Mazu Adventures

We left Minerva Reef today (Nov. 5th) with lots of company. There were 13 boats in Minerva on Sunday and by today at 10:30 there were none, we were the last out so we turned out the lights. As you can guess this is a good weather window to continue our voyage to New Zealand. As we go south the weather gets a little tricky with lots of lows and highs moving around, so having good weather information is very important. Tonight we are motor sailing with only about 8-9 knots of wind out of the east. With the light air we are also getting flatter seas, a welcome relief. This leg of the passage should take about 7 days. That makes this our second longest passage to date. Right now we are in lots of company, it is strange to see so many lights tonight. Usually it is rare to see any boat light in a given night. Tonight in our little flotilla, a am keeping an eye on 6 sailboats out and about in my neck of the woods. This afternoon we had an interesting thing happen. A New Zealand Air Force plane flew right over us very low. Moments later we were hailed on the VHF by them. They wanted to know our last port, and our next port of call and our estimated time of arrival, all very official. After that one by one he called each boat in our flotilla, finally we heard him hail a boat and said, �"ok, now it's your turn�", we all must have kept them busy today. It is really comforting to know that they are patrolling this area�... Well that was all the excitement for today�...