Moturua Island

It’s been fun hanging out with our buddy boats in the islands. Lovely walks ashore and a mystery tour of one particular island following pink ribbons into dense bush and slippy slopes. The buddies go their separate ways tomorrow with Polaire Bear and Nimue heading south and Shimshal staying in the Bay of Islands enjoying the early summer and waiting for friends and family to join us.

Chilling out with friends on Urapukapuka, Bay of Islands

A walk ashore with SV’s Polaire Bear, Nimue and Adiona (Alan, Linda, Michael, Anne, Scott and Maggie).

Sally, Cyclizine and Weather Routing

Sally, Cyclizine and Weather Routing

Something remarkable has happened. It’s been 12,000 nautical miles since Sally,  clammy and green with sea-sickness, lurched to towards the leeward rail before slumping back to her berth longing to be out of the Cabot Strait’s choppy seas. Making a dash from Burgeo to Braddeck was a mistake and we should have waited for more favourable conditions. It’s a mistake I’m not allowed to forget.

Avoiding pitching into steep, choppy seas has been the guiding principle of Shimshal’s voyages ever since for it is the slamming and the ‘g’ forces that are sure to induce a recurrence of her lifelong affliction. It’s more than my life’s worth to contemplate a repeat of the Minch and the Cabot Strait!

So how, in 12,000 miles, have we kept Sally smiling and enjoying offshore passage making?

First up for special mention is Alex, an excellent Physician Associate and a former employee of mine. Alex once prescribed Sally cyclizine for Benign Positional Vertigo which worked better than the Epley Manoeuvre. Luckily Sally is able to take this with impunity. Immediately traditional sea sickness remedies, loaded with anticholinergic side effects, were consigned to the dustbin. When at sea she pops a cyclizine every eight hours whatever the weather and this has had a huge effect on our cruising. Thank you Alex.

Next up for praise is PredictWind which is an incredible piece of software that demystifies weather forecasting. There’s no pretending to understand 500 millibar charts and occluded fronts. Instead, PredictWind dumps  vast amounts of data from all the major weather models onto a massive server and works out winds, waves, currents, rain and cloud for every hour of your planned  10 day voyage (knowing both your intended route and the performance of your boat in the forecast conditions). Having churned the data it reports it to your iPhone in a beautifully presented and easily understood fashion. It even looks back over recent weeks to advise which model has been most accurate. Only once in the last 9,000 miles has PredictWind got it significantly wrong - but happily Sally’s stomach survived unscathed.

Our third line of defence has been to employ weather routers to look over our shoulders and receive the blame should Sally’s nemesis reappear! That’s not always worked well as the router we used for the Davis Strait didn’t understand the ice charts which caused some consternation. Maik in Iceland, however, saved our bacon when we exited Scoresby Sund in Greenland when he saw one of those mega systems brewing in the Denmark Strait. 

For the whole of North America, including the Cabot strait, we did without a router and trade wind sailing between Panama and French Polynesia is pretty simple. But, for the ‘Difficult Middle’ and onto New Zealand we invested in the services of John Martin of Ocean Tactics. John has been sending us daily routing advice throughout this year’s voyage and has kept us out of trouble and Sally sickness free. Having made the same passage 40 times in a similar boat, John is well placed to understand the consequences of squeezed isobars and approaching fronts on sea state and comfort.

It all worked well and ‘Cyclizine Sally’ is so buoyed up by the adventure she is even contemplating further ocean voyages once we have had our fill of New Zealand. Thank you Alex, thank you PrefictWind and thank you John for keeping us safe and sick-free!

Arrived New Zealand

We have been formally welcomed to NZ by both Customs and Biosecurity!

Aotearoa - the land of the Long White Cloud

Aotearoa - the land of the Long White Cloud

A dark grey plume of cloud masked Aotearoa at around the time we should have first glimpsed New Zealand’s promised land. S/V Nimue, our almost continuous companion for the last 2,000 miles, was a couple of miles ahead and her crisp white sails shone against the steely grey sky and sea. Last week we were in Tonga with its sun-kissed, palm clad beaches. Now we were within touching distance of New Zealand and the dawn chill made us reach for fleeces, blankets and long trousers. A thousand miles means a big change in the weather when sailing almost due south.

Shimshal has been bearing us bravely and at great speed towards the promised land but, late last night and with a hundred miles to go, she told us how desperate she was for surveys, skilled maintenance and repairs. The bilges had been dry (as they always are) but when I lifted the boards to check I saw what no sailor wants to see. A LOT of salty water slopping around and the pump’s float switch jammed against the backup pump so that neither pump  could work. 

I hastily booted up both pumps and was mightily relieved to see the water level start to drop. After 10 minutes the bilges were dry once more and  there was no need to reach for the MayDay button and prepare the liferaft.

But where was the water coming from? That mystery is still not solved after much scurrying around with a head torch peering into lockers, under floorboards, stern glands, rudder glands and engine exhausts. As I write, the source remains a mystery.

Fortunately the flow of water into the boat is now just a trickle and it was the freaky failure of our bilge pump float switch that had allowed so much build up. Further investigation can be deferred until we are tied to something solid and that should be in just 4 hours time.

I’ve already made a mental note to buy a bilge water alarm at the earliest opportunity. We have so many alarms on board for smoke, propane, carbon monoxide (triggered several times by our new petrol generator), exhaust temperature, water temperature - the list is endless. I’m wondering why we never got around to fitting a bilge water alarm 20 years ago

Social Media for nostalgics

Social Media for nostalgics

I love being connected to all things digital 24/7 and freely admit that I have a nerdy part of my brain that can be dismissive of analogue evangelists.

But this year something changed. The imminence of a significant birthday sparked a nostalgia for the early days of our ocean passage making. This coincided with our buddy boats all having rubbish vhf aerials, a crossing of paths with a passionate radio HAM and the existence of some terrific SSB nets a thousand miles away. 

Single Sideband Radio, or SSB for short, is a high frequency,  decades old, radio communication technology that’s powerful enough to span a hemisphere. Until the millennium it was the only way boats communicated when crossing oceans. Those that had it used SSB to get weather forecasts, report their positions and summon assistance when sinking. It worked most of the time but it had its quirks and propagation of radio waves could be a bit too hit and miss for my liking. Nevertheless, we used it loads in the 90’s.

When we built Shimshal 2 we installed our old SSB radio from her predecessor but it sat at our chart table both unloved and unused for two decades as satellite technology extinguished the need for old fashioned radio. Many, including me, have said that SSB is dead and cannot be resuscitated.

Then, on a lovely afternoon in Tonga, Mike called by in his dinghy and offered to test our SSB set in the hope that we might tune into an impromptu group of friendly cruisers all heading in the same direction. Mike is, perhaps, more nerdy than me but embraces old technologies as well as the new. He measured the power our SSB sent to our backstay aerial and smiled at his findings. He then spent 90 minutes re-programming our set to make it almost analogue-idiot proof. How could we say no to joining his fledgling ‘Impromptu Net’?

My first problem was that the net was to be run at 0700z and I hadn’t a clue when that was but it did sound awfully early for a notoriously late riser. Google helped by explaining that HAM radioists call UTC ‘Z’ for reasons that remain unknown. So 0700Z translated into a much more acceptable 2000 local time.

I was so amazed that anyone heard me at all when I made my first, faltering SSB call in 20 years. Indeed, I was so shocked that I lost my powers of ‘radio-speech’. All that I had learned on a long range radio course in 2003 deserted me and I fluffed and jumbled my lines. For that transmission I was given the ‘dog’s breakfast’ award by the silky smooth net operator and took my rightful place at the bottom of the class.

Luckily, there was some stiff competition for the bottom of the class and soon I was joined by those who reported their position in decimals of a degree and those that mixed their SOG’s with their COG’s. The harder we tried the harder it became to string radio-fluent words together.

It didn’t  matter. The background noise from radio waves bouncing off the ionosphere blurs the message and, in the days when analogue was all we had, clarity counted. But now a quick WhatsApp clears up a mis-spoken word and the muddled messages can easily be unscrambled by a glance at our digital gizmos that broadcast SOG and COG to giant public databases every minute of every day.

What did matter is that we were communicating by voice in a time-honoured fashion across hundreds of miles of ocean. It was,unexpectedly, rather lovely. Human voices, wrapped in crackles and punctuated by weird, otherworldly, noises were bouncing from boat to boat with a little help from the the upper atmosphere and a mysterious thing called propagation. Magical. We had our own, old-style, social network,

As with all social media I quickly became re-addicted and, within a few days, I was reaching out for more with growing enthusiasm. I hooked into Gulf Harbour Radio in New Zealand and had nightly chats with Patricia and David who we hope to meet up with when we make it to Auckland. Patricia even complemented me on the strength of my signal!

Most enjoyable of them all was the ‘Broken VHF Net’ between us and our buddy boats with the wonky aerials. Being just over the horizon their signals came booming in and we all enjoyed the nightly chatter that is part of being human. We were proud that our own mini-net though they may not always have been in perfect radio-English!

So SSB is not dead. It’s a wonderful social media for the nostalgics amongst us who value friendly voices mixed with a little static and a smattering of ionospheric distortion. We will be reaching out to our SSB equipped friends when we next cross an ocean.

Minerva Reef

After a magical few days at Minerva reef the weather window opened and everyone lifted their anchors and left. We were the last to get underway but the conditions were too good to miss. A gentle southerly is now whisking us WSW in great comfort and with good speed despite the 3 metre swells. If our forecasts are correct the wind should shift to SE and allow us to sail the rhumb line for Opua in the Bay of Islands, New. Zealand. ETA Sunday night or Monday morning NZ time. Some of the photo credits go to  S/V Nimue (Shimshal by moonlight at Minerva Reef), S/V Trinity (nearly lost his drone taking this), S/V Polaire Bear (Shimshal reefed to slow down when approaching Minerva) and S/V Tourterelles (from our reef walk with expert lobster hunters).

Last leg - to the promised land

Last leg - to the Promised Land!

Bob Marley is blasting out of our Bluetooth speaker as we motor through the windless centre of the 1032 anticyclone whose breezy perimeter has propelled us, at great speed, south and west from Minerva Reef towards New Zealand. 

It’s almost exactly 26 years since a Bob Marley CD, played on a cumbersome ghetto blaster, kept us endlessly entertained during our first Atlantic crossing in 1999. I remember the anticipation and excitement of fetching up on an exotic Caribbean island. That ‘arrival’ excitement and anticipation has not dimmed over the decades. 

As Bob booms across the big blue ocean, we are excitedly preparing for our imminent New Zealand arrival aboard our own boat. The culmination of a journey that started 10 years ago when we dropped our Traighuaine mooring (in Scotland) and pointed the bows north and west towards the Arctic, the Americas, Galapagos and beyond - not the shortest route to New Zealand! That was the beginning of our awesome journey.

The excitement of an arrival on a distant shore is made more precious by the challenges that we have faced and had to overcome along the way for it hasn’t all been plain sailing. Hitting a rock in the deepest recesses of an East Greenlandic fjord still sends shivers down my spine - one of the few times expletives flowed freely! Then there was the time when Shimshal sat in the path of a major hurricane and we tied her, it seemed, to every tree in Nova Scotia before retreating to the safety of our old liferaft ‘launched’ in a forest clearing! Shimshal survived unscathed  but our ‘safe haven’ filled with the torrential rain that comes with a hurricane. 

This season’s challenges have been gear failures caused by anno domini and 3 years in the tropics. Sourcing spares mid-Pacific requires endless patience, deep pockets and a relentless spirit of optimism. Crossing of the ‘Dangerous Middle’ seemed a significant obstacle but turned out to be a delight which Shimshal carried us through without complaint.

But we, like most others, have been apprehensive about the final leg down to New Zealand and we were pleased not to have to wait too long for the perfect conditions as a lengthy pause would have fed anxiety. 

As soon as a forecast low tracked south of our anchorage on Minerva Reef, we pulled up the anchor and, along with 7 other boats, set off on a sleigh ride powered by a brisk southerly wind into 3 metre swells. Gradually the wind backed to the SE and Shimshal, on a beam reach,  was in her element surging through the waves at 8-9 knots and, occasionally, crashing off the top of one. Exhilarating, fast sailing under a full moon.

The weather windows to New Zealand are short and getting it wrong can be treacherous as a cold front strikes Northland 7 days after the departing high fires the starting gun. The ferocity of those cold fronts gives this passage a fearsome reputation and we didn’t want to get it wrong.

Neck and neck, all 8 boats roared southwest anxious to arrive before next Tuesday’s forecast cold front. And most of us will make the 865 mile passage in 5 or 6 days with only one of the slower boats having to pause north of 30 degrees for a couple of days to let the front pass below.

As I write, Shimshal has 294 miles to go to the quarantine and interrogation dock where we will face our last source of anxiety for this season. We should arrive on Sunday afternoon. Once tied up a platoon of officials (and their dogs) will descend on Shimshal for a guided tour of our squeaky clean bilges, emtpy food stores and freshly polished bottom. Our last onion will definitely be confiscated. 

Like all the other challenges we have faced, we have done our best to prepare. Whatever happens on the Quarantine Quay, Shimshal will, at last, be in the land of expert and affordable technicians, boat hoists that don’t break and an abundance of easily available spare parts. Shimshal’s promised land!