A delayed departure and how to follow us at sea

The view from the top of the mast - Angus doing our pre-departure rig checks

When our friend Brett was on board, he introduced us to the phrase “shooting for the Tongas”.  We laughed so much at him, as he’s the only person we’ve ever heard who refers to the Kingdom of Tonga as “the Tongas”, but the phrase has stuck, and the time is approaching.  We thought we only had one more flat boat sleep before we shoot for the Tongas, but actually there’s a bit of weather north of here, which could turn into a named tropical storm, so we’re staying put for a few more days at least.  We’ve been alongside a pontoon in Opua, on the north-east coast of the north island, for the past week, and have been rushing around chasing our tails with our final preparations before we head offshore.  The great news is that our UK Ship Registration finally came through, so we are now legal to depart New Zealand when the time comes. 

A few tweaks to our rig tension..

We’ve joined a rally called the Island Cruising New Zealand Pacific Circuit Rally, along with about 40 other boats, so we won’t be on our own for the crossing to Tonga.  It has been a fascinating week meeting the other people and beginning to get to know them.  There are lots of “kid boats” in the fleet.  With 25 children on the rally, from 10 months old to teenagers, our three have loved getting to know their new buddies.  There’s one boat with four boys, aged 2, 4, 6 and 8!!  Whenever things are getting a bit crazy on the good ship Vicky, we just imagine how it must be on that boat, and feel instantly better.  The majority of the rally people are not on “kid boats”, but to be honest we haven’t seen much of them, as they are not refereeing their offspring at children’s hour each day, and during the weather / routing / passage planning talks, the real grown-ups are able to sit at the front and concentrate, whereas we are hovering by the doors to the decking, keeping a look-out for children scaling the Opua Cruising Club balcony and contemplating a quick dip in the sea below…

Eloise and George getting involved in the SUP demonstration

At the beginning of the week, we were feeling pretty relaxed about crossing an ocean with children.  Afterall, lots of other people are doing the same as us, some with more children, others with manically crazy toddlers, and a few having almost never sailed before.  (And that’s not just the children..)  As the week has progressed, however, it has come to light that most of the mothers and children are flying to Tonga, leaving their husbands to sail the passage with at least two or three additional crew.  Where the children are doing the passage, the families all have a minimum of one extra adult with them.  There are lots of adverts up in the laundry here at the marina, of smiling young people wanting “the experience” of crewing on a boat to Tonga.  We have considered it, but on balance we don’t feel anyone is ready for “the experience” of Jack in a confined space for a week, and also it seems a bit of a risk having an unknown person join the boat, so we have decided we are better to stick as the family unit.  Having said that, George was reading the “RYA Sea Survival Handbook” at breakfast today, and Eloise had picked up and was ploughing through “Single-handed sailing”, so I’m not sure they have a huge amount of faith in our sailing ability.

Our salty shipmates with our lovely flat - thank you Sophie and Rory xx

A very chatty American couple were strolling along our pontoon yesterday, and stopped to ask me and Jack about our boat and our trip. “Wow, gee.. and whatta you do at night?” the lady asked.  “Ah, at night.  Well, we just put down our sea anchor and go to sleep,” I replied.  “Reeeeaaaally?” she asked, wide-eyed.  I laughed, shook my head, and explained how things work at once the sun has gone down.  The kids snuggle down in their beds, rocked to sleep by the motion, not a care in the world, while Angus and I take turns between sleeping rather fitfully, and struggling to keep our eyes open on-watch and keep the boat sailing safely along at best speed in the right direction.  We did a night passage last week, on our way north, as part of our preparation on Victoria.  We up-anchored at Great Barrier Island at 5pm, just before it got dark, and lovely Eloise rustled up macaroni cheese for our hungry crew, while Angus got the sails up as we cleared the land.  We sailed through the night to arrive in the Bay of Islands the following day.  The night was beautiful.  We had a lovely breeze, the sky was awash with stars, and the most extraordinary thing was that we only saw one other boat on the whole passage.  Last summer we crossed the English Channel at night, and hardly got a wink of sleep due to the volume of ships and fishing boats, all intent on mowing us down.  The waters of New Zealand are notably more relaxing to sail in, although the wind angle was not great and we were struggling to keep away from the land, so eventually we gave up the battle and turned on the engine for a while. 

Ashore in Great Barrier Island - just before the children found some long-lost treasure

Once everyone else was finally asleep, Angus and I split the remainder of the night into short watches - two-hours-on, two-hours-off.  It went well and we both got a bit of sleep, but it’s fair to say that the following night, when we were safely anchored in a lovely bay, we were absolutely shattered!!  Our plan for the offshore passage is to split the night into longer watches, so that we get a few more hours of solid sleep, and also to make sure we both get a nap of a couple of hours in the day.  I’m not actually sure how this will be possible with the children, and sailing the boat, but if it’s not we’ll just have to man up, deploy some cocktail sticks to keep our eyes open, and have a really good sleep when we get to Tonga.

Jack sitting on the fridge, helping me make scrambled eggs

We are gearing up for the change in our on board communications while we are at sea.  Obviously, our mobile phones won’t work offshore, and we won’t have wifi.  Instead we will use radios; normal VHF radio, which works up to about 20-30 miles, and long range radio, or SSB (single side band).  Once we have connected our boat computer and fired up the modem, the SSB is capable of connecting to coastal stations to receive emails to our boat email address, and more importantly, weather files, to our boat computer.  This is quite an art and requires a good deal of patience; a successful connection to a coastal radio station (“Darawank” is the usual one) is dependent upon time of day, weather conditions, sun spots (?!) and tussling with whoever else is trying to connect at the same time.  Almost all of the other boats we are going with have satellite phones for sending and receiving emails, which is much more of an investment, and seems to take away some of the romance of being at sea.  Let’s see how long we can hold out before we take the easy (but pricey) option and adopt the more modern technology!

Model boat building - hours of fun (but we now need to resupply on spinnaker repair cloth and tape)..

The Island Cruising New Zealand rally has a tracking page:

www.forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/rally/ICNZ_2019-PCR/ 

The boats with satellite communications will have their positions updated continuously, whereas we have to email ours via the long range radio for it to be updated.  So - just to warn you - we won’t actually move very often on the tracker – probably once or twice a day.  Please don’t be disheartened or worry about us if we are stationary for ages, because a) it is not a race and b) every time we manage to email an updated position we will make a huge and impossibly fast leap forwards.  Sometimes things can get very busy on a boat – we might be making delicious muffins, or landing a huge fish, or be engrossed in home-schooling, or clearing up something that has crashed all over the floor, or in the middle of changing our sail plan – in which case connecting the computer and firing up the SSB to send our position may take second place.

Ten snapper in two hours - with a little help from our friends the Renalls on Calypso..

For any boaties (NZ terminology) who have an AIS app – eg marinetraffic.com, then you should be able to follow us on that too, once we are at sea and have ours turned on.  Our boat is Victoria, call sign MEWK3, MMSI 232 020 973.

If you just want to see the odd picture, do follow us on Instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/victoria_0583/

We will send some updates from the high seas which my sister, Rosie, will post to the blog (so long as we can both manage the technology), so we should be able to share some salty tales while we are en route to Tonga.  In case we fail on this quest, Eloise highly recommends the School Ship Tobermory Series, by Alexander McCall Smith, to give a flavour of life on board a boat at sea.  She devoured the whole lot in a few days, and we have also all enjoyed and learned a few things from the Bear Grylls adventures books; the Sailing Challenge and the Sea Challenge.

A long-awaited bath!

There’s so much more I would like to write about, but it’s very late and we have a mass of things still to do.  It’s probably fortunate that our departure has been delayed.  We need to tidy and stow the whole boat, buy our fresh fruit and veg for the passage, check that the deck and all our lines are ready for sea, tie on our kayaks and dinghy very securely, move the boys bedding out of their cabin (which is at the front, so too bouncy to sleep in at sea), plus restarting home school tomorrow, which rather fell by the wayside last week with all the frantic preparation.  Most crews by this stage are either in a similar state of chaos to us, or are completely stowed and organised, and are now reading their books and watching movies whilst baking brownies and preparing stews to eat en route.  If only that was us!  We haven’t done a detailed passage plan yet, but Angus has done an incredible job in making sure we have all the right paper charts, plus downloading not only two separate sets of electronic charts on a variety of devices, but also satellite images from google earth and Bing, which we can compare to the paper and electronic charts.  In the part of the world we are going to, there is a lot of underwater volcanic activity, not to mention moving and growing coral heads, so a satellite image can be an extremely useful thing to have, along with a depth sounder and several good pairs of eyes, of course.  

Eloise's plaits kept falling out, so we superglued the ends!

It feels like a little bit of an anti-climax that we’re not leaving tomorrow, but we don’t really want to find ourselves a couple of days from Tonga in a tropical rotating storm with 4-6 metre waves, which is a possibility based on current predictions, so we’re more than happy to spend a few more days in New Zealand.  If you want to have a look at a real-time snapshot of what the weather is doing all over the world right now, we absolutely love the earth.nullschool website.  This link, depending on how soon you look at it, will show a cheeky little low pressure system north of Fiji, which is the one the weather gurus have their eye on as being potentially troublesome.

https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-187.49,-27.38,489/loc=177.071,-12.049

Another cheeky little thing which is potentially troublesome..!
Darling Jack doing a bit of early morning window cleaning.

I’ll send another quick update before we depart.

Lots of love from all of us salty sea dogs.

Laura, Angus, Eloise, George and Jack xxx

We loved catching up with our Winchester friends, the Davidsons
They left Opua last week bound for Fiji on their lovely boat, Bonaire