Our friend Brian in Fakarava just gave us a forewarning. There's a big squall headed our way. He said they got up to 35 knots and now it's sustained 30. So we are getting ready for that to hit us. At the moment we're just death by fetch right now from the northwest just coming on the beam which is tough because the boat just rolls back and forth but that's nothing compared to what we're going to experience tonight so got to get ready for this thing coming. Winds are picking up a little bit it looks like there's some dark coming towards us that would make sense this is about the time it's forecasted to hit us so expecting some winds up in the upper 40s tonight. Hopefully it won't be too bad. We're ready well as ready as we can be. It's a little gusty this morning but at least we're facing northwest so the fetch is the same direction as the boat so that's good. Last night was a little bit rocking and rolling had to tie in the dinghy keep it from shifting which definitely helped and just two more days of this. These are probably the biggest gusts that we've had yet. All right we've got another band of strong wind and rain coming through Comes in every, I don't know, hour it seems. It'll go really strong for about 15 minutes and then back off and 45 minutes later we get really strong again and the fetch is picked up but all in all it's been relatively benign compared to what we were expecting. It's not great obviously but it's better than it could have been. Brian just looked at the instruments so that we are averaging in the 20s and we've got some gusts up in the 30s so not not too bad at the moment. Well it also looks like I want to share with everybody we may have dragged a little bit. See this is the main crescent right here and you'll now see that we're behind that. I think we dragged just a little bit but we've got room to drag. Very plausible especially since we're on a little bit of a downward slope. So this is what we're facing at the moment this tropical depression that is moving through. We are those blue dots right there and one is not enough we get a second one coming coming over us tomorrow and then that should be done with it and we'll be back to normal east winds pretty quickly. Ready to have this over with but thankfully it's not stronger. This actually was slated to potentially have cyclonic action and actually it's the one behind it and it has turned out to not be so we're really grateful that it's depowering that's the key. This is gusts and that is really terrifying but thankfully it hasn't been that bad. We have a lot of protection from the island in front of us and that has helped big time but we're not we're not through it yet. When you're in a storm you spend 24 hours a day for the whole time you're in it just looking at weather looking at forecasts trying to figure out which forecast is the right one which is going to be most accurate to your location. We've got another couple of days to go. We've got pretty significant winds from the northwest now showing a little bit of a drift here on my anchor alarm app so we're definitely moving a bit which is not a surprise given the wind given the floats. If we were in just regular sand with no bommies we'd have no problem at all but because the bommies the anchor has to be a little bit lower than where the bommies are that they get caught on so unfortunately we're on a downward slope and we've had to float it and that's what's really a bummer because the weight of the chain is what keeps the boat steady the anchor in and right now the anchor is just being lifted because the chain's being lifted and pulled every single time we get one of these you know 40 knot gusts. Definitely ready to get this over with. Brown's plan is to get in the water to check the chain just to see what's going on see if we are dragging how much we're dragging what we need to do we have options i think we have options i've got a float here ready just in case probably drawn just about seven feet okay that's not bad and the anchor's fully in okay and the path that it's on it's clear good whoa you've got sunshine wow today is our day of reprieve before we get the rest of the second storm coming through and it is so nice we still have a fetch we still have some wind but very little compared to what we were getting it is so nice to get this reprieve we are still bucking like broncos a little well not as bad as broncos and we have turned to the west so we got one bommie under us but i think the chain is above it we'll have to check that later on wow it is just so nice to be able to open our windows to be able to have the front door open to not have to hold on for every step that we take this is such a great reprieve one more day of this tomorrow it'll be a 12-hour day of high winds again and then we're done we're not liking the look of the shortening of the chain right now and we've moved very much to a westerly wind so we need to get in there and just check make sure we're not caught on something it's very very likely we could be caught on a bommie at the beginning i do remember that there was a fairly tall one it could just be that we're wrapped on it and we're going to just be wrapped on it here comes the big winds again and ron's going to go in the water and check where we are i mean there's really nothing we can do about it so if we're pulled tight this chain is not going to hit that bommie right there the bommie that we're close to you said it's going to lift up and go over it but are we over it now it's right in the middle there's no pressure on the body brown and i describe things very different differently he's going to go take a film so i can get all my questions answered so there's one bommie that will catch our chain so brown's going to try and put a float on it so we have nothing to think about or worry about at that spot hopefully you can do it without my help we'll see he's got to go down and pick the chain up and then grab the ball and put it on it's not easy to do alone it's much easier when you have a second person i might have to get in the water oh looks like he's getting it oh yeah oh no two balls right next to each other is not good so brown is out there working on the floats trying to separate them a little bit more to get lift but also not to get them tangled with a lot of wind we shouldn't have a problem with the tangling if there's a lull then it becomes an issue because the floats will fall into each other get tangled and then it becomes a problem brown's checking bommie heights a lot of things you have to think about when you have a storm right and you're swinging and this is crazy we've gone from directly east swung all the way around now we're directly west we've got northwest but not west so this is an interesting new challenge as part of our four-day megastorm here we've got a few minutes of sunshine on our day of reprieve here so we're gonna head into the water do a little snorkeling get off the boat just enjoy the only day where we can do that because tomorrow it's gonna be back to storms well that was pretty cool we just got out of the water it is rainy again ready for the next phase of the cyclone to hit but i got to see because brown spotted them on the surface and told me where they were i got to see a mating chain of mantas female and three males it was amazing they stayed with me for about 25 minutes 20-25 minutes circled constantly it was absolutely one of the coolest things well this is the cyclone that keeps on giving we just learned that the one that's gonna hit us at three in the morning it has just been upgraded to cyclone conditions so so we're gonna move up now put out more chain and try and float as best as we can over the coral that we're currently on to be prepared for this this is uh i'm so ready for this to be over all right guys we just put out another 100 foot of chain we've got 250 feet out while we were putting the chain out the port engine kept failing and i think the reason it keeps failing what we think the reason is because we've been jerked around for the last few days with all of the storm fetch and that clogged up the fuel filter that's our assumption so brown's changing the fuel filter the reason we're doing that is because the storm that was supposed to come tomorrow and just pass us by has been upgraded to uh cyclone and we really would like to have both engines running we've got enough chain out now to make us feel better but we definitely need the engines if we end up in a situation where we get really high winds yeah that's what's going on right now gotta help brown so okay hopefully our final sunset with a cyclonic action coming who knows this is exhausting well we were prepared for the worst and so far we've had one really big squall with a lot of lightning but outside of that this is the calmest it has been in over a week i cannot i'm like completely blown away pun intended this is insane this is completely insane now maybe it's still coming because it does show that the on the tracker that the cyclone is to the west of us so i don't think we're out of the woods completely yet but wow our friends in tkio have said that they've gotten 30 plus sustained knots of wind for 30 minutes i do feel rain now so maybe we're getting our part of it now they've had some like cells come through in tkio and also in pakarava but we haven't seen anything this is we slept through the night there's the cyclone tracker there's the cyclone there that is us in the blue dot so it looks like it may have even shifted course and is not coming in our direction which is absolutely amazing could not be happier as far as the main part of the cyclone it looks like it might be past us wow it's really hard to believe that we were supposed to be getting a full strength cyclone right now and it's pretty calm we could not be happier it could not be more thankful and yesterday we experienced one of the coolest things it was a train of what i thought were mantas but i thought no they definitely are not mantas they're something else and what i learned was that these were mobula terrapakana they're typically seen out in the open ocean very rarely are they seen in atolls and believe it or not the video that i was able to take was a mating chain i thought it was probably a female followed by three males i was so enthralled with that i wasn't really looking to see the sex of the mobulas but what the ladies told me was that it was actually two females in the front the second of which was pregnant and then two males really on the chase my first time ever seeing a mating chain absolutely mind-blowing the amazing marine biologists at manta trust or mantas de polonais told me that i was the first one to ever get a recording of these beautiful creatures in a mating chain and secondly i am the fifth in the world for being able to get a video of the mating chain which is incredible we were so fortunate to be able to see them here and i spent about 15 minutes with them they just kept circling and getting closer and closer it was fantastic it's such an amazing experience and one that i will never forget including the fact that we were supposed to have a tropical cyclone today but thankfully during the night the cyclone path shifted to the west a little bit and so we're just getting a bit of rain that's what's coming down now very light winds not even enough to sink our floats so we are just absolutely thrilled that this has turned out this way oh my goodness totally relieved so grateful today for a new day that is not cyclonic it's been a relatively quiet day we've had a lot of rain but only one big wind gust and now things are really calm fantastic and finally turning back to the northeast and then tomorrow to the north