Yacht Delivery Blog

Well, the last 24 hours have been interesting. And I don't like interesting or exciting when I am sailing. I like boring and repetitive. Exciting generally means something terrible is about to happen if you're not careful. It turned out the water pump we replaced yesterday isn’t an exact drop-in replacement as they said it was, which was actually a good thing in a way. We can now confirm that we do have a plumbing issue and we are losing water somewhere. The intermittent cycling of the original pump had largely been put down to a faulty diaphragm, and the new pump worked perfectly, which of course reinforced the original diagnosis. And the original diagnosis was correct. But we now know there is a faulty diaphragm in addition to the plumbing issue. We had already investigated the suspected leak and didn’t find anything. It’s extremely hard to find dripping water in a wet bilge, and you can’t hear it because we are surrounded by splashing water. So it was with some horror that ...

 We had a great day sailing yesterday, with 15–18 knots of breeze and the wind sitting around 100 degrees apparent. Yesterday was a day of emotional peaks and troughs, as we had an extremely exciting encounter with a superyacht which was also heading to Mackay. It came past us at around 12 knots.  The reason for the excitement was that it was something else to look at, and it soon disappeared over the horizon, with Ocean Breeze gallantly chasing along behind at a steady 6.5 knots. Poor wee thing was trying her hardest! It has been nice to have a few days of sunshine and blue sky after all the cloudy, rainy and cold weather earlier in the trip. It is also definitely getting warmer, which I hadn’t expected. I expected it would get cooler as we approached Mackay. After spending so much time in jackets, long trousers and socks, it’s quite nice to be back in conditions where you can actually remember that we are supposed to be sailing in the tropics. On the ...

We made good miles yesterday, averaging 6.5 knots over 24 hours, which gives us 156 nm, so not too shabby. I have another note to add to my area of general knowledge concerning the buying of bottled water, in addition to my previous discovery that 'eau gazeuse' means sparkling water, which was discovered 12 hours after leaving port on a previous passage. The new information is that water “fortified with extra calcium and magnesium” makes milk curdle. It’s a strange discovery to make at 2am in the pitch black when you’re having a coffee to keep alert and suddenly think, “Hmmmm, something is not right. Is this lumpy lemon milk?” We have now begun the process of threading through the reefs above New Caledonia. They extend for miles, with only small patches of clear water before you approach the next set of reefs, and then the next set, for hundreds of miles. I think I mentioned in an earlier blog that sailors used to name places as a form of navigational information, and the names...

We got the anchor down in the quarantine area in Port Vila right on sunrise and then had to wait for a few hours while everyone woke up. We called a few times on the VHF and sent some emails to see if anyone was awake, but didn’t get a response until 9am. We had to take the boat to the fuel wharf to deal with the authorities because we don't have a dinghy, which I think actually made things easier, even if they didn’t want to admit it. It meant they could all come when they had time and didn’t have to get a dinghy out to the boat or synchronise their trip with other departments, which is a considerably more complicated operation. The biggest blow of the day was that I didn’t get to go to the supermarket. Instead, I was busy filling in forms, going to the ATM to pay a bill, going back to the ATM to pay another one, getting a form from one office to take to another, and dealing with the fact that no one could understand why we only wanted fuel and water and were leaving immediately. ...

 We are 2nm off the entrance to Port Vila and just waiting for daylight to go in the bay to anchor in the quarantine area.  So there wont be a blog as its not the time to be staring at the laptop. But we are hoping to get the entry formalities completed first thing this morning and if all goes smoothly we are aiming to leave this afternoon - finger crossed!

Things on board are going well, with everyone settled into their rhythm of watches and daytime naps. I never thought in my life I would ever say I am looking forward to going to the supermarket, but after the outrageous prices in French Polynesia and the scarcity in Tonga of anything more exotic than Spam, I am really looking forward to the supermarket in Port Vila! The breeze has been up and down, giving us periods of motoring and steady sailing. A big plus is that we have been seeing patches of blue sky and even some stars at night, though it’s still far from tropical. At this point, blue sky is becoming an event worth mentioning. Charles Dickens had a similar writing spot We are on track to arrive first thing Friday morning and, in fact, will have to slow down a little to make sure we don’t arrive at 3am. The area to anchor in Port Vila while you wait for clearance is squashed in between a few reefs and I would much prefer to arrive in daylight. The long-term weather fo...

 It’s funny how one thing leads to another and you start pulling the thread and everything falls apart. I follow two broad rules: “picking it will only make it worse” and “it’s not going to get more broken if it’s already broken”, and I interchange them as I see fit.  In this case, however, I had to make up a new rule: “It’s not quite broken, so let’s pick at it and make it worse — but not so much that it actually gets broken". Yesterday we noticed the AIS screen on one of the instruments said “No AIS”, which was a bit of a head scratcher as it had been working a few days ago — we had seen traffic, so we knew it was working. A bit of troubleshooting showed all the wiring was good, but the AIS wasn’t showing on the network menu of the chart plotter. Something must have happened when we reset the chart plotter, and this was the thread that started to get pulled. It ended up with us having to stack the small stools from the saloon on top of each other and climb 3.5 meters into th...