A lovely day today, but it would be nice to be in an exotic place swimming and snorkelling rather than motor sailing on the ocean. Not the best sailing day as there has been no wind, but I enjoyed sitting in the cockpit nice and warm, as it will probably be the last time I might feel that warm for a while. Sea state was so calm and we had a pod of whales swim closely past our boat which was a real treat.

Frans had us all a bit worried on the radio last night when he called us all around 10pm. It was my watch luckily, as I do the radio. He had downloaded new grib files and was really concerned about the weather we were going to be facing. I sent off an email to Bob about the concerns and he got back to me and basically we will see over the next few days how the weather front pans out. It looks like the big front on Monday is now going to be more south and won't affect us as much which is good, but the Friday/Saturday one looks worse as we would be sailing through it on Saturday, before we are supposed to arrive Sunday morning. Not looking very good. So according to Bob we might have to add another waypoint and keep heading west and wait out maybe another day at sea or try and make a run for it on (maybe on Thursday), depending on how close we are to Opua. At this stage we are following his suggested waypoints, but a little ahead of schedule, as we were going fast yesterday. Tomorrow we are supposed to be heading west as the winds are supposed to clock around and be on our nose. We are as a rhumb line goes, only 590 nm from Opua, but we will probably sail 750nm from our current position by the time we get there.

We are both tired and I didn't get much sleep last night and spent so much time today downloading weather, listening to weather reports on the HF, doing the radio net and discussing weather with Omweg, meals and my watch. I hope I get a better sleep tonight. Apart from the weather issue, all is good on board and no sea sickness as it is so calm. Fantastic!

Tomorrow, I am going to fill in again as net controller, so that will pass some time, as I will do that in the morning and the evening. A special thing today, is that we have crossed into the eastern hemisphere and so now our longitude is east instead of west.

Our current position is 26 degrees 24.244 minutes S and 178 degrees 57.296 E. We are on a course of 212 degrees True and we are motor sailing with a speed over ground of 5.1 knts. The wind is from the NNW and is 7 knts now, but for most of the day is was 3-4. We have wispy 80% cloud cover, but the sun is still shining through the wispy cloud. The barometer is reading 1012.

Looking forward to a lamb roast with mint sauce in NZ, really craving for it actually!