NZ to Tonga Day 7 - Sleep at Last!

Position at 21.30 UTC Monday 5th May: 24 deg 15 min south, 176 deg 59 min west

 

All's well aboard Maunie and, finally, exhaustion has led us both to better sleep off watch so we're feeling a bit brighter than we were yesterday. We've had a good sailing wind all night though it's taken us a while to get the sails balanced so that Winnie can steer without the need for regular human help.

 

We're now less that 300 miles from our destination so hopefully just 2 more nights at sea before we arrive on Thursday, as long as the wind stays with us. We've been looking at our paper chart of the Ha'apai islands of Tonga and, though it was printed only 3 years ago, it looks like a museum-piece. It was surveyed by Captain A. Mostyn Field, RN, aboard the H.M. Surveying Ship Penguin in 1898! So the depths are in fathoms (6 feet) and the chance of any accurate alignment with modern GPS is remote to say the least so needless to say we'll be approaching the area with very great caution.

NZ to Tonga Day 6 - Pursued by a large cat

Position at 03.00 UTC Monday 5th May: 25 deg 49 min south, 178 deg 02 min west

 

Distance travelled in last 24 hours: 162nm

 

We've had some good sailing in the past 24 hours, as the mileage testifies, but it has been a trifle rolly, with a swell of around 2.5m, and we've needed to give Winnie a helping hand quite a few times. Even so, we continue to marvel at her ability to keep the boat pointing in roughly the right direction whilst we get on with other things; it's hard to imagine how hard it would be without her.

 

We've kept ourselves busy with culinary delights – the chilled lasagne we made the day before we left was very tasty and the oven shelf below it was used to bake some muffins, whilst the running of the generator last night to recharge the batteries allowed us to run the bread-maker for very good ham sandwiches at lunch today.

 

We're both feeling as though we could do with our own batteries recharging, however. For some reason neither of us has been able to get decent off-watch sleep so we're decidedly weary and in need of some distractions. Luckily a very pleasant distraction arrived this morning in the shape of Kiapa; amazingly their track from Whangarei put them just a few miles behind us at this morning's radio net and a couple of hours later they spotted our sail directly ahead of them.  They came past at great speed so Graham took lots of photos to give them when we meet in Tonga.

 

Speaking of Tonga, the southern island of Tongatapu lies just 340 miles ahead. We don't plan to stop there as the port of Nuku'alofa doesn't have a lot to entice the sailor, even though it's the capital of the country. Instead we'll pass by and sail a further 85 miles north to the Ha'apai islands and the main (only) town of Pangai. Ha'apai was devastated by Cyclone Ian in January so we hope that the international aid programme has lived up to its promises but the natural beauty of the many reefs and islands is said to be stunning.

 

 

NZ to Tonga Day 5 - Proper sailing at last

Position at 22.00 UTC Saturday 3rd May: 28 deg 17 min south, 179 deg 58 min east

 

Distance travelled in last 24 hours: 137nm

 

The promised SE winds have finally arrived, after teasing us yesterday – we had enough wind during the day but had to motor-sail during most of the night. We now have a good steady Force 4 (about 13 knots) on a beam reach (the wind coming at us from 90 degrees to our starboard) – perfect conditions as we have relatively fast boat-speed without the heeling over that would accompany a headwind or the relentless rolling that's the penalty of a tailwind. The re-built Winnie the Windpilot is coping well, though a reach is never her favourite point of sailing so every now and then we have to give her a hand if a change in wind speed makes the boat want to round up into wind. The Kermadec Islands are 120 miles to our starboard – they belong to New Zealand and we think there's some kind of scientific station there (originally a radio station in the days before trans-ocean cables and satellites) but if anyone can Google them and let us know, we'd be grateful. We do know that yachts aren't supposed to stop at the islands but people have in the past and been welcomed as a novelty by the handful of people stationed there. 

 

Whilst our boat speed is reasonably good – we're averaging about 6 knots  - we've just had it put into perspective on the morning radio net. Lionel and Irene, who normally sail from Perth,  Australia,  have a pretty awesome 'Gunboat' 50ft cruising catamaran that's specifically built for long ocean passages. We met them a few times en route from Panama and admired the boat but this morning we decided we didn't like it so much. They left Whangarei (further down the coast from Opua)  the day after we set sail and they reported sailing at an average of 11 knots this morning so expect to overtake us today and arrive in Tonga in 2-3 days' time, whereas it'll take us 4-5 days! Just not fair!

 

We also chatted to a few boats, including Stormvogel, still in Opua this morning and they were not enjoying a chilly, foggy start to the day. The weather window that they all hope for (next Tuesday) now doesn't sound brilliant so some are already talking about waiting an extra week which would be a bit demoralising (harbours rot ships and men, as you know). We're keeping our fingers crossed that they do get away next week.

NZ to Tonga Day 4 - A new crew member

Position at 00.00 UTC Saturday 3rd May: 29 deg 56 min south, 178 deg 39 min east

 

We're delighted to report that, since yesterday morning, we've been sailing for most of the time. At a sedate pace, it must be said, but it's lovely to have the silence. The engine on Maunie (a 56hp, 4-cylinder naturally-aspirated Yanmar 4JH3E diesel, if you're curious. Thought not.) is a pretty good installation in that it's mounted below the floor in the pilot house in a sound-insulated compartment so it's relatively quiet but, even so, after a few hours the noise does get on your nerves. Incidentally, before we left Opua we filled up the tank with fuel and it came to $170 (about £88); alongside us at the other pump was a 50ft blue-water motor yacht. Their pump stopped when it reached $999 (the credit limit on the self-service system) and their tank wasn't even one-third full!

 

So we've been making 5-6 knots in a north-easterly direction and after 3 days and 5 degrees of latitude, the temperature is already warming up. The duvet will be packed away soon we think! The sea has turned that lovely mid-blue of the deep Pacific and the wildlife is already starting to thin out. We had a dolphin escort on Day 1 but no sightings since and only the deep ocean skuas can be seen in the skies now. Apart from a little visitor we had yesterday, that is. A Swift, no doubt on some incredibly long migration, flew around us looking exhausted and even landed in the sea with his wings spread out on the surface. He managed to take off again and landed on the outboard motor on the stern rail for a couple of hours rest. We tried to tempt him with water and crumbs from freshly-backed muffins (a new night-watch snack!) but he just seemed to want a bit of kip and flew off a couple of hours later. Hope he makes it to wherever he's heading.

 

We are both slowly adjusting to the watch system and sleeping better off-watch but it'll take another couple of days before we do that wonderful fast-asleep-as-your-head-hit-the-pillow trick that only comes with tiredness bordering on exhaustion.

NZ to Tonga Day 3 - If you're thinking about it, now's the time to do it.

Can you guess what this is?!

 

Position at 22.30 UTC Thursday 1st May: 31 deg 51 min south, 177 deg 05 min east

 

Sir Chay Blyth (round the world sailor, ex-Paratrooper and founder of the Challenge Business which put ordinary people into extraordinary steel global racing yachts) had a number of sayings that he would share liberally, whether they were asked for or not. We still repeat his 'Chafe is Your Enemy' when checking the sails and rig and his 'Trim, trim, trim' when looking to coax a few extra tenths of a knot out of the boat. The one we use most, though, is "If you're thinking about it, it's time to do it" which applies to all sorts of things aboard a boat. If you're thinking that maybe it's worth putting a reef in the sails, do it now ; invariably if you wait, the wind will get up more and make the process more challenging.

 

It also applies to boat maintenance, too. It's very easy to look at some frayed stitching or a bit of chafed line and think 'I must get round to that' only to find that it fails a day later with much more difficult consequences. We've just paid the price for not following Sir Chay's advice fully.

 

The photo, above, is of our fresh water pump which resides in a small (of course) space under the floor behind the engine. It draws water from the main tank and pressurises a ring main servicing the taps in the heads and galley; the red tank is an 'accumulator' which has pressurised air on one side of a flexible membrane and water from the pump on the other and its job is to provide a steady flow of water so that the pump runs smoothly and doesn't stop and start repeatedly when a tap is opened. Anyway, a week or so ago we noticed that the pump was getting louder when its pressure switch detected the need for it to run and then took longer than normal to re-pressurise the system. We'd bought a spare pump, just in case, and Graham had checked that it had all the necessary fittings to replace the old one.

 

Of course, it crossed our minds that it might be a good idea to swap pumps before we departed (If you're thinking about it, etc.) but the old pump was still going and we had a lot of other things to do. Wrong! Yesterday afternoon the pump died completely so Graham had a fun hour extracting it from its hole under the floor, replacing the old pump with the new one (and, of course, it's a different pump so new mounting holes needed to be drilled) and refitting it all. Luckily the boat wasn't rolling too much but it would have been a lot easier if we were still moored in the marina! The good news is that it's all working again.

 

Apart from this hiccup, all's well aboard. We're still motoring but the weather files show nice south-easterly breezes tantalisingly close ahead. As we hinted in the last blog, it feels wrong to set off on a passage knowing that there would be a couple of days of diesel-burning at the very start but what we didn't say was that our NZ visas had just expired so we faced an expensive ($330) and tedious process to apply for extensions if we did decide to wait a week for the next weather window. The authorities were at pains to reassure us that they wouldn't kick us out into unfavourable conditions but a couple of days of motoring in light wind could hardly be described as hazardous!

 

So we'll make the best of what we have;  running the engine allows us to run the watermaker and enjoy hot showers whilst we wait for the wind.

 

 

NZ to Tonga Day 2 - Wot, no Stormvogel?!

Position at 02.00 UTC Thursday 1st May: 33 deg 52 min south, 175 deg 23 min east

 

We've had a good first night at sea and were delighted to have a decent sailing breeze until about midnight, as the forecast suggested we'd be motoring from the start. The wind swung round at about 22.00, giving Graham the challenge of gybing the boat and setting the pole to goose-wing the foresail without waking Dianne up from her off-watch slumbers. The process is a lot slower with just one person on deck and of course, that person is clipped on to the 'jackstays' (wires which run along each side deck) for safety, which hampers movement even more. However all was completed safely but the wind continued to drop until we were sailing at only 2-3 knots and rolling a bit in the gentle swell; it was time to start the engine.

 

For the first major passage since the Atlantic crossing, we didn't have a friendly navigation light within sight. Regular readers of the blog will know that we met Peter & Heidi on Stormvogel back in Falmouth in August 1012 and have sailed with them pretty much since. It's been great to have another boat in visual range in the middle of an otherwise empty ocean (and, thanks to our amazingly similar boat speeds, for most of the long passages we were never more than a couple of miles apart) and we've built up an firm and unshakeable friendship through good times (and a few bad). They are sailing up to Indonesia this year, via Vanuatu (west of Fiji) and Australia, so we bade them a sad farewell yesterday; we'll miss them. The good news is that they also have a long-range SSB radio so we should be able to chat to them for the next month or so at least.

 

On the subject of radio, we've restarted the Southern Cross Net, the daily radio chat that ran so successfully from Panama to New Zealand last year. At the end we had up to 30 boats joining in on the morning net; this morning's net, by contrast, had only 5 boats at sea but we know lots are leaving NZ next week so we should see numbers increase quite dramatically. It's comforting to talk to other boats on long ocean passages; the obvious safety element is augmented by useful comparisons of weather at different locations on route and the entertainment of shared news and chat.

Leaving New Zealand

We just left Opua at the start of an 8 day passage to Tonga. Very sad to leave but we're looking forward to the warmth of the Tropics again!

The weather prediction isn't brilliant for us - a couple of days of very little wind to start but we hope to pick up some nice south-easterlies on Saturday. We really ummed and aaghed about whether to wait for the next weather window (in about a week's time) but eventually decided to go for it. Just hope the swell isn't too bad as we're motoring out!

We'll update the blog with news as the passage progresses.