SV Panta Rhei Retirement Trip

This is the most complicated and dangerous weather environment I've ever sailed in. Sure, right now we have little wind and haven't had any wind for days. You would feel safe aboard SV Panta Rhei right now. You might be a little concerned that we continue to use fuel like there was an endless supply, but just have confidence that wind will come and why worry?

Then comes news on the ssb net of a low forming north of Fiji. That's almost a thousand miles away. And it is north of us. We're worried about weather south of us where the endless succession of lows spins out of the Tasman Sea and moves across New Zealand. As it turns out this day the low over New Zealand isn't a deep, tight one. Basically that weather is OK. It even brings us wind. BUT geez that low up north is scheduled to come south where we are now. The mantra for the day is to run south and do it with all available speed. This ocean which is a mirror now is going to turn into a tempest.

So we order up the GRIB files and what we see is amazing. Where the talk of the ssb net was that Minerva wasn't going to be safe, the GRIB files make our part of the ocean well south of Minerva look unsafe too. There are 40 knot winds and 4 meter seas right where we are now....and even south of where we are now in the GRIB forecast. These winds are coming faster than we travel but FORTUNATELY we have a head start. Dumb luck may save us again. We hope.

I'm so glad I have a relatively fast boat right now with a big fuel tank. We have a lot of company (26 boats checked in to the ssb net) and many of them go half our speed. Right now I wouldn't cut our speed in half for all the tea in China. Did I mention that right now we have about half a knot of current against us and 587 nm to go?

We are beginning to see light wind out of the NW which is according to the forecast. It will still be a day before we can sail. We have fuel for that. And incidentally the cloudy fuel we were seeing in the sediment bowl for the engine is clearing up. That is a good surprise. The bad surprise is that we are getting pumice rocks in our engine water inlet and they have also plugged the boat speed sensor (which now reads zero). I've cleaned them out of the engine inlet screens, but they keep coming. The darn things float, which makes them hard to get out when we clean the screens. There are a few that want to float to the side of the screens and then of course are displaced when we replace the basket into the screener, which displacement puts them on the engine side of the screen. Not good. I'm putting (small) rocks through the engine just as I really want it to keep working. So far it's OK. The ones we miss are small and we try not to miss many. It would be a bad end to this story if the underwater volcano a thousand miles away caused us to be swept over by the storm that also came from a thousand miles away (a different thousand miles!).