Stormbound

The weather is insane and unbelievable. This last weekend has seen widespread flooding and destruction throughout the country including the complete collapse under snow of the roof of Southland Stadium in Invercargill. This is a 10 yr old $10M building and is probably demolition material. The winds from between SW and NW have been horrendous with Gale Warnings out for the entire country. For us this has meant winds between 20 and 40 knots mainly from the NW which is the direction we want to go! Then, just as we thought things might have been improving, we see that the forecast for this coming Thursday is for NW (again!) 40 knots.

We had thought that we might go to the Bay of Islands to wait for better weather and then clear Customs at Opua but it isn't even remotely sensible to consider going up there in this wind direction. We hoisted the trysail today on the marina to make sure all was well with that as it's our heavy weather sail and might be needed! As this is being written (2200) we have just had a wind gust of 30 knots right here in the Town Basin Marina and you couldn't get a more sheltered anchorage than this. That would probably translate to 50 off the coast.

So, here we are and now starting to seriously run out of time to get up to Noumea and back before the cyclone season starts. If we can't leave by the first week in October then we won't go. This will be extremely disappointing, especially for Gina, as she hasn't yet experienced an ocean passage, much less visited any Pacific Islands. This is in spite of the fact that she has lived in Singapore and Hong Kong at various times and has travelled the world including 6 months backpacking in India about 10 years ago. It is especially poignant as we were all ready to depart late in May but then Jim's Mum passed away and we had all the estate business to settle. That was almost 4 months ago and we've been ready to go for the last 3-4 weeks but the weather has been our nemesis.  It's almost as if someone upstairs doesn't want us to sail offshore at all.

However, we can't control the weather and can only hope for a break soon. As always we'll let you know.

Cheers,

Jim and Jean (Gina)