Commodore
October 11, 2024

Saturday 12 October – amazing snorkel

We had a good night’s sleep, some rain kept it pretty cool, and the deep bay meant we were not rolling about. Rowan is always up early, and has been looking closely at getting a weather window to head to NZ. The chat on the sailing forums is that some iffy weather will be coming, a result of El Ninja, this could mean cyclones coming earlier here, so the sooner we go the better. Rowan has checked it out and it looked like Wednesday would be a good day to go, so he contacted Phil, the NZ guy who crewed for us on the way up here, and he is all set to come.

As it was calm as anything in the morning, Rowan rightly saw it as a good opportunity to do a few boat chores before the wind picked up. We had furled our Code Zero sail the wrong way which means the UV strip is not doing it’s job – protecting the sail fabric. This meant hoisting Sporty Spice up, unfurling her and dropping this enormous sail onto the deck. We managed to finally get the sail into the furler the right way around, re-hoisting and furling it, without the wind causing havoc. This all took quite a bit of effort, but finally we got there. We also had a session with our anchor chain. We had it re-galvanised in NZ as it had got so rusty. It is incredibly rough with it’s new coating, and has been sticking in the windlass. We also added another 30ms to the anchor chain in NZ, so the chain has been jamming in the windlass. We needed to let down the entire chain, over 100ms now, then stack it carefully at the back of the locker so that it doesn’t pile and get jammed. We’ve been waiting for a calm sandy bay with no other boats to tangle up with! Thankfully it all went to plan.

Rain, wind and cloud was predicted for the afternoon, so we went for a kayak mid morning also before the wind picked up. We paddled to the beach and had a good walk along the beach which was littered with shells. Interestingly there were lots of flowering trees right up to the beach and loads of butterflies.

Midday we went for a snorkel at the one headland. With the sun up high we had a wonderful snorkel. Big structures of coral dropping off into deeper water and all along the wall, thousands of colourful fish catching the light, quite spectacular against the blue backdrop. Most probably the best coral we have seen to date, loads of variety and colourful. We saw two Eagle rays cruising along, gently flapping their wings. We were drifting with the dinghy which was moving at quite a pace now that the wind had picked up a bit. Rowan had seen a clam that I didn’t see and I turned back to look for it, only to come face to face with a couple of white tipped sharks that were obviously following us. I quickly caught up with Rowan. The cheeky things were so curious doing big circles around us, they would disappear into the blue and then then a little while later they would come gliding past underneath us. I didn’t feel totally at ease about it. We snorkelled for ages as it was so impressive. We finally got out seriously wrinkled from the water!

We are very remote here, we have not seen a single boat today, nor any sign of people. Just a bit too far from anywhere, especially as a lot of the boats are packing up and leaving for either Australia or NZ for the cyclone season. Rowan had a zoom call with Met Bob the kiwi meteorologist in the afternoon, it appears the weather predictions have moved on a bit since this morning, and he is telling us to stay put and leave over the week end, but there will be better info after a day or two. So Rowan had to quickly tell Phil that plans had changed!