What a water! 34.05S 174.27E

Salsa af Stavsnas
Ellinor Ristoff Staffan Ehde
Sun 17 Nov 2013 17:56
Another sunrise, and another night accomplished, a great full moon made it light all night.
Now we are 54nM from the entrance to the Bay of Islands, where the port of Opua is located.
Once we enter the bay we have another 10nM to go inshore.
Our GPS shows that we have 9 hours left to the bay but right now we are maing a speed of 7.4 knots, engine and sails.
But the wind and rain is suppose to pick up and we hope to be able to shut down the engine. It has worked all night for us and have done it very well.
The kids need to come ashore. I have never seen them like they where yesterday, lots of running, climbing, fighting, crying and so on.
Miss My called us up yesterday afternon and told Ellinor they got a tuna. As we were out of fish Ellinor dropped the ping squid and after an hour the line started to scream, Ellinor runned to the reel and turned the brakescrew the wrong way so off it went, the squid and the line and the fish...
But we had great food anyway, for instance a dinner with tea and freshly baked bread with a very crisp surface, hardboiled eggs that where almost mashed and ABBAs caviar (yes we have had a tin with us from Sweden, now we thought we better eat it before the NZ biodiversity guards take it from us).
Most of you are probably aware of it, but there is HUGE list of what you may not bring in to NZ, most of it being food of course.
A skipper on a boat joked yesterday on the afternoon radiotraffic that for the last boats it will be easy to navigate to NZ. Just follow the track of floating food.
 
We are still in company with Miss My, other than that I can see a tanker coming ahead of us on the AIS. So civilisation is kicking in.
So we keep our fingers crossed now that this is our last day at sea and that we actually made it from Tonga to here without any dramatic weather or incidents. Lets hope it stays that way.