BJ told me there was an Albatross circling his boat and asked me to find a picture, so here it is. — Andrew
We’re almost a full day en route to Fiji and I can say unequivocally that it has not actually started to get warm yet.
Our current latitude is analogous to somewhere in South Carolina, though we don’t have a great big land mass nearby. The is from the South, which of course you must remember here in the Land of Opposites that the South is the Place the Cold Comes from.
So we’re not wearing shorts, we’re not playing Jimmy Buffet and we’re not fishing yet. Too darn cold.
The sailing is.OK. Dead Down Wind – when the wind is blowing on a line straight from New Zealand to Fiji is what we’re dealing with here. Just like going upwind, you can’t sail in a straight line where you want to go though for different reasons. Going down wind you want to avoid an accidently “gybe”, where the wind crosses the back of the boat and slams all the sails hard from one side to another. This is a bad thing to do accidentally and is how boats and people can get hurt out here.
So we sail a bit up from “Dead” downwind, and zigzag across the wind never quite pointing where we want to go. We also go faster this way as straight down wind is really slow, and doing a broad reach is much quicker. So our direction made towards Fiji is still higher even if we are sailing an oblique course.
Our current arrival time is hard to pick. We originally hoped to avoid coming in on the weekend or after hours as the overtime charges at customs clearing in can be quite high. But last week’s weather did not cooperate, instead of a nice window to leave mid-week (which was, coincidentally before our New Zealand visas expired). But the weather pattern was ugly, two “Troughs” or low pressure waves came through during the week dumping lots of rain, wind and waves on us in Opua. Those troughs were followed by an actual low pressure storm system which we really wanted to avoid.
All of the above conspired to keep us in NZ looking for a safe departure window until Sunday, some thirty six hours after the point where we were no longer legally in the country. We talked it over with customs and immigration and they are very understanding, we had no fear that the immigration police would storm the docks and cut our lines forcing us to leave. Unlike some countries, NZ has the sense to know that sort of behavior just leads to more business for the Coast Guard down the road. It just means more paperwork when we return.
But to date this has been uneventful, and uneventful is what we strive for on passages. Your best passage is deathly dull in that regards, with nothing but easy weather, constant winds, not too much by way of waves to deal with and nothing breaking. See our trip to NZ from Tahiti for an example of how you don’t want to do it!
So here is to a continuing dull trip, with hopefully several more dreadfully dull blog updates with nothing to tell you about but seeing cool marine life and catching fish!
