23:06S 166:20.6E Under way
Salsa af Stavsnas
Ellinor Ristoff Staffan Ehde
Fri 5 Jun 2015 04:47
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We left Noumea before 7 this morning.
After a final ride on my bike to the bakery, we had
3 fresh baguettes and one Champagne (bread) Maxi.
A nice and cool day to take off, smoth seas
inside the reef and then as we left the passage behind us by 11 am we entered
the OCEAN.
2-3 meter waves but with long frequency. We are
heading as much south as the wind lets us, SE 10 -14 knots.So we are sailing
nose to the wind and waves at a speed of 6-7 knots.
We are trying to get so much speed we can to avoid
two fronts with lots of rain and thunder, also the reason to go straight
south.
We count on having 8 days to do to Australia, Bob
Mc David is helping out with the routing since the Tasman is known for being a
sea with "temper".
And again, we are finding ourselves sailing into
the winter. It is getting cooler and cooler already, we have big sweaters on if
the sun is not heating us up.
We hope to make it to Newcastle, just N of Sidney,
which is our final destination, but it all depends on how the weather develops.
We might have to go further N and then work our way down the
coast...
I did not write much about what was happening in
Noumea the last two day. We had a lot of things going on, apart from preparing
for the ocean crossing Ellinor and the kids went to a park with birds etc. Jean,
the port captain we met in Futuna took them out as he had a day off. Both he and
his wife are wonderful generous people! They really took care of us while in
Noumea! Valerie is english and Jean speaks really good english because they have
spoken at home in France to give their kids a second language for
"free".
The last day we had a rental car (Point Rouge) for
21Euro (!) and went to a facility where they have set up long cables above the
forest.
You climb and climb and finally the reward is to
hook on the cable to your harness and then fly over the trees for about 300
meters at about 90 meters over the ground. You pick up a normal speed of
30km/hour but the last ride went downwind and Im sure we made 50km/h! We did 6
rides in all, the final two on the same spots but they were just better second
time as you had more awareness to look at the environment.
We loved it! We found them at the tourist fair and
thought that would be a different experience, and it was. Andrea s was to small
to ride alone so he wanted to go tandem with mom.
After that we had a lunch by a beautyful water fall
in the forest and got to see some countryside in New Caledonia!
When I post pictures from the ride I will put a
link to their website.
For those that keep track of events and calendars,
we are twelve days away from 3 years ago when we left our home
port!
Lets see if we make it to our unloading destination
Newcastle just before / or the same date!
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