Deja Vu all over again. This is our third passage from the tropics to NZ, and we always reach this point somewhere south of the 30 degrees South benchmark. We are sailing into southerly winds and instead of going south we are going west. Not encouraging looking at our VMG. Then there were the groans overnight as we were sailing hard on the wind at 8-10kts in 2m seas. "No, it isn't as bad as the first day out" I kept responding, but no one wanted to listen. At first light we did put a reef in and settle the boat down a bit. The wind is dying and will get to a point where we will start motoring in a few hours as we approach and cross a kigh pressure ridge. At that point we will head directly to Opua and wait for the wind to fill back from the SW so we can motorsail and/or sail again.

So here is how we chose to determine when the wind had reached west of north so we knew when to gybe yesterday. First, we estimated the wind direction watching our masthead fly (the apparent wind direction) and knowing our heading. When we thought we were about there, we gybed the main and assumed a dead downwind heading. We then used the boats heading to tell us the wind direction. We were a little off initially, but close enough that we could continue a little off of dead downwind before gybing the jib over and continuing. So how would you do it?

Today we covered 141nm, but as I said earlier a lot of the miles were east to west vs north to south. So we have now fallen a little (maybe 3 hrs or so) behind on our 7 day passage benchmarks (we had actually been ahead until today). Given the forecast I don't know that we will be able to keep the pace for a 7 day passage completion, so we may need an extra day. Cindy says no problem - we have plenty of food!