Leaving New Caledonia
Well, our weather predictions seem to be holding good. Penny discovered a door to door bus which took us to Customs, Immigration and the Capitainerie (Port Captain in charge of all port activities). We needed to visit all these (separate) places to get clearance for the yacht to depart as well as ourselves. This saved a long walk- particularly useful as Dave cut his foot moderately badly.
Once we had performed the formalities, we left the Marina and fuelled up with duty free diesel. We did not need much. Indeed, we used less than a car tank full of diesel since Coffs harbour!
The passage is approximately 900 nautical miles (about 1,700Km). We are coming in a wide curve to avoid sea mounts, make the most of various currents and also because we expect bad weather for the last two days.
We anchored in Petite Rade for the night. We had a great view of the cruise liner, Pacific Star, which went past a mere 100 metres away around midday. We were woken at around 2AM when it left port. The majority of the noise was from drunken passengers; the engines were a lesser noise.
We up-anchored after a good breakfast and set off through the Dumbea Pass. The sailing was good and fast with a pod of bottle-nosed dolphins "waving us off".
The first day's sailing was excellent and uneventful- 'though much faster than we had anticipated. The seas were moderately big and we did break two turning blocks connecting the self-steering gear to the rudder. One in the afternoon and another at 4am. It is not nice hanging upside down in a dark space, in a rocky boat at that time of day. Fortunately this was the last such problem for the whole passage. These turning blocks each seem to last about 2 years or 8,000NM before metal fatigue sets in. There are 12 of them.
Next day (Wednesday) was rather horrible as a large front went through. Gale force winds and torrential rain & we were not able to lay our course for most of the day. Things improved by the evening and we started to get back on track.
Thursday the winds were light so we pulled down the mainsail and repaired some stitching and the head board attachments which had broken in the bad weather. While we did the work, the wind vane (Flinders) continued to steer us on course with just the headsail. It is the first time we have performed this type of repair while still sailing.
As of Friday morning, it has been wonderful sailing weather with light winds of around 10kts and boat speed of 6kts. We are about half way. Yesterday, we had a couple of pilot whales with us and today Penny has spotted the most amazing small jelly fish floating past like bubbles on the surface of the water. Today was also Spinnaker day. We ran it for about half the day and it was very successful, 'though we always watch it like hawks as it is very big and things can go wrong quickly. All went well.
No ships, no 'planes etc so we are all alone out here.
Each morning we chat with several other yachts which left for Bundaberg around the same time as us. We provided them with weather forecasting and they are very chatty. One of them had the same bad weather as us and unfortunately the wife has fallen and hit her head leading to seasickness which she has never had before.
Nothing else to report- both are well and sleeping reasonably. The boat is racing along very nicely.
It is now Saturday.
Regards,
Penny & Dave
