First boating weekend of the season...

[John B]

Thanks guys!. Yeah its a boom furler Duncs, discussed earlier in the thread. I have to say that like the chartplotter I have a love hate relationship with it . The chartplotter because its touchscreen in the weather and its little bleeps and and lost position whenever it got wet , but its accuracy was spot on and it was really easy to use.( just make it so you can turn off the touchscreen mr Garmin.) When Dave came back from last years trip they replaced the first unit because of that whole zooming out and flying off to Ethiopia thing whenever it got wet. This new one just bleeped and changed screens a little bit when a splot hit it so it was a lot better. Chart wise as I said , it was smack on for the region we were in in Fiji.
....and the boom because it requires the mainsail to be wound all the way up and all the way down, but it could be infinitely reefed down and all from the cockpit, largely making the trysail redundant.

[John B]

Some more pics for today..

yeah, now thats what I'm talking about....




The minerva reef book has become well travelled, with two trips including both reefs under its belt now..



The next day it was sunny and clear......Its artifact deja vu all over again



some awful sights to be seen on that reef..



But Brett the provider continued contributing his skill.

[John B]

Yup, the claw, the claw....

[John B]

and the three boats we met ..
Migration ,a Cross Trimaran . Bruce and Alene. Lovely people , incredibly hospitable. She became mothership and the space on board! Incredible.




Their blog if you like seeing people live a good life.. http://www.brucebalan.com/migrations/

Jason and crew Mercedes in Jasons Down East 32



blog http://www.jasonrose.com/ Jason lives and sails 8 months and works on tugs into the bering sea for 4 months in northern summer.


and Rikki in his early Halberg Rassey 35 , Guava Jelly.



http://www.svguavajelly.com/

Great people .

[Larks]

Thanks for the links to the cruising blogs John, I'm in need of something to keep me busy at the moment and to just make me feel utterly miserable about sitting in an overly air-conditioned office 4500km from home and my boat on a cold, wet cloudy day while waiting for some tasking and systems access.............I've only read some of Jason's blog so far....I hate him already......bastard!!!! Talk about an incentive to get the H28 finished!!! (He's done well with that cook "Mercy" ..........of course I mean by the looks of what she's serving up).

[John B]

Yeah she's a card that young lass. Scottish, brought up in Zimbabwe.
Jason and Rik cruise together as buddy boats but more often than not singlehanded I gather. Nice guys .
They don't have a vast amount of capital involved in those boats ,but they're out there living it.
I've a bit of catching up to do obviously, you've taken a job away from home?

Migration is off west to Indonesia somewhere for boat refurbishment, so they need to get there before summer.

[Larks]

Yeah she's a card that young lass. Scottish, brought up in Zimbabwe.
Jason and Rik cruise together as buddy boats but more often than not singlehanded I gather. Nice guys .
They don't have a vast amount of capital involved in those boats ,but they're out there living it.
I've a bit of catching up to do obviously, you've taken a job away from home?

Migration is off west to Indonesia somewhere for boat refurbishment, so they need to get there before summer.

Yes, couldn't get any further away and still be in the same country. Taken a contract in Rockingham WA for six months.

[Steveh]

So next year it's Riada I and Riada II then?

[John B]

Yes, couldn't get any further away and still be in the same country. Taken a contract in Rockingham WA for six months.

keerikey. WA , a big place, but isn't there a danger of running into Wild Dingos over thar.

[John B]

So next year it's Riada I and Riada II then?

Riada and RiadaII you mean, Nope. I don't know how it could happen because of the kids ages/ schooling. Otherwise, I'd be in like Flynn. Wanna go when we do?

[John B]

A few pics for today...
leaving las vega... er, south minerva we hooked up a little bonito, but it seemed that something else with a bite radius of about 4 inches give or take wanted it more than us.




I'm a boatman, I like it on top of the water...

We hopped the 20 miles or so to North Minerva and lo... I had the priviledge of steering a lovely Kauri 45 ft Davidson in through the pass in through the reef again.





Much less dramatic than last year but I tell you and I tell you true.... its a buzz.

thats what I'm talkin about.



...

The only ' beach' at the Minervas..

[John B]

The inside towards the light..



and the outside of the reef with the tide coming in.. weren't there for long.




Nek minute... er morning, we were off for Fiji.

Through the rips , one hook up and yet another lost lure later...



...

[Steveh]

I'm in, book me a position on Riada John.

Pink peg eh! think there was some artistic licence going down here. But you never know, you and Kirsty have a canny sense at spotting pink pegs. We picked up a nice wahu coming out of north Minerva.

[John B]

Could be a while Stevey, but , you never know.

Todays photo additions would be leaving North and sliding the last couple or three days to Fiji.

yup , first it was...



then it was



Sometimes with a little bit of jib only overnight as we seem to have SE trades and assisted trades on and off the whole way. Sometimes a 4 metre sea ,sometimes a 2.
15 knots turned to 25 , back to 18 up to 30 down to 15 etc etc.
Pretty much the whole trip was completely without moon, so any overcast cloud meant pitch black nights. On one of those mornings I picked up a darker cloud overtaking us and sure as eggs , 1/2 an hour later I found myself steering downwind at 5.30 am in 35 knots and a rapidly building sea.

We . were. flying., with constant 10's and 11's and 12 and a half occasionally. What a buzz.

As the timing worked out we didn't make land in daylight... Still 40 miles or so to go to our port.




...

As you do , you have your plans and then you have your contingency plans.
Plan A is to make Levuka on Ovalau island , and go in through the reefs at night and get out the rum.
Plan B is to heave to and stand watch all night and then do plan A in daylight.

"you can't trust that the marked lights will be there in Fiji" says Dave.

[John B]

So the primary tools in this game are the garmin chartplotter, the handheld in my pocket, the paper chart down below and the ships AIS/ GPS as a positional check on the first 2.

The paper backed up the electronic every hour, the sky was clear for once, the reef light flashing every 2 secs was there and the two blue leading lights not only were there but backed up the marked bearing through the reef passage present on paper and on both plotters. On top of that we still had a 2 and occasionally 3 metre sea so we had visuals on the breaks over the ends of the reef.
Kapai!. slot her in .
10 .30pm approx, and we were anchored nicely on a near lee shore behind a good coral reef.

and in the morning , we were looking at the old capital of Fiji, the old trading port of Levuka.





...On the clock tower in the centre of that photo was one of our friends, a blue leading light, the other being behind it on the hill.

just like wildcat island.

[Duncan Gibbs]

Keep it comin' thar JB!

I was going say something about the pink peg, but I wasn't quite sure...

Thanks for the stories!

[John B]

What pink peg?

So joy, its monday again. where were we.

Levuka. what an interesting place. Old capital of Fiji until Suva took over, largely Fijian population as far as I could see and pretty much the polar opposite of the west coast resorts and their whitewashed and chrome coralled holiday lifestyle.
I like to try and get some understanding of any place through history and if there was one standout for me it was the fact that so many Americans were involved here from the early days. Most early settlers were from whaling , slave and trading ships and unlike many of the pacific islands Britain did not seem to have an early foothold here. David Whippy is guy worth looking up and reading about. A Nantucket boy left behind to assemble a sea cucumber cargo by a ship which never returned . He made his life in Levuka and became a respected and prominent trader with many decendants in Fiji to this day. Google him.

Fiji itself is primarily a mix of native melanesian Fijians because it is not a polynesian island, with a blend of Polynesians from Tonga and outlying islands like Rotuma for example, and Indian people originally brought as immigrant labour. The mix has brought tensions which periodically turn into conflict and currently Fiji has a military led govt.
Strangely enough, and despite the regular travel warnings from my own ( NZ)govt, it seems to be working and is stable. There seems to be a general satisfaction as to how things are being run.

Regardless of all that , Fijians are incredibly friendly people who are invariably courteous and pleased to talk to you .
Imagine this . You walk down a street and you pass say oooo, 100 people , and every single one of them looks at you in the eye and smiles and says hello. and then you have to walk back. Great atmoshere and a rewarding place to visit.



if you look at a little white dot in front of the most left building in the distance, that is Riada II, and that is pretty much a lee shore with about 20 knots.
We were thinking it'd be nice to go now.





....

Levuka be halfway down on the eastern shore of Ovalau, and our reef passage is directly outside it. You can see how the SE trades tend to chop across the reef and blow in at an oblique angle.

[John B]

After a couple of nights there we did leave and headed ENE for an island with a certain , shall we say, personality.

Ah yes .... Macongai, the old leper colony.

There she be, and that little breaking wave there, thats the reef and the pass in just to port of it. You do need to be on the ball, the reef is a long way out.






.....

[snow(Alan H)]

Didn't know you had lassies on board kept that quiet.

[snow(Alan H)]

Didn't know you had lassies on board kept that quiet.

Ok I'm off to specsavers for new glasses - just looked at the other photos & there she is

[John B]

Ah yes Jo, aka Jo find,our Ngati kaimoana finder. We'd just watch where she went on the reef and go there for the crays. Just returned from a delivery trip carribbean to NZ on a 50 something footer and straight onto Riada II to get smashed around in seas and wind simply not present in the previous 8000 miles. But thats NZ eh.
back tracking to Minerva for a minute, this was one of Jo finds discoveries. Peering in a crack on the reef well back from the edge we were looking at she saw some cray feelers. Using her camera she then 'looked' underwater to see that indeed there were some bugs in there.


What she didn't see was the eel which became offended at the digital intrusion and bit Bretts thumb nearly right through despite the kevlar glove. Kevlar schmevlar , you need chain mail Bretty boy..
Cue Deano. "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, its a Moray".


Crew up were Skipper Dave , moi , Jo and Brett. Brett not a sailor but is a boatman as he's an instructor lifesaver at Muriwai beach for a fun job, a builder in real life. Danger beach, The guy is a fish.

[Duncan Gibbs]

Was there much sign of the military John?

I was nearly born in Fiji... But that's another story.

its a Moray

This is one of those 'written only' jokes.

I can only guess at the language at the time of the incident. How was the wound treated?

[John B]

Military?Nil nada zip Duncs.

The wound, with a bit of hilarity until we discovered the thing bit right through his nail. Then it was antiseptic and a bandage. It came right.


another little interval... after zipping ashore for the sevusevu, a gift of kava to the Cheif or headman which then gains you welcome and rights to wander the island and also assumes some responsibilty taken for you by the people there, we did just that.
On one of the wanders we came across this vehicle corpse and where I announced ( frequenting a classic car site as I do) that I knew of some people who could identify what it was even though there was very little left.

Voila!





which they did.

If you own one you'll get it straight away . My thoughts going by the shortish chassis length were an early british small pickup of the 40's perhaps......

[Jase]

nope, its a 45 series landcruiser, mid 70's model guaranteed

[Duncan Gibbs]

Don't Ian see it! He'll want to ride up there, dismantle it, carry it all out of there on the back of his KTM, get it back to Sydney and put it in the "to be restored" line!

[John B]

There's only one person who I know who owns one of those .... I guess I laid out the right berley to catch me a Jase.

This is what the car forum guys came up with.



My assumption is that after closing the facilty and letting it go to ruin circa 1969/ 70 , they needed a general purpose mule for salvaging building parts/ generators and equipment etc.

[snow(Alan H)]

This piece of metal would have told a toyota man what it was

[John B]

There's Toyota men? Heels worn out from excessive braking?

[snow(Alan H)]

There are Toyota girls (opps women) - I do not think Jas wears heels when he is off roading

[John B]

Brings back fond memories of the Camry I drove for a while after my Holtang was stolen. One cup of coffee for me in the morning to wake up, and one for it. After a while it also needed a boot in the backside as well.
I started to dress in brown clothes and dream of old folks homes. Pretty soon I was drinking sherry before dinner, buying roman sandals and socks and wondering about which bank I could get an extra 1/5 percent interest at. I think I was about 35 at the time ... Thank goodness I snapped outa that.

Ah well, at least it wasn't a volvo with little family stick figures on the back.

[Paul G.]

Socks n' sandals, love that look!

John, just curious about the bugs at minerva, are they the same as our reds and how warm is the water?

[Larks]

Too late to brag that I recognised that side vent? I had a "Bajah'd" version of one in Alice Springs in the late 80's. Rebuilt from scratch to a very high spec' by a mechanic friend to promote Old Man Emy shocks, Racaro seats, wheels, tyres etc and other performance engine bits and pieces. It ended up being too impractical for Alice Springs though, although it sat on the highway like a sports car and blasted through the scrub like nothing I'd ever driven before, I was all the time worrying about scratching the new paint work and staking an $800.00 tyre in the sand. I ended up selling it to a Melbourne banker who saw it while on holidays up in Alice, probably to park on his Toorak nature strip.

[John B]

Paul, I don't know the temp but I'm guessing about as good as our summer gets .. say 20 or 21 ish. The wet suit is mostly for the coral and anenome or whatever does it, scratch/ bites/ irritation. Those crays are Painted Cray. Much smaller tails relative to the body compared to ours .. big legs for scuttling around on reefs I guess. And they're new age crays... vegetarian apparently. Setting a pot full of fish scraps will get you zip , dunno about lentils .

Greg, I thought bush bashing was what they are for.

[Larks]

Greg, I thought bush bashing was what they are for.

Absolutely they should be, but this one was just a bit too "show room" to make the most of it. After I sold it I bought an old Series II Land Rover for $600.00 and let loose.

[John B]

Cool.


Fish for friday?

one of them bugs



Walu



Cuda




little yellowfin tuna

[Steveh]

Those bugs have got a lotta legs, bit like those alien critters.

[John B]

They do seem to have a lot don't they. No nippers though.

Which reminds me , Must finish this trip. So we'd looked at Naigani and then had a challenging sail across about 50 miles past where we'd been out to Koro for the night. and then it was off to Savu savu.
Nice little spot rather well geared to look after cruisers. An anchorage and mooring field owned by a couple of companies, we went to the copra shed and paid for a mooring for a couple of nights and access to THE SHOWERS. Booked me ticket out and signed off.
Signing off the crew the immigration guy told me that the people who had just left were the couple who'd been wrecked 2 days earlier, losing their home and yacht, a 14 M NZ (ketch I think ) called Touche. They'd gone up on the 'challenging sail 'day in about 20 to 25 and quite big seaway.

Savu Savu is a little estuary sort of thing between an island on a spit and the mainland of Vanua levu. Hurricane hole further up, it seems that quite a few cruisers leave their boats there and head home for business or whatever. Jason on Bodhran was doing that.





Just one more party that night on board the tri Migration with the minerva reef social club( and the boat Calypso we'd met the year before)







and it was off to Lambasa and my flight home the next day.

And that was that.

[John B]

Back to the reality of town life and boating...
Riada got fired up and taken off for 2 1/2 days, school holidays here. We just had this patch of really spectacular weather although pretty cold with the old southerly system in place.
An unusual sight here in Auckland ...



a bit of this..




a little bit of this across the Firth of Thames







and off to a favourite possi amongst the islands on the Coromandel coast.

[John B]

....Boys eh...






But the girls took the cake when they did this on our flying/ brunch visit to te kouma harbour....



thats 12C in there.

5 hours later it was back to Auckland just before dusk. Pretty good little round trip of 80 miles or so, considering it was unplanned.

[Larks]

A duck diving dog??? A very small Loch Ness monster? What is it?

[John B]

A seal, Not common here but every now and again you get reports of a stray.

[dhic001]

Had a small one way up the Wairoa River at Clevedon when we were down there in Kapanui earlier in the year. Was just lying in the river having a sleep. Going upstream it dived under when we came close, going downstream I shut the engine off and we coasted past and it stayed on the surface feet away from us until we were well past.
Daniel

[snow(Alan H)]

Same thing 2 years ago on the Riverhead Hotel cruise, there was a seal mooching around the wharf - a sign of a healthy harbour i.e. lots if fish

[CapnJ2ds]

- a sign of a healthy harbour i.e. lots if fish

I second that, Alan. We had one resident in the marina for a couple of weeks last year - had a barking competition with one of the pier dogs, parked itself on a big sailing cat and amused us by spending long periods looking at its own reflection in the tinted windows in the cat's cabin bulkhead. Not good at cleaning up after itself, though!

There are several shags fishing in the marina all the time, some of the biggest Parore I've seen nibbling weed off the pontoons, a large mullet population, several varieties of sea birds perched on the sea walls, eels aplenty, some making their homes in bow-thruster tunnels - with occasional fatal results to both eel and bow thruster! A few herons, which make a mess on the piers. About the only fauna not doing well are the ducks; between the eels, the shags and the black-backs, not too many ducklings survive.

Yep, reckon the old Waitemata isn't in too bad a shape.

[John B]

It is in good shape, the last couple of seasons has seen vast amounts of fish caught right in the harbour at various times of the season. Its never been like that before in my boating lifetime.... I'm talking about right off the seawalls and bayswater etc.
They ain't biting too well right now except perhaps the kahawai, we had about 9 of those between two boats last week.

I need a new rod and reel to fit in between the light soft bait gear and the TLD25 and boatrod I ' got for christmas' whenever it was.. 2 christmas's ago.
What should it be..... has to do the lot , bait, lures/ poppers/ strayline, maybe a bit of live baiting.. somewhere around 12 or 15 kg gear maybe . so its an eggbeater... maybe a shimano baitrunner. Rod has to be able to stow.

[J P]

and off to a favourite possi amongst the islands on the Coromandel coast.

Looks familiar.



Paddled out around there last March. I couldn't resist getting out and climbing around too.


Thanks for this most enjoyable thread John.

[John B]

Oh, you're on the western side JP, we're on the eastern. The kids were out for an hour in the dinghies with a pod of dolphin about 200 metres off and there were big kahawai boil ups that afternoon when we left.
Did you hop over to the Happy Jack while you were there?
This photo from about 05 or 06 was in the same spot.



I always liked that one.

[Duncan Gibbs]

I've got some more old pictures for youse lot over the ditch.

I was out'n'bout hanging some nesting boxes in school grounds all over the shire and dropped in on a bookshop that Jeff (Skuthorp from waaaaay down south, south of Melbourne) had recommended in Kingscliff on the coast. I'd just finished putting up a box in a school half a block away and then dropped into the bookshop for a quick visit and who should I find in the stacks but Jeff. And a whole wall of fabulous old boating books, amongst a whole array of sections. Books going way back to 1809. IN BLOODY KINGSCLIFF?! A bogan suburb if ever there was!

Anyway, to get back to item of interest: A centenary book for the Royal Sidley YS published in 1962. There's a whole slew of Un Zed yachts featured, including Rawhiti lines plans, paintings and photos. When was big Thelma built? I think she's in there, and Waitangi as well. I wasn't going to take it, but Jeff said he'd buy it and get it back from me when he next came up.

I'll post some soon, once I've recovered from lugging 5m extending ladders cross country to Uppercumbuckta West.

[J P]

Welllll ... we were on our way to Happy Jack. It was our first day out of a 3-4 day trip and everything was going to my carefully researched plan; wind was from the east-ish that day (why we were tucked in on the west at Double) and the forecast had it shifting around to the north the next day, which I thought would be convenient for meandering south down through the islands. Started to make the hop and about 200 meters out (we're back in the wind) I get The Word. "Nope, not doin it. Not today." So the plan was adjusted. Ah, well, something to shoot for next time. Had a great time though.

[John B]

Sounds very interesting Duncan, I'm sure Greg/ Rawhiti would love to see any info on her.

JP, Happy jack has that nice cove, Elephant cove which is open to the south.Its quite interesting in there and we've had some nice nights. Unfortunately, in settled anticylonic weather ie good, the breeze tends to crank around to the SW at night , so you can find yourself on a pretty teethy lee shore at 3 o dark.