It couldn’t have gone much better. At 5:30am we left our slip and exited the marina beneath the raised footbridge. For the first hour the wind was light so we didn’t raise the sails until we were round North Head and west of Rangitoto. Leaving Auckland in the dark provided us with a fantastic last memory of the city twinkling away. Farewell Auckland and thanks for all the happy memories.
When the wind came it was just right. Over the course of the trip we saw anything from 15 knots to 27 knots. We had some good exercise shaking out and putting in reefs in the sails. The swell was light making the sail pretty comfortable. We arrived and anchored in Marsden bay at 4:30pm, 11 hours after we started. Not bad considering we’d half expected to arrive after dark.
We anchored here because this is where Suzi and Dave from Sidewinder were anchored and as this is our last night we can party it seemed as good an excuse as any. As they’d already stowed their dinghy for passage and we hadn’t I picked them up and dropped them off. We had a nice evening together. We’ll certainly see them on the dock tonight as we await our check out and departure tomorrow.
The forecast remains good for a departure tomorrow morning. The key thing is keeping the pace to avoid a high pressure system settling over the area 3-4 days from now. If that catches us we’ll run out of decent wind. The first 24 hours will see the wind direction changing a lot so it will keep us on our toes.
The passage overall looks to be pretty good. No signs of any really bad weather and we’ll be going from quarter to full moon so the nights will be nice.
It would be fantastic if we can make the passage in 7 days because then we’d arrive in Fiji on Sam’s birthday. We’d have to average 6.8 knots to make that which is possible but we’d need to be lucky. It’s more likely we’ll take 8 days.
We have a few final things to do to the boat before departure (like removing the outboard from the dinghy) which we’ll do on the dock this afternoon. But after our sail up from Auckland, crew and boat are looking pretty ready to go.
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