Wednesday 21 November, Roberton Island, The Bay of Islands, Northland,  New Zealand  South Pacific Ocean 35 14.0S 174 10.3E  Today’s Blog by David (Time zone GMT+13.00; UTC +13.00)

Wither the NZ Summer?

We are sitting at anchor in Twin Lagoon Bay, Robertson Island. For the cruising sailor, it has an iconic outlook which encapsulates all that is cruising in the Bay of Islands - except that ever since we arrived in New Zealand, the sun has been missing.  Our present outlook, south of the anchorage, is a familiar view reminiscent of an autumnal day in the Scottish Western Isles, in both topography, visibility and temperature. Yesterday, when we were diving  it was cold enough for steam to form on our breath.  Air temperature is circa 15 degrees C today and it is raining again!.

Weather forecasting is not a precise science being basically a matter of opinion based upon predictions of the future. It does seem an even less precise exercise here than in Europe (where the 24 hour forecasts are reasonably accurate). Most NZ forecasts have each day predicted sunshine for the following day and each following morning we have woken to another disappointment. Anyway – to the point.

It took a long time to get here. Most of that time was spent waiting for a favourable weather forecast both in Noumea and then in Norfolk Island and then working through the disappointment when the weather forecasted didn’t materialise.  

We were looking for moderate winds because we did not want to stress our rig which, I have to confess, is not well – not at all.  Peter has commented to me that we tend to make big in the blog of little things and play down the more important issues we encounter. There is some truth in that observation,  so the fact that we didn’t make mention of it at all illustrates that the rig was a cause for concern.  

The Furler

I have previously observed in connection with powered winches:  “…… electric winches are unforgiving things.  They would be excellent in the frontline of battle because they are very strong and they have no intelligence; they do exactly as you tell them. So if you press the button (aka order them to wind the sail in) that is exactly what they do without any consideration of whether that is what you really should be doing – no Sirree – that is above their pay grade.  It is the person  giving the orders (aka pressing the button) who needs consider whether pulling it in is a good idea …….. “  And so it is with hydraulic furling..  If it is not a such a good idea then you risk:

The furler foil is torn through about 60% of its girth as a consequence of somebody(or …bodies) pressing the button at the wrong time(s). This presented a problem because the headsail could not really be deployed as was because we would be far from confident of being able to furl it if the furler snapped when we needed to.

Initially we thought we might get away by just sailing with it reefed – say double reefed. The rolled sail would give support to the furler and take some of the strain.  It quickly dawned on us that this was not our brightest plan so we needed to DO SOMETHING. One option was to wait in Noumea for a part to be flown out and hope that there was someone able and willing to fix it. There were a number of drawbacks in that line of thought not least that we were bored with Noumea and our crew have tickets home from Auckland.   So we decided (with some encouragement from Reckman in the UK) that we needed to strengthen it.

We first tried some 20mm studding and jubilee clips:

The completed repair was not pretty but we were initially quite pleased with it. By the morning we were worried about the transfer of load from the furler to the studding splints in which we were reliant on just four jubilee clips.  We decided to strengthen it further. Eventually, we settled on:

The bottom now secured with 10 heavy duty jubilee clips, the load was trasferred from the studding back on to the foil above the break through the white plastic packing between the foil and the splints. So far so good, but now we were concerend about potential damage to the sail.  The packing taped  below was intended to taper the gradient at the bottom of the repair and we planned to do something similar at the top. However, there were still 10 very prominent nuts and bolts  on the closures that would quickly do damage unless….  

Quite how Peter managed to fashion the plastic shields – essentially freehand and by eye – to fit first time, I will never know.

A similar packing approach was adopted to reduce the sharp corners at the end of the splints above the tear (we needed to do it in two parts – had to hoist the sail up the furler before we could protect the top) then wrapped the whole thing in tea-towels and other spare cloth to soften the repair and to extend the taper over as long a length as we could reach…….   We concluded we could do no more. It was a bit ‘belt and braces’; using 20mm studding was probably a bit OTT but we were at least confident that the furler would stay together and that we would be able to use it at sea.

Since we were still concerned about the strains on the sail,  we resolved to use the genoa as little as possible and always with eight furls in the genoa (essentially two reefs).  Fortunately, two reefs in the genoa and a full staysail proved to be ample to drive us at a sensible speed as long as we did not shape too close to the wind – somewhere in the range 40-45 degrees apparent proved ideal.

On that basis, we set off but, predictably, the forecast  “weather window” we sailed through shut on is before we got to Norfolk Island and so  we sheltered to let the front go by. However, our then deviating eastward in search of the Eclipse added about 70 miles to our remaining 485 mile journey  – sufficient to put us in the path of another vigorous frontal system as we approached NZ.  The upside of it was that for the majority of the time we needed only staysail and furled main – at one point two reefs in the staysail and four or more in the main and we were still tanking along at 8 knots. So we got here without stressing the headsail too much – I hope. The sail maker will let me know in due course…..

Pacific Weather

Pacific a. Tending to peace; of peaceful disposition; characterised by peace, tranquil. 

On reflection, it has been a windy few weeks in this area of the Pacific. There are a large number of boats coming into Opua with damage to their sails presumably through stress of weather - shredded genoas abound along with some mainsails too! And at least one more yacht has foundered,  a day or so out from Tonga (crew taken off by a freighter)  as an unseasonal deep depression  tanked on by.  All of which suggests that there is  nothing peaceful about the Pacific!