Day Six to NZ – Oh Look! More Motoring!

On Nov 24th, 2015 Published By B.J.

Distance to Arrival: 146 NM
Current ETA: 3:00 PM (+/-), Nov. 25th

This will be a brief post, I’ve waited until later than usual to get it out there and I need to get to bed before watch.

The wind hasn’t filled in much. The prediction is we might see NW winds of up to 10 knots before we get to NZ. For us, that equates to maybe four knots of sailing off the wind – if it even happens.

The Northerly has filled in a very small amount, we’ve seen some short frenetic fits to almost 10 knots, with a Westward shift. This has allowed us to do “limp sail motorsailing”, in which we continue to motor, but fly both sails trimmed for the apparent wind. The wind looks like 5-7 knots on the beam. This configuration looks silly in my opinion, but the headsail being out and trimmed and the main eased adds about another 1/2 a knot to our speed. I’ll take it, as we’re very concerned about fuel and have cut back on the engine RPMs.

By our current estimate we have about twenty-four hours of engine run time left in the tanks, and no real prospect of wind. With the conditions we’re in with wind, currents etc. our arrival time is estimated sometime tomorrow late afternoon – about twenty to twenty-two hours from now.

It’s going to be close, in other words. If we don’t get any wind tomorrow we’ll likely dump in a couple of jerry cans just to make sure we don’t run the engine out of fuel. That’s a nuisance in a diesel, it means I will have to go into the engine room and bleed all the cylinders before I can restart it. I don’t want to do that in the open ocean if I can avoid it.

So every few hours we stick a yard stick into the primary fuel tank to see how much it dropped. Over the last five hours and twenty minutes it dropped an inch and a half. That’s about .3 inches per hour; we’re using 1/2 inch per hour to be safe. We’ve got just over twelve inches left in the tank, hence the “twenty four hour” estimate, though I can not tell you for sure there’s no taper in the bottom of the tank, it could be less.

But we do have another twenty gallons in the cans on deck, which is reassuring. We’d sail in at 3-4 knots before we use the last ten gallons of that up. We need to have the reserve for maneuvering when we get close to docks and moorings. We’ll get in, it just will take longer.

As of now we’ve got 98 hours on the engine since leaving Fiji. With 20-22 hours left, we’ll end up running the engine some 120 hours or so on a seven day (168 hour) trip. Maddening, but that’s what it is – we knew there wasn’t going to be much wind on this trip. It looks like we got a day or so less than I expected. If you recall what I estimated our range to be a few days back – I said about 130 hours of motoring time.

So a few times tonight we’ll run the yardstick into the tank and have a look, just to be sure. In the morning we may put a few gallons in to keep moving.

We’ll be close, but we’ll make it.

Posted in Diesel, Fuel, New Zealand, passages | Comments Off on Day Six to NZ – Oh Look! More Motoring!

Day 5 to NZ – Motoring, Motoring Now We Go…

On Nov 22nd, 2015 Published By B.J.

Distance to Opua, NZ: 347.5 NM

ETA: Some time Wednesday afternoon, 11/25/15

Still no wind. At one point we had a hint of some maybe wind late this morning when it crept up to six whole knots of breeze. But this was from the North, directly behind us. The only real effect was to make it hotter on the boat and make the main flop around more. Imagine riding a bike at 10 mph with a 10 mph breeze at your back – it would feel like there is no wind at all.

At least with half a knot of wind we still get to feel a seven knot breeze in our faces from the boat’s motion.

We we motor like this we almost always have the main sail out. There are several reasons for this. First, there may actually a few knots of errant wind. In any direction other than right in front or dead behind us that may actually get us a small wind increase. But the second and more important reason is roll stabilization.

When I say it’s “flat” out here, that is relative. It’s not flat like a mill pond on a windless morning right after sunrise. The ocean is always lumpy and bumpy and even without wind driven waves there is frequently some long, rolling swell coming from somewhere. This swell can give the boat an unpleasant rolling motion if it’s from the wrong direction. With no sails out the motion can be quite violent. The main sail can act like a giant stabilizer or air brake that greatly muffles the rolling motion.

This morning I took the three a.m. to seven o’clock watch for a change. Just after sunrise at six o’clock we were briefly joined by a small pod of dolphins, but they were far off and didn’t stick around to visit. I only saw them surface twice, it wasn’t enough of a visit to justify waking anyone up for it.

Sometime in the next few hours we’ll transfer the fuel from the reserve 300L tank into the main tank which is now less than half full and has plenty of room in it. That should be our big excitement for the afternoon. The process isn’t very time consuming; I turn on a pump and run it until the reserve tank gauge reads empty. If I’m feeling ambitious I can open up the floor and look in the tanks to eyeball how much fuel is really left, and to make sure I moved all 300 liters into the main tank.

There is one other reason we cruisers hate motoring. It’s not just the noise of the engine, the smell of the exhaust (when the wind is from behind), and the motion of the boat. Refueling is also an expensive nuisance and can be a lot of work. Fuel in Fiji is sold at a fixed price by location – from $1.68 to $1.72 FJD per liter. One Fiji dollar is currently just under $.50 USD, which amounts to a cost of about $3.20/gallon which isn’t bad. New Zealand will not be so cheap to re-fuel, though the dollar is stronger this year compared to last.

One added fun feature of fueling in Savusavu is the lack of any waterfront fuel facilities. In Port Denarau there was a floating fuel dock we could pull up to which makes fueling easy. Someone pumps while someone looks in the tank with a flashlight to monitor the fuel level until it’s full.

Without a dockside pump it’s jerry cans and jugs. We did this in Trinidad once, where one was allowed to buy up to 100L of fuel per day at a gas station and jug it to your boat at a cost that was about 1/6th of the “Tourist Boat Price” at the fuel dock. It was our first time like this and it took days of going back and forth in the dinghy with five 20L jerry cans. Then the jugs had to be poured into the tanks, a sloppy, smelly, and grueling process trying to to make a mess while holding heavy, dirty jugs to pour.

In Savusavu a local gas station would, for a 10% surcharge, deliver their own 25L jugs to the dinghy dock of our choice and put them right in the dinghy for us. Back on Evenstar, all be had to do was lift the jugs up on deck and move the fuel to the tanks. We had discovered hand pumps we Tahiti for transferring fuel that functioned as siphons. Brilliant little things – the hand pump just primed the siphon if you kept the tank elevated and the fuel ran in on it’s own. That whole process was a lot quicker and easier than the refuel in Trinidad, thanks to the cheap siphon pumps. We ended up taking on about 645 Liters into the tanks before we left, not including the 80L on deck in the four jerry cans.

Other than that it’s no real change from yesterday. Unexciting is good, if expensive.

Posted in New Zealand, passages | 2 Comments

Day 4 to NZ – Bye Bye, Wind.

On Nov 21st, 2015 Published By B.J.

Miles to Go: 516 (Well past half way!)

So what I’m thinking is that the front/trough/whatever we hit two days ago was moving a little than predicted. It caught us a day earlier that we expected, and has now disappeared a day earlier than expected as well.

That’s my theory anyway, I’ve been unable to download a new GRIB file to confirm this since we found all that wind on Friday. But it sort of fits.

But as of about 7:00 am this morning (Sunday 11/22/15 on this side of the world) the wind petered off to nothing and we had to turn on the engine once again. We’ve been motoring ever since.

We had over thirty-six hours of excellent sailing conditions though, which should definitely put enough miles in the bank to make sure we don’t run out of fuel before we get through this hole in the wind.

Wildlife Report

One thing of interest to report today is what we believed to be a sighting of a Beaked Whale, though we weren’t close enough to tell if it was a Cuvier’s Beaked Whale (most likely) or a Blainville’s Beaked Whale. It looked to be about twenty feet long and brown with white spots. A small curved dorsal fin was visible, and the brown color was quite distinct and is a possible color for the Cuvier’s. Geographic ranges precluded a few of the other beaked whales in the book. It was considerably larger than a bottlenose dolphin, so definitely a small whale, and was on it’s own – also a common way to come across older male Cuvier’s whales.

That’s our tentative identification though. We’re still scanning the skies for our first Albatross as we approach closer to New Zealand.

Arrival ETA

With the lack of wind and rough seas and the fact that we are motoring now we’re able to start to pin down a more likely estimated time of arrival in New Zealand. We’ve got just under seventy hours left motoring at 7.5 knots, which should put us in early afternoon on Wednesday the 25th (NZ Summer Time)

Of course things could still change. I’ve got to stick my head in the bilge and check the fuel levels to re-assure us that this pace isn’t burning it up faster than expected. More weather could blow up, though it isn’t expected. Depending on the weather, we could either be slowed down a lot (wind from the Southwest), sped up with favorable winds, or slowed down a little if there is enough wind to sail but not to sail quickly.

Trouble Getting the GRIBS

Above I mentioned that I have had trouble getting updated GRIB files. This is not a technical failing, everything is working well. It also should not be taken to mean we don’t have access to any weather reports – we do. We have several text based subscriptions of regional weather reports e-mailed to us every day.

It’s the GRIB files we haven’t updated yet. When I am communicating from offshore I am using my shortwave (SSB) radio to send and receive e-mail via radio over the amateur radio bands. There are radio stations out there that are connected to the internet, they listen for our calls in the ether and connect with handshaking and error checking protocols to send digital data over scratchy, static filled, narrow bandwidth SSB radio.

This is not fast. For those of us who used PC’s in the 80’s and early nineties connecting to Compuserve or other BBS software with 2400 Baud modems.these speeds would usually seem slow.

A GRIB file can be huge, depending on how much geography you want to include in it, how much detail you want to include (You want sea surface temperatures, wind, air pressure, sea currents, rain, and so on), and how many days out you want to go. When I am sitting at anchor connected to shore Wifi or Cellular I’ll grab a great swath of the South Pacific thousands of miles on a side so I can watch the weather patterns move over the next two weeks in detail. These files can be a megabyte or more.

Offshore like this? I basically need to request a GRIB for a tiny swath of ocean that covers where I plan to be for the rest of the trip, and only about four days out. The last request I sent was for a file about 44,000 bytes in size. I couldn’t secure a fast connection, and it was estimated to take 3-5 hours to download this. The fastest connection I can get take maybe twenty minutes to download the file.

It’s also important to note that one can not simply connect to someone else’s hardware for free and hog it up for hours. There’s a fair amount of equipment and cost to running one of these stations, and they are shared by all amateur operators free of charge. But there are limits – set both out of manners (don’t be a pig), and also by the operators of the radio station. The best radio station I can reach out here is in Wellington, NZ. I can establish a “High Speed” (meaning about like that 2400 baud modem or a little faster) connection there, but I am limited to forty minutes time connected each day. Other sites give you more time, but they still usually kick your connection off after half an hour to make sure others get a chance to use the station, so you have to call back and reconnect to continue your download.

To add to it, there aren’t that many radio stations doing this in the South Pacific. My primary contacts are with stations in New Zealand, Hawaii, and Australia. Weather, atmospheric conditions and time of day limit which stations I can reach and when, but in general I’m limited to about eight stations in those areas. I can not just sit down any time during the day and establish a connection, mid-day for example it is near impossible and night time is best.

So yeah, it’s slow. Slow is the normal. Some much so that I ask anyone e-mailing me out here to make sure to NOT quote my original e-mail when replying to me because it makes downloading the e-mail reply double or triple in time.

Hopefully we can get a GRIB from yesterday by tonight!

Posted in New Zealand, passages | Comments Off on Day 4 to NZ – Bye Bye, Wind.

Day 3 to NZ – So THAT Wasn’t in the GRIB File!

On Nov 20th, 2015 Published By B.J.

Distance to go: 694 NM

GRIB File: Short for “Gridded Binary”, these are the files that contain weather data that sailors download to predict future weather. There are several sources of them, but the most common are the “GFS” model and the “Euro” model, representing the source of the weather prediction model that is used in the file.

Evenstar has tools for numerous sorts of weather information available to us in order to predict what to expect on a trip. Our plotting software, Maxsea, has an excellent “Routing” tool that is sophisticated enough to provide a rough expectation on what weather conditions, expectations and trends to expect along a given route at a given time. These predictions would probably prove quite adequate if the GRIB files I downloaded for it had any bearing on reality.

Yesterday was a good example. Based on the latest GRIB file I downloaded an hour before we left Savsavu we were to expect light conditions for the first couple of days. Some sailing, but Thursday and Friday would have little to no wind. Come late Saturday some wind from the S to SE was expected, in the range of 15-17 knots, which would swing East over Saturday evening to provide some comfortable reaching through Monday where the winds would die out and mostly disappear for the rest of the trip.

Nothing about DUE SOUTH winds. Nothing about 25+ knots, gusting to 30.

Backing to to where you left us yesterday, we were hove to and looking to see how this abrupt shift in weather would pan out.

Keep in mind we were NOT sitting this out for the wind strength, 25 knots isn’t dangerous in a boat like Evenstar. From the right direction twenty-five knots is an absolute blast – you just hang on tight and go like hell.

We were looking for a shift in direction. While twenty-five knots on the nose isn’t dangerous at all, it is annoying as all get out. Sailing as high upwind as we can requires a human driver. We were looking for the wind to clock a little to the East, which would let us “crack off” about 10-15 degrees from upwind beating and allow the autopilot to do it’s job without exhausting us.

So we hung out for a while, took some naps, had some dinner. After about four or five hours of this the wind had indeed moved to the East (or “to the left” since we were heading South) and we could carry sails and use the autopilot on a course that would actually hit New Zealand at some point instead of New Caledonia.

So with sails reefed the the Fun Meter (or “Wind Speed Indicator”) pegged around thirty knots we started sailing again. It was kind of a wild, lumpy night, but we made decent forward progress. By morning the wind has eased a bit into the low to mid twenties. When I took over again at 0600 the wind was light enough that our reefed sails were too small. So I eased the sails, shook out the reefs, and we speed up again and have been maintaining seven and a half knots or so on a close reach every since.

According to my GRIB file, however, the wind should still be flat and I should expect it to gradually increase to fifteen knots around eight o’clock this evening. So I’ll keep an eye out for when it starts to drop.

Posted in New Zealand, passages | 1 Comment

Day Two to NZ – Careful What You Wish For

On Nov 19th, 2015 Published By B.J.

DISTANCE TO NZ: 803.5 NM

No wind, engine running. Keeping it slow to save fuel.

There was wind, from the perfect direction, but it was less than eight knots. Usually more like four or five knots. Forget making it to New Zealand by Thanksgiving, sailing in that sort of wind would put making Christmas in doubt.

So we puttered along, putting up really short days for us and going slow. Hoping for more wind.

It was certainly comfortable, though we’ve been burning up dinosaurs faster than we wanted to. The wind continued flaky and variable, but this morning we awoke to cloud cover instead of clear blue skies.

But still no wind. You’d think with the clouds a little wind would come. Nope.

As the day progressed we spotted some rain on the horizon, coming at us. Great, but rain like that usually is associated with less wind, not more. The light rain came, but most of it misses us. The wind stayed light but crept forward.

Around 2:00 pm we suddenly registered wind! On the nose, to be sure, but we saw thirteen knot! We can sail in this. Engine off, sails up. By the time we got things stowed we decided to leave a reef in the head sail as the wind was up to sixteen with more gusts.

Ten minutes later we’d reefed the main in, and reefed more jib. The wind was know breaking twenty knots (on the nose, of course). We reefed in a little more main as the wind worked up to a steady twenty five knots, with gusts close to thirty.

The autopilot can not sail in this direction. Dead upwind is a manual steering situation only, there is too much variability and the poor autopilot can’t handle “sailing on the edge”.

“Sailing on the Edge” is fun. For a little while. As a rule we cruisers avoid sailing dead upwind. The reasons for this are several, including that it is a nuisance since the auto steering systems don’t do well with it, it is uncomfortable since the boat is really, really tipped and you tend to pound through waves, and all the tipping booby traps out closets and breaks things.

We decided to take a short break and let this blow over. So we’re “hove to” as I type this. “Heaving To” is a way to set the boat up so that you are basically parked, or at least dramatically slowed. The boat’s motion is much kinder, tilting is a lot less, and you are more comfortable. It’s not fast and it sometimes takes you away from where you want to go. But it puts a stop to all the pounding and tilting while you want for the bad upwind sailing to blow over you.

We won’t likely stay this way for long, the sun is shining again and the winds are dropping down to the low twenties. I’m looking for the shift back East that will let me sail the way I want to go again, but we may not get it. But at least with winds will calm down for us and we won’t have to do so much pounding.

Posted in New Zealand, passages, Wind | Comments Off on Day Two to NZ – Careful What You Wish For

Day One Back to New Zealand – Slow Going

On Nov 18th, 2015 Published By B.J.

So far, anyway, it hasn’t been a very fast trip. But we expected that.

The weather forecast for the coming week shows a lot of “holes” – meaning holes in the wind, patches where the wind would be nonexistent. It’s not ideal, but we left anyway.

In a perfect world, you leave on a fresh breeze and the breeze stays moderate, constant, and from an easy direction, giving you a nice easy and face passage. Engines don’t leak oil, things don’t break, and the wind doesn’t die or swing around on the nose. Sometimes, rarely, this happens. But usually you pick the best looking “window” and you go for it.

Sometimes you have more time to pick a window. A month ago we had our choice of windows, but we weren’t ready to leave Fiji yet. We’d met some new friends, we were having fun and it wasn’t time to go yet. We had a good window, but had to turn around. Now we have another “good” window, but it’s a slow one and we expect a lot of motoring.

One priority in picking this window was looking for an easy passage. As in uneventful, weather-wise. This is the first time the three of us have sailed off shore without Will, so we really didn’t want to have unpleasant or difficult positions for this new experience.

So far we’ve got it, but it’s not going to be exciting. That, as far as I am concerned is a good thing.

Good excitement is catching a nice fish. Bad excitement is nasty weather. We’re good with fish, bring ’em on. But we’re content right now to watch our fuel carefully as we motor through the holes.

Fuel Capacity

And for those wondering, if we have to motor the whole way or most of the way to New Zealand. What is Evenstar’s range? Here are some quick numbers.

We carry 1,000 liters of fuel in our main tank. This was full to the top when left. Literally, full to the top. The day before we left I overfilled it and made a small mess. We also have a reserve tank of 300L, and we carry an additional 80L is yellow jugs tied to the rails. We don’t count that last in our powered range totals though.

According to our owner’s manual, our approximate consumption at “cruising speed” is about 10 Liters per hour. This can vary wildly with sea state, conditions, and how hard we push the engine. There is a substantial difference in fuel consumption between running the engine at top speed versus backing off a few hundred RPM’s and slowing it down a knot or two.

With 1,300L of rule on board that gives us about 130 hours of run time on engine alone. If you are motoring only, there’s little need to use the generator. But if we’re sailing we will need to run the generator for 4-5 hours every day or two. Again, it depends on our consumption. The most power hungry operation for Evenstar is sailing at night, since all of our instruments, autopilots, radar, etc. are all on in addition to the refrigeration and lack of production from the solar panels.

Our “cruising speed” is roughly 7.5 knots. We can push it fast, but it burns a lot more fuel to run at 8.5 knots or more, so we rarely push it that high.

The math:

130 hours X 7.5 knots = 975 nautical miles at the rated cruising speed, which we rarely use. Or roughly 1,000 miles – if we take it slower we can extend that.

Our jerry cans give us another eight hours of run time (60 miles), but realisticaly we view that more as “generator time” since that’s not really a significant amount of travel distance. It will give us maneuvering capability when you make landfall if we’ve used the rest of the fuel.

The new generator uses 1.4L/hour at half load, 2.7L/hour at full. We only hit close to full capacity when we run the air conditioning which we don’t generally do off shore. That eighty liters of diesel can keep the generator running another 40-50 hours. We need 4-5 hours of run time roughly every other day. So in the unlikely event we completely exhausted all of our fuel in the tanks we can still have instruments, autopilots, lights, and refrigeration for another 10-20 days on those jerry cans, with a small amount of fuel for anchoring.

The trip from Savusavu Fiji to Opua New Zealand is 1,146 miles as plotted. 7.5 knots is 180 miles per day, so the trip should take about six and a half days at that speed. If we are sailing aggressively in light air it will take longer. If we have great wind like we did crossing the Pacific we could do the trip in less than six days, but that isn’t likely.

What We Need for Weather

From the above, it’s clear we can’t just motor all the way from Fiji to New Zealand. Well, we could, if we kept the RPM’s down and motored slowly, but that would still be risky with regards to running out of fuel So what we need is a couple of days of good wind.

We sailed yesterday and until about midnight last night, then sailed four more hours today before the wind died again. So that will be the pattern – every time we get wind we’ll sail on it as long as we can. We expect to see some breeze over the weekend where we may get up to two solid days of sailing. Unfortunately, by Monday we expect to run out of wind and see very little for the remainder of the trip. So we want to reserve out motoring until as late as we can, but the 3.5 knots of true wind we have right now isn’t exactly helping that!

Posted in Fiji, New Zealand, passages | Comments Off on Day One Back to New Zealand – Slow Going

Day One Back to New Zealand – Slow Going

On Nov 18th, 2015 Published By B.J.
Posted in New Zealand, passages | 1 Comment

For Want of a Hose…

On Nov 17th, 2015 Published By B.J.

So here we are, almost a week later, and still in Savusavu, Fiji.

Last Friday it went according to plan. Mostly. We got up and had breakfast, went to the market, cleared out of customs and spent all but the last $1.60 of our Fijian money. We set off around 2:30 in the afternoon and started motoring out to sea.

Before we left we’d found and fixed (we thought) a couple of problems. One of them was a big pool of oil under the engine.

Some of you may recall we had serious oil leak problems on the way to Fiji. The was disconcerting since we had a lot of work on the engine before we left New Zealand and the engine was supposed to be set. On the way to Fiji we thought we’d figured out why the oil was leaking and stopped it.

Over the coming months I had checked the oil and added a little a couple of times. More than we used to add (which was basically none) but not huge volumes. The space under the engine was a mess again after the trip, which made spotting leaks more difficult.

After draining the oil out and changing it last week before departure, I noticed there was of oil under the engine. Quite a lot of oil. It had been leaking out still, but we hadn’t been moving much or running the engine often enough to catch it happening. Once again I tightened the clamps on the dipstick and checked the crankcase breather hose for blocks and kinks, then finished my oil change. Kathy cleaned the oil and water out from under the engine so we could more easily see any leaks. I started the engine, ran it for ten minutes and detected no leaks. Excellent!

Back to last Friday. Sailors have a superstition about leaving port on Fridays, it’s supposed to be back luck. Leaving port on a Friday the 13th might also fall into the “bad luck” category.  But so what? I’m not superstitious, the weather window was right, the boat was ready, so we left.

About twenty minutes into our trip Kathy suggested we should check the engine to make sure there were no oil leaks or problems. What she found was that oil was bubbling out of the dipstick at the top of the engine. Lots of oil, coming out quite quickly. The wind had picked up, so we put up a single sail to keep the boat moving while I went below to have a look.

What I found was oil coming out of the engine again. With the engine heated up and running at speed we were indeed losing oil out of the dipstick hole. After fiddling around and trying a few things I concluded that the problem was a block in the crankcase breather hose. When I disconnected the hose, the oil oozing stopped. When I re-connected it again…presto, the oil started coming out.

The crankcase breather hose is not necessary for the engine to run. It’s function is to allow any pressure in the crankcase to escape. The fumes, hot air, and misted oil though will make a mess in the engine room and could be dangerous if carbon monoxide accumulates. So a hose is run from a fitting on the valve cover back to the air filter so the oil and fume exhaust laden air can get sucked back into the engine. My main safety concern running off shore without the hose in place was carbon monoxide and exhaust getting into the cabin. Also, it would make a mess.

We decided that we needed to sort this out so we were comfortable. At least we needed to find a jury rig to hold safely until we got back to New Zealand and could get it handled permanently. Time was running out on us though, the Customs and Immigration offices closed in the afternoon and we needed to re-enter the country and get our paperwork straightened out. Fortunately, we reached them by cell phone and they agreed to wait for us and to reverse our clearance back in so it would be like we never left.

This is not a large hose.

This is not a large hose.

My working hypothesis is the breather hose got replaced in New Zealand when the engine was out, and the new one is too small. I tried to blow through it and it was nearly impossible. The inner diameter of the hose is less than 4mm – less than one half the cross sectional area of the factory part.. The fitting on the valve cover the hose comes out of is 3/4″ in size, and that has a step down covering that takes it to a 1/4″ hose. But this little hose has pretty thick sides. The air flow wasn’t high enough to bleed off the pressure, and the back pressure was pushing the oil out and making the engine difficult to start. With the hose disconnected the oil didn’t leak, and the engine started normally. Ergo the hose is the problem.

The real reason sailors don’t leave on Friday? Because if you have to come back with a problem almost nothing is open until Monday. Saturday morning the hardware stores and gas stations were open until noon. I went to seven different shops before noon on Saturday, not one of them had a hose anything like what I needed. There were hoses, but none that could take the heat of engine exhaust without melting. By noon everything was closing up here and in New Zealand and Australia where I might need to call for parts. Basically, we had to sit on our hands until Monday. There’s usually a practical reason behind a superstition.

Come Monday, after a lengthy conversation with the folks that did the engine work in New Zealand I arrived at a possible solution. All I needed was a hose. A bigger hose would do, any hose that I could run from the breather fitting to the air filter, so long as it was bigger than the one I had. A friend came up with a possible hose for me, and I went into town again looking for a new hose with different parameters.  Instead of replacing the old hose with one the same size, I wanted any hose that I could figure out how to jury rig on to the valve cover and air filter.

Eventually I found a 3/8″ hose at a hardware store. I realized I should be able to fit this over the step down adapter instead of inside it like the tiny hose did. After puzzling the other end over for a while and considering cutting a large hole in the air filter case to slip the hose into I came up with a better solution. I used some stainless steel seizing wire wrapped around the hose, then threaded into the intake grating and tightened down to hold it in place.

The clever, and larger, replacement hose.

The clever, and larger, replacement hose.

This morning, to be extra sure, we took the boat out for a spin. We ran the engine up hard and at least as long as before we found the leaks Friday. It all held – no oil leaks, and no fumes and exhaust in the engine room.

So we’re good to go once again and are planning to leave on the 18th of November (our date here in Fiji, the 17th back home). With luck it will take us a week and we’ll be in New Zealand in time for the Thanksgiving dinner at the Opua Cruising Club.

Posted in broken things, Engine, Fiji, hard to find parts, Savusavu | Comments Off on For Want of a Hose…

Wrapping it Up in Fiji

On Nov 10th, 2015 Published By B.J.

The plan, as it stands today, is to leave Savusavu, Fiji for New Zealand tomorrow. That is November 12th, our time…that will be Wednesday the 11th back on the home side of the dateline.

Fiji has been a blast, and yes I owe you all a bunch of posts. I’ve been negligent, but not because I haven’t been writing. I’ve just been working on writing fiction, not updates to the blog. Some day that ship might come in at which point I’ll talk about it. Suffice it to say my keyboard has not been idle!

We’re enjoying another Diwali celebration here in Fiji. There is a large Indian population, with a substantial number of Hindus. It is a national holiday here, so everything closes. It seems like everyone is a little bit Hindu for the day, with various family celebrations, dinners, and of course lots of fireworks.

But tomorrow morning we will run a last few errands, pack up the dinghy and set sail for New Zealand. As usual, it is later than we hoped to leave but we’re pretty used to that by now. It’s our first major passage without Will on board, so we’re being very cautious with the weather and will be taking it easy and not pushing things.

Sometimes tomorrow of the next day I’ll start up with the passage notes and updates. Then we’re back to New Zealand!

Posted in Fiji, New Zealand, Savusavu, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

So Where Are They Now?

On Oct 15th, 2015 Published By B.J.

Like one of our favorite bands, Spinal Tap, we’re currently in the “Where are they now?” file  since I’ve not updated the blog in two months. Fair enough. I’ve gotten very involved in a writing project and have been awful about doing updates.

So the answer to the #1 question is “Savusavu, Fiji.” The last time I updated the blog we were on the other side of the country. Although technically that isn’t true – I wrote a 1,700 word blog post a couple of weeks ago, but lost it in a technological malfunction and didn’t re-write it.

Back in September we heard a rumor of the existence of another rarely seen creature on the other major island in Fiji – a teenaged cruising girl! At the time we were in the Blue Lagoon, in the Yasawa islands and the rumored sighting was in Savusavu, over 100 miles upwind through a lot of reefs. We weren’t done in the Yasawas right away, but decided to work our way gradually upwind so we could get Danielle and this potential friend together.

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This was where we were, and where we are now.

The trip was a circuitous one, and we did it over several weeks, traveling slowly and enjoying the scenery. There are a few blog posts there to write, so I won’t do a lot of spoilers. In short, we sailed from the Yasawas back to Nadi to re-provision and do laundry, then worked our way around the North coast of the island inside the barrier reef, then at an abandoned leper colony en route to our final sail to Savusavu.

That’s all I can put up for now, other duties press. But we are alive and well in Savusavu!

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Posted in Fiji, Savusavu | 1 Comment