Propeller refitted

We're very glad to report that, after some frustrating delays in Customs (6 days!), our propeller finally arrived on Thursday afternoon. We'd arranged to have the boat put into a cradle ashore for two days which gave us time to give the hull a really good clean and polish and to complete a few other under-the-waterline maintenance tasks.

The prop returned having been given a full service and new bearings at the manufacturers and the trailing edges of the blades have been ground to a new shape:

The clean bronze at the edge of the blade shows where the re-profiling was done (the rest of the prop has its old 'Propspeed' anti-barnacle coating left on).

Once the prop was refitted (in horrible, heavy rain), we relaunched yesterday and did an engine test out in the anchorage. The great news is that the engine can now spin at higher revs, as it should, and we got an extra knot of maximum speed; the prop was smooth and rattle-free again. Hurrah! We are very pleased with the service from Brunton's Propellers but pretty annoyed with DHL for their poor communications and slow reactions to the Customs delay.

So we are pretty much ready to go, except for the weather and Graham's dental issues. There is a possible weather window to leave today but it does not look very good so we'll wait for another week or so for the next system to go through. It looks as though it will be a fairly wet and windy week in NZ, though!

Hope that 40-50 knot red monster goes south of us!! The wind arrows have the 'feathers' (like an archery arrow) at the back so we are getting W to NW winds 

Meanwhile Graham went back for a further round of dentistry on Thursday and his jaw is still pretty sore, so the enforced wait will give him time to recover, with a course of antibiotics to sort a flight gum infection where the tooth was extracted. However, he's been enjoying his role of 'Ground Control' for the boats who have been on passage to Fiji this week, updating the weather outlook for them via the SSB radio and email every day (at sea they can't access all the weather websites). Kiapa has now made it safely to Fiji and Exit Strategy and Ithaka are now having much better wind and sea conditions and should be there on Monday morning. They will all be pleased to arrive after a very challenging voyage.