Aboard Dignity (Lagoon 420) Blog

172nm to go to Marsden Cove. All is well aboard.

Another t-shirt day? Only if you’re me and using a lot of will power to pretend it’s still warm. And only then standing in the sunshine when outside. It’s gone cold. Current dawn temp is 18C. This might be a warm day in NZ but not for us used to minimum overnight temps of 26C.

Despite this, day 5 was a pretty good day. We spent most of the day with the chart plotter telling us we had less than two days to go. This puts us into a kind of end game wondering what we’ll do when we plant out feet back on land. Although spirits have been high, this gave us all a further lift. The sea was at it’s best, with two meter long period rollers lifting and lowering us gently with blue skies overhead. Even though it was cold, it doesn’t get much better.

Before anyone else got up I caught another fish. It was another piddly skipjack so I tossed it back without waking anyone to share the joy. Later in the day we found one of the 80lb lines snapped. Something big must have bit. Lost was my lure with the made up double hook.

Lunch was eggs and bacon. Yum. In fact, we’re all being force fed now. With anticipation of being tied to the dock sometime on Sunday, even if in the evening, Helen is packing it in. She’d made two large fruit cakes before Lissa arrived which we’d not managed to start before we set off from Fiji. Needless to say, we’ve been having rather large slices after filling ourselves which each evening meal.

One bit of bad news from yesterday came when I turned on the water maker and the bilge alarm went off fairly quickly and repeatedly. Turned out one of the end caps on the high pressure tube had cracked and water was squirting out. We’ve had this once before (the other end cap) and we were sent two replacements so I have a spare. Even though the repair should be straight forward I want to do it on flat water and therefore want to conserve water. Within minutes of hearing the water maker failed Helen took a shower. I guess I should have spelled it out we were not full and needed to conserve. I did spell it out to Lissa but to be fair I suggested she could take one more full shower before we got to the marina where we’d have as much shower water as we want. She then went and washed her hair which usually takes twice as much water. Not her fault (nor did we say anything) – I should have used the whole alphabet when spelling it out. It always falls down to the captain. My fault.

We’ve averaged 6.4 knots over the last 24 hours which puts on a Sunday morning arrival. However, an hour into Helen’s watch (she’s on before me) the winds shifted NE and dropped quite low. We were down to 3.5 knots for a while but are slowly picking up. We have squalls off to the east which are probably causing much of the drop but the forecast is for light winds this morning picking up this afternoon. We’re now up to 4.7 knots which gets us in for Sunday evening. If the winds are still light once the squalls pass I may just have to break out the big sail.

322nm to go to Marsden Cove. All is well aboard.

Another t-shirt day. In fact, when inside I had to take even that off, it was too warm. Is this really the same patch of ocean we’ve traveled twice before?

And we’ve made some good progress. On the morning net we heard the boats 60nm south of us were in light air and motoring. They’d run into the high which we’d been trying to avoid. In fact, it was my primary reason for leaving on Sunday and not earlier as this was a likelihood. Through a combination of luck and judgment the wind was lightish throughout the day but by the time we reached that latitude we had good wind. In fact, overnight we’ve made very good progress. The wind has shifted some 30 degrees but stayed stronger than forecast. If we keep this up we’ll be in early Sunday morning although I strongly suspect it’ll be late Sunday. We’ll see. Aboard time for arrival is defined not in terms of days but numbers of night watches left – nobody likes them.

We had some other good luck too. During Lissa’s morning watch we caught a fish. Lissa reeled it in. It was a smallish skipjack tuna on a lure where I’d fashioned a double hook. One of the hooks had torn it’s throat out so it looked a little beat up. Later, we found some deck catch – a squid. The squid took it’s turn on the hook and by the end of day we caught another fish. Lissa again reeled it in and again it was a skipjack, smaller than the first. Neither were kept.

Overnight we had another clear sky. I spent a while on my back on the roof of the cabin watching shooting stars. The Magallenic Clouds were clearly visible ahead of us, showing us the way to New Zealand.

One thing I forgot to mention in yesterdays blog was that I’ve also made some progress making short term fixes to the runners for our sliding door. Both had broken plastic flanges which served to hold the door in its groove. Not the sort of thing that can easily be glued back together and really needing full replacement. However, I discovered a French Polynesian 2 franc coin was just the right size and width to glue onto the side and create some structure to hold the plastic together. Unfortunately we only had one. In the end the second runner was fixed by cutting a similar sized shape from one of Helen’s old store cards – glad we kept them.