Commodore
October 20, 2024

Monday 21 October – what a great send off

We had a 9am slot booked with customs who come to the marina office to do all the sign off paperwork. We arrived to a crowd of people, 26 boats were signing out and they were already running an hour behind. Not all the boats are heading to NZ, plenty were heading to Australia. We met the crew we had supper with the other night, good to know we will have so much company on the way. Every sort of boat is part of the armada of boats heading to NZ. There is a tiny little boat next to us, a beautiful wooden boat with a young kiwi on board with his English girlfriend, they have a friend who is crewing for them, I think it might be quite crowded in there! Beyond them is an enormous Dutch boat which was on this year’s World Arc Rally with our friends on Fatjax. Talk about extremely different boats and then us, different again, quietly very confident we are the most comfortable. The guy in the little boat says his back is damaged from all the rolling about in their boat. We have seen them a couple of times at anchorages looking like a rocking horse.

We were done around 10am and then we were keen to go. The weather forecast is really only reliable 5 days out and there is a threat of a systems developing, so current plan is to go as fast as possible and get into NZ before Saturday! The marina do this very quaint thing where every boat that signs out to leave Fiji, the marina choir presents the boat with a floral wreath and sings the Fijian Farewell anthem. They have such lovely voices, you often hear them singing, all very jovial. I don’t think I mentioned when we had our manic time in the storm a few days ago and landed up anchoring in a bay with a village, once we were anchored and recovering from our ordeal, singing wafted over the water to us, it most probably was church singing as it went on for ages, it really was magical and soothed our frayed nerves.

Singing over, lines in and we were off, it takes a good hour to get out the reef area and through the pass which on one side has the famous Cloudbreak surfing wave. We could see the enormous wave through the binoculars, it is a world class wave, where international competitions take place, it’s considered very challenging, definitely not for beginners! It breaks onto a coral reef, coming from deep water, you would not want to land up on the coral besides it being a challenging big wave.

As soon as we were out the pass, the wind was in the mid teens and we were soon whizzing along. Bumpy waters initially which calmed down a little as we got away from land, but still a big swell. We averaged 9.7 knots on our first day, 230 mile day which is great going. We have joined up with the Pacific Rally heading to NZ, run by Viki a young Kiwi woman, who is an absolute dynamo, she liaises all weather forecasts, routers, guardian angels, and is an endless fountain of knowledge, having done this passage a number of time.. There are about 30 boats all heading to NZ from both Tonga and Fiji under her care. She is on a monohull, and also left today but from a different port nearby, by mid afternoon we had overtaken her and the rest of the rally boats in our group, hot on the tails of the boats that left yesterday. It is very reassuring having so much company about.

I did the first shift until midnight, all pretty easy besides a boat whose AIS (identifying tag) was not showing on the chart, so always a bit concerning, as it means checking on him by eye sight, as he barely showed up on the radar screen either. To be fair he obviously had a problem with his signal as he got it working just before midnight, which was good news. Otherwise there was a reef out in the middle of nowhere to avoid, pretty small but enough to have the wreck of a big cargo ship on it. Phil has slotted in well, he knows us well now as he has been on board twice before. So far all going well