The morning weather session turned out to be quite useful. Members of 6 or 7 boats came ashore and we all sat around a long table with out laptops looking at various weather sources. There was a lot of discussion and sharing of ideas. I noticed Bert from Boree had a more up to date version of the software to view my downloaded wind/wave files and soon I was up to date seeing my wind, rain and waves in glorious technicolour. We’ve agreed to keep meeting at 10am each day although noone is individually bound to come.
The outlook for a passage to New Zealand right now is not good. A low pressure system is forecast to hang around about a 1,000 miles to the east of New Zealand with a high pressure system stalling to the west of New Zealand. Between them they squeeze some strong southerly winds and swell which would not be fun to beat through. For me, these systems are the thing to watch right now as everything is governed by them. We could be here for a while.
In the afternoon Helen and I went for a walk around Pangaimotu which was a pleasant leg stretch. At 6pm Sandra from Larabeck had agreed to play the fiddle. This was excuse enough for a number of us to come ashore and listen in. Soon we had Bert (the same one) accompanying her on a guitar from Imagine. All good fun and very memorable.
Disaster did strike yesterday in the form of running out of beer. The last of our reserves, topped up in the duty free store in Niue, are now exhausted. We’re also down to two bottles of wine. The rum is gone. We have gin but no tonic and some tequila fumes. Had we been leaving today this would have been perfect timing. Looks like we may have to go into town tomorrow to hunt down some essential provisions – tonic being the top of the list.
This morning we listened to the traffic on the Penguin net largely comprising the vessels who left here last Sunday. We know they’ve had a hard time over the last couple of days but it was great to hear things we settling out and they were mostly all past the bad weather and looking to arrive in New Zealand over the next few days. The one theme that did come through was ……. it’s cold down there.
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