Sandy Point

Nothing too exciting today, we didn't even lift the anchor. Tuesday is Vela's busiest day with meetings and getting on top of her work for the week, so she spent most of her day in front of her computer screen.

Meanwhile, Nathan was catching up on a bit of boat maintenance. Firstly and most importantly was sorting out the water maker which was only working intermittently, after a phone call and a bit of investigation it was a simple fix of replacing the 5 micron pre filter (which we carry a spare for) as the one in use was completely gunked up and black.

Next was to sort the accumulator for our fresh water pump. The accumulator is mildly faulty, causing the pump to come on more quickly and for shorter periods than it should. The temporary fix is simple though, just draining the accumulator and we get a good 3 or 4 weeks of the pump working normally.

Nathan had noticed the leech cord on our staysail needed to be re-tied at the head of the sail, so we dropped the staysail on deck and sorted that one out too. Nathan had also noticed some wear on the furling line for the big genoa, and on closer inspection spotted the line was run the wrong side of the feeder onto the furling drum. Not sure when that was done or how it took so long to notice, but it was an easy fix to re-run the line correctly.

Vela then cooked a delicious lunch with scrambled egg, noodles and a chili garlic sauce. We hid from the sun in the afternoon, and made a plan to head over to Okiwi Bay tomorrow afternoon. We also started to do some research on heading through French Pass, which has the strongest currents anywhere in NZ (commonly 5 - 7kt, creating large whirlpools) and only a 20 minute window of slack tide being the safest time to traverse it. The plan is to head through on Thursday afternoon into the Marlborough Sounds, at roughly 2pm before the current starts pushing us in a northeasterly direction (helping) which gives us a little leeway.

We ended our evening watching a movie inside - Death at a Funeral, we laughed from start to finish!Read more