‘We had not really planned to go to Vanuatu, but had no other choice’

Leaving Australia, Marianne Urth never planned to make landfall in the islands of Vanuatu, but the experience was magical

I’m looking up at an almost naked young man 60 feet in the air. He’s balancing on a platform built of sticks and branches, raised on a mountain top in the Vanuatuan jungle. All you can see from here is fluorescent green treetops covered in cascades of lush vines, while deep below us, far away in another world, lies the dark blue Pacific Ocean.

Men and women wear traditional dress, penis sheaths and grass skirts, and chant and dance next to the tower. My eyes go back to the young man on the platform. He’s chanting now, spreading his arms out, his ankles tied to two vines cut to the exact length so when he jumps his shoulder will just touch the rich, dark volcanic soil below.

We are about to witness the land diving ritual, nagol, which is performed each year between April and June to ensure a bountiful yam harvest.

The singing gets louder. My eyes are transfixed on his body. He crosses his arms in front of his chest, arcs his spine backwards and slowly lets his body fall into the open space.

He crashes down into the dirt right in front of me with a loud thump. Two men rush to cut his ankles free and pull him up. Now I can see he is just a boy. He stumbles back to the other dancers. I remember to breathe but my heart is still racing.

It’s crazy and dangerous, a ritual from another time and only performed here on Pentecost Island, one of 83 islands that make up the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. The only way to visit it is by yacht.

Exploring the South Pacific has been my dream since I was 19 years old and read books written by Danish hippie, Troels Kloevedal, who sailed around the world with friends and family in the 1970s in an old gaff-rigged schooner. He visited remote places where the locals would welcome him in dugout canoes and offer fruit in exchange for anything he could spare.

I found my captain sailing the Mediterranean 28 years ago. Delivering a boat with my sister, we were tucked into a small fishing port at the south end of Sardinia in a wild storm when a young Chilean sailor offered us help and, later, homemade pizzas. That’s when it all started.

Almost three decades and four kids later we moved from Santiago to Sydney where we bought our first catamaran, a Fountaine Pajot Helia 44. We fell in love with the space and comfort of a multihull, but realised we wanted a boat that would sail in light winds and in a gale and discovered Catana’s newly launched Ocean Class 50. With daggerboards, a central steering station and the light weight of 13.4 tonnes, it ticked all our boxes.

We received the boat in France, where we sailed for a couple of weeks until it was shipped to Australia to be exhibited at the Sydney Boat Show. Our first day sail out of Sydney Heads showed us what the boat was capable of.

We reached out with one reef in the main and the gennaker on a beautiful day when a huge gust suddenly accelerated the boat, flying to an exhilarating speed of 23.8 knots. It was as if we had been given a young stallion and we were not 100% sure how to ride it.

On our short-handed shakedown cruise up and down the east coast of Australia, we learned how to handle our new boat; how to reduce sail in good time – and always at night – and dock it in tight spaces with just the two of us.

Picking up mooring buoys proved to be the most challenging: the bowsprit and its two stays are connected in sharp angles to the hulls, which makes it difficult to pick up mooring ropes. After we bought a set of ‘marriage saver’ headphones, communication improved tremendously. By the time we tied back up at our mooring in Sydney we felt we had tamed the beast and were ready for the next step: sailing into the South Pacific.

Going east

There are two ways of getting there. You can cross the Tasman Sea to New Zealand, which is not for the faint-hearted, and from there venture north to Fiji and Tonga. Or sail east from Australia the 780 miles to New Caledonia and from there go to Vanuatu or Fiji.

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We joined the Go East Rally, run by New Zealander Viki Moore, because we had no idea where to start our preparations and found the thought of sailing in company attractive. It turned out to be a great idea, mainly because of the paperwork. When you leave Australia you need to export your boat, and the copious customs declarations for leaving and entering another country can be daunting.

The extensive checklist for the rally got the communication and safety up to Cat 1 level, which is required for boats departing from New Zealand but not for Australian boats. We attended a first aid course for remote areas, equipped our grab bag, got the proper charts, installed Starlink and DataHub for tracking: all pieces of a puzzle that finally came together and prepared us and the boat for a safe passage.

We left Sydney at the end of April and sailed 400 miles north to The Boat Works boatyard on the Coomera river at the Gold Coast, to fix a problem with our propellers (the port side prop suddenly engaged when sailing over 9-10 knots so Catana offered to install a new one). It was also the meeting place for the other rally boats.

Before leaving we provisioned sparingly for the passage, aware that on arrival in New Caledonia all fresh fruit and vegetables would be confiscated, but we would have access there to French cheese and wine, as well as usual supermarkets and fuel.

Our New Zealand weather router, John Martin from Ocean and Offshore Cruising Strategies, gave us the go-ahead and on a Sunday morning the Australian Border Force arrived with a team of 20 people to check the 13 rally boats out from the Southport Yacht Club. In light south-westerly winds, the fleet motored out through the Gold Coast Seaway towards the sea mounts 100 miles offshore.

We settled into a routine with comfortable watches of two hours on, four off with our third crew, Alex’s sister. It was comforting to see the other rally boats on AIS, as once we crossed the highway of cargo ships along the Australian coast there was nobody else out there. After motor-sailing for two days with relatively flat seas, the wind set in from the south and we were able to turn slightly north and set course directly towards New Caledonia.

Trouble ahead

Generally, the boat handles waves very well but soon we had large cross seas coming up from the Southern Ocean, together with wind and waves on the forward corner. It felt like being in a washing machine. Meals were eaten on the floor in the saloon, which seemed to be the most comfortable place. Watches were largely undertaken from inside the cabin. There was nothing to look at outside apart from checking the sails and the horizon from time to time.

The boat handles strong winds well and doesn’t need much sail area to take off to plane. We felt safe on board; the German sheeting arrangement eliminates the dangers from an unexpected gybe. The best preparation we did for the ocean crossing was marking all halyards and reefing lines (the reefing system has separate luff and leech reefing lines) for each reefing point, so there was never a doubt as to where the lines should be set. This way reefing can be done quickly by one person while the other only needs to check that everything runs smoothly.

On day four, 300 miles west of New Caledonia, we started to receive news about violent rioting in Nouméa. The airport had closed, supermarkets and shops burned down and fuel was reserved exclusively for the military. The messages were clear: go back to Australia or continue to Vanuatu, which meant another three days sailing in strong winds and heavy seas.

Vanuatu it is, then

We had not really planned to go to Vanuatu, but had no other choice than to modify our plan. As they say in Australia: “eat some concrete and harden up!”

Winds picked up, so did the waves, and a strong current against us made the boat rock and slam violently. We passed Isle of Pines at the southern end of New Caledonia, by then exhausted, and set course for Tanna, a volcanic island in the south of the Vanuatu archipelago.

Seven days after leaving the Gold Coast’s skyscrapers, we motored into Port Resolution, a bay with lush green jungle vegetation covering steep cliff sides.

Local fishermen in outrigger canoes cast their nets around our boat and gave us friendly nods while we picked our anchoring spot in the bay. From the shore, the smell of warm, humid soil reached our cockpit and as soon as we turned the motors off we heard laughter from children playing on the beach while their mothers watched from under an enormous banyan tree. From a distance it seemed like paradise, yet also so foreign that we could not really imagine ourselves being part of it.

After being cleared by immigration and customs the following day, we walked around the village. Everyone smiled and waved, or shook our hands and told us their name. An elderly woman gave us bananas, a gaggle of kids offered us grapefruits and giggled with delight when we asked if we could take photos of them. The uneasy feeling of having landed in such a remote place started to wear off.

We’d prepared for months to be ready for anything an ocean passage could throw at us, but what I hadn’t prepared for was the lack of provisioning at this unanticipated landfall. We took a very bumpy three-hour ride in the back of a pick-up to an ATM machine in the only town on the island and visited the local market. But the only thing there which I understood how to cook was spring onions and bananas.

Luckily, I spotted a local fisherman with a load of huge yellowfin tunas. Later we found that you can barter fishing hooks and clothes for grapefruit and cucumbers at almost every anchorage and I adapted our menu on board to whatever was available. Fried bananas quickly became a new favourite and we caught plenty of wahoo and yellowfish tuna. There is also fresh organic meat in Port Vila’s supermarkets.

Experiences of a lifetime

Behind the bay of Port Resolution lies Mount Yasur, a live volcano which you can visit if you dare. In some wind conditions ashes would fall on the boats at anchor in the bay. Standing at the rim of the crater, protected behind only a rickety fence, I could feel thunder in my bones as the volcano spewed red hot lava over our heads.

I was relieved when we left and sailed north towards others of the more than 80 islands of Vanuatu. Navionics charts seem accurate enough and with Starlink you can always double check with satellite imagery. We also use the Rocket Cruising Guide and Zulu app and found beautiful, protected anchorages on every island we have visited.

Prevailing winds are south-easterly trades, but we also experienced several days with no wind and cloudy skies which brought our batteries to their knees. You can never have enough solar power. We don’t have a generator, but we have 1,600W of solar panels on our coachroof and 800Ah of lithium batteries. If there is sun, we can run our watermaker, washing machine and breadmaker as often as we like, but when it gets cloudy we have a problem.

Every island we visited offered us unique experiences. We swam with dugongs in the Maskelyne Islands, took part in the mask dance and chief grading ceremony on Ambrym, went land diving on Pentecost, canoed to the stunning blue water holes on Espiritu Santo, and visited remote villages where the chiefs welcomed us and asked for help to fix their generator and solar panels.

We never planned to sail to Vanuatu but I’m so glad we did. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d find a world like the one my childhood hero visited so many years ago, but arriving here in Vanuatu on our boat made me realise there are still places that have kept their magic.

I’m not sure how much longer we will be able to experience the culture of Melanesia though. All the young people have phones and seem glued to them – as do young people anywhere in the world. Are they watching their elders, I wonder, and learning from them, or are they dreaming of living in the world the phone shows them? My advice is to hurry out here, but do not rush through this magical place.

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