On route to Neiafu; Vava'u; Tonga
23h00 UTC 23 August
Course: 244°
Distance covered last 24hrs until 22h00 GMT: 168 nm
Distance to Neiafu: 267nm
Position 17°34' S 169°42' W
All's well on board.
Well it's a rocking and a rolling all over the ocean at the moment. The seas are 3-4m with a short chop attacking on all fronts but the starboard beam. It is amazing that, in still water, you dive below the boat to clean the bottom and as you sink in the silence you have this massive keel just hanging there. It is still, four and a half tons of lead hanging on the bottom. The boat does not move. When you walk around on deck it is a very still platform. In contrast we are being tipped up all over the place by the waves. They roll us to over 35° on one side and back again to the other in a matter of seconds. Then a wave will hit the stern and the boat slews around causing the self steering into its defiant mood as it swings the helm over to turn the boat back. Unfortunately the night before we had one of the lines on the self steering untie itself and we landed up doing an uncontrolled gybe in 25-30knots. Fortunately not much damage and Colin had just ducked back down into the cockpit from resetting the steering lines. Well the autohelm self steering that was steering the Aries spat the dummy as it tried in vain to get us back on course. Colin disconnected the autohelm and put the wind blade on so that the Aries could sail us on the winds direction. We have fixed the autohelm ... one of the drive belts had come off.
Sleep is really a problem at the moment and we are both fairly tired. Your body gets hammered as you are never still and always needing to hang on. When it is still, you can read a book etc, but at the moment even that does not work. One moment the book is on your nose the next heading off for a tour of the cockpit with you arm attached and your eyeballs stretching to try stay on the line you were reading. So you sit...three hour on three off.
The other evening as the clouds drew the curtains on a fair sunset it looked as though it would rain a lot during the night. Sitting in the cockpit later you could see the stars slowly appearing to keep you company. The moon arrived later... not much left but enough to send all but the brightest stars into hiding. All the contrasts are simply fantastic as one goes from one stage to the next.
We have two more days to Tonga and should arrive some time on Thursday morning. At our current rate of progress(ave:6.8knots) we will need to slow down a little tomorrow night so that we can arrive in daylight to navigate our way in. The winds are expected to remain the same so I guess that the seas will not change much. That's it for now... time to go hang in the cockpit for a few hours
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