Day 10 Johnny be Goode position 37:01.38S 151:31.56E

Mark_needler
Professional Skipper
Thu 9 Dec 2010 23:04
 
NZT 1200
 
 
Welcome to the Tasman Sea!!
Sorry the blog was a little late yesterday but we were fairly busy with a 4 to 6 meter breaking seas and constant high winds. I spent from 0700 to 1230 hand steering JBG and after that James was on the tiller while I try to recover from the fatigue on deck, both of us put some big hours in that day and at approximately 1600 the wind eased to 25 knots and we could then let Leigh on the helm and get some sleep for a while which helped an awful lot. As the night went on the wind eased a little more, as forecast.
 
Well that is the clinical version, the none edited highlights are, we got shit on from a great height 4 times with about a tonne of water each time,  I was throw over the other side of the cockpit twice, one time into the main sheet at a great rate of knots, James got pushed to the floor from a seated position. We got partially knocked down twice and soaked pretty much every five minutes or so for the whole of the time. With the wind and the waves being so big I decided to use other the Genoa and the motor to give us a little pace, the genoa was only unfurled about 30% and at times we were still hitting 8/9 knots.
 
But apart from a few scrapes and bruising everybody was James Bond.....shaken but not stirred (sorry I could resist!) Through it all JBG took it all shook herself and carried on without the slightest murmur
, she did us proud and wasn’t deterred by anything that was thrown at her. Apart from the aforementioned human injuries no damage was sustained to JBG at all.
 
All in all a interesting and exhilarating day at the office, to be honest I have crossed this stretch Sea many times and you never leave it without a few scares, just as a reminder that you’ve been here and to think twice about coming back again!!!  TIS!
 
Well to console all you concerned folks out there, our current situation is we are 95 nms from Eden, heading into a westerly out of Eden, we are currently looking at arriving around about midnight +/- 1 hour, we have about 15 knots of wind and are covering about 6.4 nms per hour oh and the inside of JBG smells like a wet Labrador!!! or is that us? I'm not sure lol.   

 
The blog will be put on pause while James and I do some work on the yacht, Leigh is heading back to Melbourne on Saturday and we will be leaving, weather permitting on Sunday evening or on Monday morning so i’ll start to blog up again then and tell you about the weekends work then.
 
 
Cheers
 
 
Mark, James and Leigh