Enroute to New Zealand!
Nickanddenisesailing
Sat 11 Nov 2017 03:36
COG 270, wind speed 11knts NNE, our speed 5.3 (motor sailing), local NZ time 5.26pm
We have finally received our much anticipated "green light" from Bob the weather man and are currently underway and enroute to New Zealand! Estimates are that we will be there around Friday 17th/ Saturday 18th - but we will keep you all updated.
We had a full day of boat jobs yesterday after the excitement of the previous 'shiger' day. We had a few issues bringing down our genoa to change it for our smaller (better upwind one) so there were 4 trips up the mast. The first by Ben, then 2 by me and the last from Nick. Ryan and Ben did a great job of winching everyone up. By the end of the day we had located the problem and had a plan of attack for the following day. What should have been an hour long job turned into a full day saga - life on boats. Luckily we had an invitation to evening drinks on 'Ghost' our Norwegian friends - so we had a good chance to unwind. There was lots of talk of weather and tiger sharks before we headed back to the boat for our last 'stable' dinner for a while.
So this morning was more boat jobs and sorting the headsail - we managed to get it down (with Nick up the mast) and change it for the smaller one - a nice victory. Then after some more weather talks on various boats and a bit more cooking we had some lunch, hoisted the dinghy on board and we were on our way by 3pm.
Now we are just getting back into the swing of things, the wind is a bit light and the seas pretty confused so we are just helping ourselves along with the engine. We are trying to keep to our 5knts that we have on our Bob plan. He is sending us well west before heading south to avoid a nasty low. There are about 10 other boats that have left with us today. Pretty much the whole anchorage has cleaned out.
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