Footnotes from Water Music

Our Position: 25.18s, 170.40e

We continue on our journey south and as we cover each mile it gets colder and colder. So far we have been wearing full oilskins at night and last night i out on boots and socks to keep warm. Today we have dug deep under the bunks and retrieved the warm clothes - Grace is now sitting on deck with her wooly skiing hat on in full afternoon sunshine.

today we have spent most of the time rigging a jury backstay after a leak in one of the hydraulic rams meant that we couldnt get the forestay tight. The jury rig means that we can now set the jib more effectively and we are now reaching along in about 15-20 knots of wind and doing about 6 knots.

Our route through takes us South once we reach the High Pressure zone - which should be sometime on Saturday and then on Monday we will make our turn to the East to the North of New Zealand prior to running down the coast to Opua. At this rate, we reckon we will get in in 5-6 days - but there is considerable uncertainty about the weather nearer New Zealand. At least Gulf Harbour Radio seems to think that the depressions passing through early next week are rather slighter than originally thought. With the dog leg, we have some 700Nm to run.

Up until a couple of minutes ago, we hadnt seen anything on this trip other than one pod of Dolphin this morning. When we spotted a ship passing astern of us, there was great excitement - particularly knowing they are heading to Auckland - gives us comfort that we are going in the right direction!

So we have quite a lot of the ocean to ourselves - except we are going with a pack of about a dozen other yachts from different parts of Fiji down to NZ and expect that number to swell when the exodus starts from Tonga and Minerva reef.

All well on board - although it would be truthful to say that Grace would rather be playing bridge!