Month: January 2021

12/1/21

The last few days have been pretty uneventful. We have had a mix of no wind, and some beautiful sailing under clear blue skies. Our routing has meant we can’t make the most of the sailing opportunities, we are instructed to maintain a certain course and certain speed to ensure that we don’t arrive at the low pressure system too early. The grib files show it now directly ahead of us about 120 miles away and we are already experiencing the weather associate with it. The sky is now cloudy, the wind has picked up a little and is slowly backing as the low pressure moves from west of us to south west of us.

We have had no luck landing fish, though we haven’t tried very hard. We lost a second one two days ago – something large that ran off 900m of line. We recovered 800 then it simple dumped the hook and took off. It was a pretty good workout anyway!

Other than that we have been amusing ourselves with jewellery making (Lesley), working for Derek and stowing all the light weather sailing stuff in preparation for the next 36 hours of passing behind the low. We have a great little tablet loaded with movies to watch and our kindles have many books on them so we are keeping busy.

Our satellite communication allows us unlimited messaging with the two other boats sailing with us so we can keep in touch with them too throughout the day to compare weather and share information and trivia.

All round things are going pretty well. Its slightly frustrating not to be heading towards New Zealand for the last few days but we anticipated it. At some point tomorrow we expect to make that left turn, the it will be full speed ahead direct to Opua.

DTG: 835nm

8/1/21

Our router has now given us a new waypoint (somewhere to aim for), which is much further north of the rhumb line. This is needed because there is a weather system developing to the north west of us which will travel across our route around the 12/13 January and we need to be behind it (to the north) to remain comfortable. In addition the forecast lack of wind has become a reality. So we are now traveling much more slowly and not directly towards New Zealand – bugger! In reality we knew this was likely to happen, but it is still a little frustrating. The plus side is that is now quite calm and flat – even the washing machine was on this afternoon. Everything is working well on board and we are both fit and well. We are in regular contact with the other two boats and although we are a bit more spread out now its good to know there are other vessels in the vicinity – we haven’t seen anything or anyone else since we lost sight of the other boats shortly after leaving Maupihaa.

DTG 1210NM