If we were still going to Lord Howe Island we'd only have 240 miles to go, unfortunately with Christmas nearly on top of us, we just haven't got the time. What a shame, it has been a goal of ours for many years to sail into the beautiful lagoon on Lord Howe; it'll just have to wait till another trip. Funny, it always used to seem so far to sail, but now we've traveled over so many sea miles, Lord Howe from Australia seems a snack. We may just get close enough on this trip to get a sighting of Ball's Pyramid.

Newcastle is 575 miles away, although now we have lost the wind, so we have done a lot of motoring since yesterday, the clouds and rain went away, the sun came out, the seas calmed down, BUT we lost the wind. Once the boat speed gets down under 4 knots, Greg decides to put the engine on (so we can be home for Xmas), unfortunately too we have at least a one and sometimes a 2 knot current against us. Not fair, we're running downwind to Australia, the waves are pushing towards Australia, you'd think the current would be kind to us and also push us the right way but no, someone decides to make it a bit more challenging for you.

The above definitely has hindered one of the boats that left with us. Paul is an Australian, a single hander, who bought a little tiny 31ft trimaran in the Bay of Islands with the aim to sail it to Australia. It has a 5 horse power outboard as its auxilliary propulsion, only a wind generator (now we only have 5 knots of wind, so his wind generator would hardly be working)! He has no other form of battery charging, no fridge or freezer and now his auto-pilot has broken down so he'll be hand steering the rest of the way to Australia (we're half way home). When we spoke to him on the radio this morning, his position was the same as he had given us at 7:30pm last night, so he has been drifting around in the same area all night.

Auto pilot failures, in our experience have been the major source of problems for yachts on the crossing. Never, never, never contemplate a crossing without some form of backup.

This is Greg writing now.

Yes, we are stuck in the middle of a huge high pressure system that extends from the East coast of Australia to New Zealand. That means light and variable winds from all points of the compass. We need to maintain an average speed of about 5.5 knots in order to get into Newcastle, clear in, then get to Sydney before Xmas Eve (we have to do our Xmas shopping!!). This means motoring more than we would like. We topped up our fuel tank from the remaining spare fuel we carry yesterday which gives us about 80 hours of motoring. Already, since then we have been motoring for 17 hours and there appears to be no change in the weather conditions for the next few days. We can't motor all the way to Australia, so something has to give.

We are currently considering a contingency plan of stopping at Lord Howe Island in order to take on more fuel. It's about 50 miles out of the way of our rhumbline course to Newcastle and we have changed course to motor in that direction - about two days away. If things change for the better over the next 24 hours we will go back to plan A and continue straight to Newcastle.

Watch this space. #

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