So after all the planning around the Korean fishing fleet, they all buggered off a few hours before we arrived… must have been something we said??!
Anyway, we made the planned slight turn at the bottom of the fishing ground and are now heading directly for the north end of Fatu Hiva. The computer says 229 miles to go and then we’ll have a few hours looping around the back of the island to get to the anchorage… it’ll almost certainly be dark by the time we arrive, so we’ll probably get out of the waves and bob around for the night… However, there is still a good amount of moon, so with clear skies we may be able to anchor out in deeper water.
No idea what those buoys were in the end, they’re not marked on any charts and although we picked them up on AIS and we send all our data to marine traffic, they didn’t show them on their online tracker / charts. It makes me think that they might be some sort of military monitoring system? – who knows….
In hindsight, it was a bit sketchy, in so much as only one of the buoys was marked. About 3 to 4 mins after we passed the first one, a 2nd one popped up, so we think they were linked, but we go through without any issues. The issue was that without anything on the charts we had no idea how wide the array was and more buoys kept appearing.
It’s not just us, but there is a growing list of jobs to be looked at when we’re anchored up… The main autopilot is making a bit of a juddering sound when it’s at certain points and working hard… I don’t feel it’s urgent enough to change the the backup, but i’ll need to have a look at it.
One of our charge controllers controllers for charging the starter battery is acting up and putting our too high a voltage. I’ve had to turn it off and will switch it out to the back-up. Again, I don’t need to do that until we are anchored up as I don’t want to be poking around whist underway if I don’t have too. It’s still pretty rolly, so if nothing else, it’ll be really uncomfortable working down there for any length of time.
We also had a glitch where the inverter decided the battery was too low, so it went into a protection mode… Better safe than sorry, but it was a false error. The only fix was to completely “reboot the boat”, so that was fun as we had to wait for all the computers to start again, so there wasn’t any autopilot or instrumentation…
There are three little nicks in the sail that need to be patched. they’ve probably been there for a while, but we only spotted it was we have been sailing heavily reefed for a while and we’ve lost some telltails on the sail that we’ll need to replace.
We have done a few long passages now and these last couple of days are really weird. The days seem to be much longer as you’re counting down the hours in anticipation of arrival, so things drag out a bit, yet you wonder how the whole journey happened so quickly…. funny how your head works.
Hoping we’ll have the right wind to get the spinnaker up later. – till tomorrow!… 🙂
2 responses
Have loved these updates and good to hear the long trip is closing in. Another tick in the box so look forward to hearing about next steps.
Really sorry both that I completely missed the blog link option. I’ve been tracking your Garmin logs and was just sitting down today to send you a newsy email when I saw the blog link. so I’ve now spent 45 mins getting unto speed on all your action.
fab photos on the marine life that ends up in the boat and the ones that cling to the hull. Nice to have those images. it seemed that you didnt have anything major to cope with in terms of weather, thankful the tsunami warnings being wrong. And amazing all the tech/apps that are now so integral to what you do as well as knowing the code backwards. very impressive.
will send longer update later.
enjoy your upcoming landing
Andy