Aiming to leave tomorrow (Sunday 17th May)

The weather window for a departure looks pretty OK so we've decided it's time to leave the rain and chill of NZ. We'll be sad to go, though.

 

The forecast looks as though we should have good following winds for the first couple of days and we are hoping that the swell left over from the gale yesterday will have calmed. If anything the wind looks as though it might go a bit light from Wednesday but we'll take light over too windy any day!

 

We'll update our position on http://www.yit.co.nz/yacht/maunieofardwall every day at around 19.00UTC

 

So, in the meantime, last jobs on the list – fill the diesel and water tanks, make a lasagne for the first night's meal, stow everything that might chafe or rattle and (just in case) take a Stugeron anti-seasickness pill tonight!

We'd like you to meet some cruising heroes

We've met some amazing, wonderful people on our voyage. The folks who decide to take the plunge and leave the house, car, career and all the trappings of 'normal life' to sail into the Pacific are generally pretty interesting people to be around. 

We'd particularly like to introduce you to a pretty extraordinary Swedish family whom we first met in an anchorage in Spain back in 2012. 

Photo from Salsa's blog

Staffan and Ellinor, with their two children Erika and Andreas had set off in their 45ft yacht 'Salsa' earlier that summer and we got to know them pretty well as we crossed the Atlantic at the same time and even shared locks in the Panama Canal. Actually the first meeting in Spain wasn't great - Staffan shouted at us that he thought we were anchored too close to him, but we've forgiven him since!

This (southern hemisphere) summer, they bucked the trend and, instead of sailing south to NZ to avoid the cyclone season, they stayed in Fiji. The country was spared any cyclones this year, unlike the previous one, but of course neighbouring Vanuatu was decimated by Cyclone Pam a couple of months ago. 

Their proximity to Vanuatu (about 4 days's sail from western Fiji) and their on-board skills (Ellinor was a consultant paediatrician in Sweden and Staffan was a film producer and business guru so has great project-management skills) meant that they immediately volunteered to help with the disaster recovery programme. They joined a brilliant charity called Sea Mercy (click for the link to their website) which uses sailing yachts to bring medical aid to Pacific Islands where conventional shipping just can't gain access.

They have spent an incredible month in Vanuatu, finding villages flattened by the wind and waves of the cyclone, with crops destroyed in the ground and very little in the way of food or medical aid. Ellinor and doctors from several other yachts have held clinics in the midst of this devastation, treating many hundreds of people, whilst Staffan has provided logistical and practical support whilst also not neglecting his responsibilities to home-school their two children. Erika and Andreas are amazing, accepting all of this in their stride and seeing it as 'just what you do'. Meanwhile he has posted almost daily, detailed accounts on his blog which highlight his respect for the local people who, in spite of the enormity of the disaster that has befallen their country, remain proud and independent; they accept outside help because they have to, not because they want to.

Staffan's latest update is a heart-warming view that puts paid to any Western assumptions that people in these situations just lie back and wait for the Disaster Recovery aid teams to come and rebuild their world. Here are just a few paragraphs which followed the description of a makeshift clinic set up in the damaged church to treat over 100 villagers:

"Remi the man responsible for the disaster work asked me if I wanted to see the village, and as we walked I saw things that were astonishing. You have a village that was wiped out about 5-6 weeks ago? And here they had arranged teams of workers to help the entire village. So instead of a tired crowd where everybody would have to take care of their own problem it was solved with many hands. 

It was organised with men setting up and repair houses and the women assisting with plaiting of material to tie up the walls etc. Can you imagine a roof with 12 guys on top lifting sections by hand and then 5-6 guys fastening to the house? Laughter and team work at its best! I get goose bumps as I write this because the joy and the speed was immense. As if that was not enough, the chiefs house looks like garbage, so Remi told me the working orders.

The chief has ordered that widows houses are fixed first, then lonely women with children, then families etc and last, yes, the chiefs house.

If anything made this relief work a life experience it was this village, I would not have wanted to miss it for my life! This gives so much hope about humanity. I'm not naive, I'm sure they have their problems, but the way they take care of this giant mess is amazing. Remember we are talking about a place without electricity unless you run a generator, we are talking about axes and handsaws, we are talking about splitting bamboo that has to be collected up in the mountains. We are talking about getting a tree away from a house before you can start rebuilding it, and we are not talking tree, we are talking BIG TREE, 100 years old, so wide that you can stand next to it laying down and it is yet taller than a man in its width.

On top of that they also had torrential rains last week so they have mud everywhere, mud everywhere!

Remi told me they are so happy, so happy, that nobody was killed during Pam."

If you'd like to read more, the blog can be found at http://blog.mailasail.com/salsa

Salsa, we salute you!

Wheretheheckawee? A new way to follow our progress

Things are looking up for a departure this Sunday or Monday - we'll be more certain in a couple of days. When we do start moving again, there's a very good website tracker for which we have signed up,  called YIT (Yachts in Transit).

It displays our position, together with weather report, speed and distance covered and any comments with a nice Google Earth graphic; it looks like this:

When we are on passage we'll update it every morning so that it'll show our track (plus an estimate of our position 24 hours later) and our daily distance covered. Once we are in Fiji it'll give photos of the islands and anchorages that we visit.

The address for the website is http://www.yit.co.nz/yacht/maunieofardwall and there is an option on the home page to 'Subscribe' where you type in your email address, tick the box next to 'Maunie of Ardwall' on the list of boats and press send. You'll get an email back immediately with a link for you to confirm the subscription (it has to be done within the hour) and then you'll receive an email each time we update our position on YIT.

We'll use this in addition to normal updates to this blog and hope that you'll find it useful and interesting!

To Fail to Prepare is to Prepare to Fail!

I'm sure that was a quote from some training event or other that I attended in 'normal' life - it was probably followed by: "There's no I in TEAM" and "To assume makes an ASS out of YOU and ME". Grrrr. Anyway, if there's one thing we've learned in this voyage, it's that good and thorough preparation before a potentially testing passage is vital. It's hard, not to say demoralising, to have to fix a problem in a bouncing boat at sea when you could have dealt with it easily in a calm harbour before you left.

So today we've been working at a couple of jobs which should put us in good stead just in case we encounter the kind of 'challenging' conditions that confronted the boats who left last week. The first was to remove the anchor.

Our anchor (a 20kg 'Kobra' design) normally lives on its bow-roller, ready for immediate deployment. On passage to Fiji, though, the water will be considerably deeper than the 80m of chain that we carry and, no matter how well it's lashed in place, the force of big waves crashing over it in bad weather could be considerable, enough to break the lashings, possibly. So, we remove it and, thanks to its clever design, can fit it, just, in a locker below our bunk.

The anchor being lowered onto the pontoon walkway

The point of the 'plough' is filled with lead and the bolt can be removed to allow the shank to fold down a bit

The 'folded' anchor ready for stowing 

The locker under the head of our bunk. The anchor fits with just about 4mm to spare and is surrounded by tins of food. Stored here (just behind the mast) we won't have its weight up front so that helps reduce the tendency of the boat's bow to pitch up and down. 

Once the anchor was removed, the next task was to deal with the chain locker. On Maunie the 10mm diameter chain wraps around an electric windlass (for hauling the anchor up from the seabed) and then feeds down through a hole in the deck into a locker below. Any water that follows it drains into the bilges at the bottom of the boat and if we encounter lots of big 'green water' waves over the bow, that would not be a Good Thing. One boat left here last year and turned back as their bilge pump was struggling to keep up with the ingress!

The windlass and chain - the chain goes down through the curved metal chute into the locker below

We remove the chute, tie a specially-made teak plug to the end link of the chain and then wedge it into the hole before replacing the chute. Now fully watertight.

The next job was to get the dinghy back aboard and first of all it needed a good scrub. After a summer in NZ, the bottom had a good collection of barnacles as, unlike Maunie, the dinghy doesn't have antifouling paint.

An unpleasant mix of green slime and barnacles, even though we usually hoist the dinghy out of the water at night

Halfway through the scraping and cleaning process, using the wonderfully-named 'Grunt' fibreglass cleaning chemical

Job done

For us, the dinghy is just as important (if not more so) than a car was to us when we were at home. It's a real work-horse and we were lucky that this one came with the boat when we bought Maunie. It's a RIB (rigid inflatable boat) so has a solid fibreglass bottom (vital if landing on coral-strewn beaches) and inflatable tubes for buoyancy and stability. It's 3.1m long so had good cargo capacity and the 9.8hp outboard motor will allow it to plane at about 12 knots with the two of us aboard. Unusually for a RIB, though, the transom (the back, where the engine is mounted) folds down flat when the tubes are deflated so the dinghy fits into a neat canvas cover and lashes down on to the Maunie's deck where it doesn't get in the way.

Securely lashed in place.

The dinghy is 18 years old, which is about 96 in human years, but the fact that it's been stored in its cover for much of its life has protected it from the UV light that kills inflatables. It has a few war-wounds and patches but we are very fond of it and hope to keep it going until we sail back into British waters.

So, two jobs that took most of the morning to complete. Luckily, as you'll have noticed, they were done in bright sunshine. More preparations to do as the week progresses; we won't bore you with them all but thought you might be interested in a flavour of what we do as the countdown to departure continues. Now, where's that to-do list?

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.

Organised like a military operation

Our friends on Kiapa, Exit Strategy, Ithaka and a few other boats who left Opua on Saturday must, unfortunately, be wishing they were still here. Their weather window has proved to be an unfriendly one and they are suffering strong winds (25-30 knots) and big seas (4m waves) with some seasickness thrown in (or should that be 'up'?) for good measure. They are sailing against a ENE wind which will swing round to the NE in the next few days and they are trying to head just east of north. We've been talking to them on the radio twice a day but, sadly, Graham can't find a weather forecast that will give them much comfort for the next couple of days at least.

We, meanwhile, have been enjoying light winds and sunshine so vital jobs are being done:

Taking advantage of the weather to dry the laundry

Our preoccupation at the moment, however, is with our propeller. The package, via DHL, seems to be fated for some reason - it was delayed in UK customs for 3 days and now it's being held up in NZ Customs in Auckland! Frantic phone calls and emails to DHL and Customs have so far yielded no results and we are booked for a lift out of the water tomorrow. We've decided to put the boat into a cradle for a couple of days so that the engineer who did the engine work a few weeks ago can do a better job of aligning the engine and prop shaft (which was making a nasty grating noise when we ran it the other day); we hope that this will give us enough time for the propeller to turn up. 

Meanwhile Graham's visit to the dentist last Friday has turned into a mini-drama. What we thought would be a filling under the edge of a crown on a back molar has turned into a very unpleasant and painful extraction so we're now also concerned if that might cause us to delay our departure. A further visit to the dentist on Thursday will tell us more.

The next possible weather window is this Saturday but we are increasingly pessimistic about how good it will be, whether the prop will have arrived or whether Graham's tooth with be ok. If we miss this window, we're in for a really nasty westerly gale here next week so would probably pay the cost to be in the well-sheltered marina for a few days rather than bouncing around on the mooring. We've found a really good new forecasting website called www.windyty.com which provides a very clear animation of what's coming in your area.

So, it's all not going quite to plan. Organised like a military operation, as Graham's Dad would say.

Waiting, waiting...

So, just to recap, our plans for this season (i.e. the southern hemisphere winter, May to November) is to return to Fiji to revisit some of the bits we loved last year and to explore the many islands that we didn't have time to visit. We'll return to NZ in November for our third and final summer here.

The Cyclone Season is officially over in this part of the Tropics and the New Zealand winter is approaching, bringing south-westerly gales (we just had the first of them a few days ago) so the cruising yachts are gathered like Swallows, ready for the off. The trouble is, the weather hasn't really settled down into its normal patterns for this time of year so everyone's wondering just when to go.

This time last year we were feeling the pressure of the decision as we counted down the final days of our New Zealand visas with no great signs of a friendly weather window in which to depart. We finally left on the last day of the visa and had a very good passage up to Tonga. This year, thanks to our flight home in February, our 6 month visitors' visas re-started when we flew back in March so there's absolutely no pressure from that quarter. In any case, we can't go yet as our folding propeller hasn't arrived back here after its return to Essex for some serious maintenance and a re-profiling of its blades designed to allow the engine to spin at its maximum power revolutions.

So we've had a very sociable time with yacht crews we know here as they all wait for the off but, thankfully, have been able to keep out of the great weather forecast debates just at the moment. The first bunch of boats leave this weekend (four brave boats left on Tuesday) so it'll be sad to wave them off; their weather window looks ok but not perfect, though, with a risk of strong winds and big waves towards the end of the 8-day passage to Fiji.

However, all being well, we'll be following their wakes in about 10 days or so, which is when the next favourable weather looks likely. In the meantime, there's still plenty to do on Maunie; last week we went out to practice some man-overboard drills and over the coming weekend we'll move out into the clear waters of the Bay of Islands to recommission the water-maker which has been 'pickled' for most of the summer. Lucky thing.