Weather

The weather is now getting our full attention.

Today it matters because we still have things to do. Mainly shopping. And moving the boat to a new slip. The forecast says ‘Showers becoming more frequent. Strong southwesterly.’ Bugger.

Tomorrow it matters because we’ve invited everyone we know to drinks and nibbles aboard Dignity as it will (hopefully) be our last evening in Whangarei. The forecast for tomorrow says ‘Cloudy at times. Southwesterlies.’ That’ll do.

Wednesday it matters as we want to be out of here. Don’t want to go down the river and sailing out to sea with it pissing down. The current forecast for Wednesday says ‘Cloudy at times. Southwesterlies.’ That’ll do nicely.

Beyond Wednesday we’d like to be nosing our way up the coast towards the Bay of Islands. The forecasts for Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun are : ‘Fine. Light winds.’ (nice but bugger), ‘Dry. Light winds.’ (nice but bugger), ‘Showers with not much wind.’ (double bugger), ‘Rain with little wind.’ (crap).

The good news is that the only thing that’s as variable as the weather is the forecast so there’s quite a good chance this is exactly how the next few days won’t go.

This near term microscopic view on the local weather fits in (as it should) with the broader patterns we’re keeping an eye on with respect to understanding and picking a weather window to Fiji. The convergence zone (and hence a lot of wetness) is still sitting over Fiji and has yet to move north for the winter. The low/ridge north of NZ that I’ve been watching is continuing to head east opening up a sailing window to Fiji tomorrow. This has been confirmed by good old Bob McDavitt’s weekly weathergram. The local SW followed by calmer winds are what we’d expect from this configuration as a high is following.

This window is not for us. We’ll take the next one. I like to rehearse the decision making process though so I’ll continue to look at the weather as if we were leaving and see how things pan out. Near term it make me feel like putting as many miles in as possible on Wednesday before the calm weather sets in. Smart idea after a party the night before.

Can’t get by without a status report while we’re still in that mode.

Boat and car cleaning took up much of the day. This included inspecting the bow lockers. The starboard bow locker was fine but the port was not. We’ve known we’ve had some water intrusion there for sometime but have not nailed specifically where it was coming from. Now I know why. We had intrusion from two of the stanchions, the bridle anchor point and a screw. So that was all fixed. We left everything out to dry.

I spent a little time collating information on marine radio bands and local cruising nets. I also went to the local internet cafe to download all the latest O/S and virus updates for my laptop. Helen went on an additional provisioning run.

We had intended a ‘dry’ evening. A bold and inspirational move for us. We failed miserably when passing by Albatross III who had the Jacksters aboard. One thing led to another.