Visited by Orion
03 November 2010 | En route to NZ
Mark
We're almost to NZ now... probably 2 more nights, arriving some time on Saturday. The winds continue to be variable so we're running the engine alot to keep us moving forward. We do seem to have managed to avoid the storms so far, knock on wood.
This morning we had the interesting experience of being buzzed by a large 4 prop NZ Air Force plane (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-3_Orion). They couldn't have been more than 500-1000ft off the water. A few minutes before we had heard another sailboat being asked questions by NZ authorities and were expecting to see a ship appear on the horizon at some point during the day to do the same for us. Well, turned out it wasn't a ship, but this NZ plane, Orion, going around buzzing ships and then hailing them on the radio, "Sailboat we just flew by, this is the NZ xxx". We figure they were just making sure each of the boats coming to NZ had already checked in with them, which we had.