Wednesday 23 October – steady progress through bouncy seas

I’m writing this on my 3-6am shift. Not much of a night’s sleep, we had a particularly bouncy stage, the slamming of the waves against the hull is hard to sleep through, even for me! Thankfully it has died down now. I took over from Phil who had just navigated us around a boat nearest to us, we have now overtaken most of the boats in the rally that left the day before us. Just two left in front of us. The wind has been brilliant, consistently in the high teens, which is perfect for PolePole. As we get closer to NZ the wind will lessen and come from behind us, Rowan is looking forward to getting Baby Spice out. We still need to get in by Saturday midday when the new weather system will kick in. We should manage that, so all looking good for now.

I managed a good sleep last night so a much easier day today. Not sure how Rowan manages to cope with work calls as well as everything else. It was his happy day as I slow cooked a shoulder of lamb that he has been dying to eat. I needed cooler weather, and the weather has certainly dropped. Blankets out at night, it happens so quickly, hard to picture we were sweltering at night in the marina a few nights ago. We got the pork knuckles out the freezer that Rowan bought from the rather dubious Pork shop in Nadi. We can’t have any pork on board going into NZ, so that is tomorrow’s slow cooked meal.

I have one chore to do before getting into NZ and that is to do our Biosecurity plan, to show we have no creatures on board and that our hull is clean. We forgot to take photos of Rowan cleaning the hull, so we think we might have to take photos of the hull with the GoPro camera on a long selfie stick. We will need calmer waters for that.

We have now overtaken the yellow and green boats near us, we just have two boats ahead of us in the rally

I included this to show all the boats that have left Tonga and Fiji on the rally, all heading to NZ. A real cluster around us, amazingly we didn’t see a single boat today, all more than 2 miles away. This chart is not showing all the boats not on the rally like the tiny little boat next to us in Vuda marina

Rowan’s video of the water rushing between the hulls, using his long selfie stick

Good end to the day