Timing arrivals is always a bit tricky. Out of a 24hr day there is normally an 8-10hr window for arrival when we'll have good daylight and visibility. Arriving an atoll narrows that dramatically. The atolls are sort of ring islands, with one or two cuts or passes in the ring through which we enter the lagoon. The lagoons inside the ring are quite large, I think Fakarava is about 10 miles x 20 miles. The issue is that the tide waters from the entire lagoon flows in/out of these narrow passes creating very strong currents. Transiting the pass should normally be done at slack tide when the current will be minimized. That means our arrival window is reduced to maybe two, one hour slots each day.
Theoretically slack tide at the north pass of Fakarava will be about 10-11am on Friday morning. There is no published data on this, just some tools from another cruiser and some tide tables. It's not an exact science. Then it gets verified by arriving at the pass and looking at the conditions. No standing waves is a good start. After that it's pretty much just go for it.
I timed our departure to arrive about 9am on Friday morning, but assumed 175 miles a day. With the winds on the beam, and current behind us, we've gone much faster; 209 miles our first day. If made no changes we'd be arriving in the middle of the night, maybe midnight on Thursday. Then what do we do? It's hard to slow the boat down. We can reduce sail, but it doesn't slow us that much, and in larger seas we need the power/speed to punch through the waves rather than be slapped around by them. So what's a navigator to do?
At the moment we are "parked", or more nautically we are "hove to". We tack New Morning into the wind, but don't release the jib. The jib is backed pushing us one way while the main is pushing the other way. The result is that we're sailing / drifting at about 2kts back towards the Marquesas. We'll do this for 6-7 hrs, then resume on towards Fakarava. If it all works out, we'll arrive in daylight of morning on Friday and then wait for the pass to be calm enough to enter the lagoon.
