Monday morning was taken up with having the car oil and filters changed. While waiting for the work to be done I visited the information site to gather information on local hikes. They punted me to the Department of Conservation site in nearby Renwick.
Shortly before lunch we headed off to Renwick. While looking for the DOC office we found an Old English Pub which we liked better than restaurants in Blenheim, choosing it for our meet up with Ed and Cornelia in the evening. The lady in the DOC office recommended a short hike on the coast NNE of Blenheim near White’s Bay.
We took her advice and headed over to the coast. We ate our lunch in the car before taking off on the hike. It was quite pleasant offering us some pretty good views of the coast. We left the camera in the car so there will be no pictures of this day.
We headed back to our cabin for a rest before getting in contact with Ed and Cornelia from A Capella to arrange the evening’s meet up. We met at the pub at 7pm and did the usual chatting about where we’d been, what our plans are, what we’d heard about other cruisers, etc. While together we made a call to Gary and Jackie from Inspiration Lady who are still in Picton to arrange a group meet up on Wednesday.
Today we’re off to Picton ourselves and will be booking our ferry ride this morning.
Another part of our sailing preparation is I’ve started looking at the detailed weather forecasts and models for the trip to Fiji. I’ve always looked about 2 months ahead with weather regions to build up familiarity with the regions to which we’re heading. We have of course spent a lot of time looking at this passage when preparing to come south. So already it’s the same old free way of high’s and lows barreling over from west to east through which we’ll ultimately have to thread a path. One aspect which is already apparent (obvious really) is that an ideal reach will involve winds with a southerly component. And that means it will be cold.