First boating weekend of the season...

[John B]

Unfortunately I didn't get photos of all the boats. The stripper on our windlass ruptured and although I could have easily hauled everything up by hand , some stubborn streak manifested and I insisted on pulling it down right there and then so as to see the issue. It wasn't complex.. a very simple thing where LEWMAR decided a few years ago to make a substandard low quality piece of rubbish out of plastic and insert it in a place where it would get beaten to death fairly easily and kark it within a short number of years so as to presumably , sell more units. A very simple issue.

anyway.. some of the boats .It was a Mark Foy or staggered start race with start times for a 12 mile course spread 45 minutes from 1.30 through to 2.15

Gypsy, a Logan from around 1938 or so.. 36 or so ft long ?. She's an interesting boat because she was launched with a gaff rig when all her contemporaries were bermudan rigged. As you see in the intervening years she's had her bowsprit removed, a doghouse added for more accomodation and she has an ali stick. I don't recall what her start time was but she was beautifully sailed ,was first home and won the race .



Stevey H on the way out in Ngatira ( 1904ish Bailey) with a big crew and lots of grins.



and Profile , the Townson 8.8 picking up his crew, er my crew, um his crew for the day.

[John B]

Naturally, I had some other preparations to make. Breaking from tradition and perhaps reflecting the fact that were were 2 handed ourselves I thought a stern chaser was in order. Nice and handy for a little surprise for the start boat.

[John B]

Alia, with Jaques and Kim doing sterling duty as start and finish boat, soon to be blessed with a heart stopper from Riada.



ah yes, nothing wrong with Jaques' health.

You'll notice a couple of the nearest fleet in the distance as we along with Achernar were scratch boats at the 2.15 start. We still had 5 minutes or so to wait at that stage.

wellll... the reaching legs were a bit gaspy for us and Achernar ( I'll check the spelling soon) had legs on us and slid away( o for the mizzen staysail) but I was very pleased at the way we hung on to windward. Ketches typically ain't that quick on the wind but at least we sailed some good high angles.


lovely sailing in 8 or 10 knots, the sun had come out in the afternoon... just lovely.


we managed to catch 4 or 5 boats... here's Spray a late 1940's Logan and Taliesin


and blew ourselves out tactically for a period with Profile forcing a tack on us...



just footing along beautifully and punching well above her weight as all Townsons do.

[Chip-skiff]

Marvelous pickies, as usual. I can almost smell the sea air.

You've gotten great service from the stripper. What do think of the center bench, as compared to the usual setup?

[John B]

It actually works really well Chips, everyone is automatically seated in the right place with maybe a shuffle fore and aft required for trim. A bit of a surprise really.
Unfortunately all maintenance and projects got canned last year so it missed out on the varnishing etc it was due for. I'll bring it home or into work now and dry it out for a clean up.

[John B]

backtrack to friday, Steve just sent me a pic.. it'd been fairly blowy and wet so we had the 'ketch reef' in .

[Thad]

Many thanks, John! and nice to get a picture (and a good one too) of your own boat!

[John B]

I took about 3 'good' ones of Ngatira at the same time Thad.
Only, they didn't turn out so good. I think I might be developing some sort of twitch .

Ngatira got in a couple of hundred metres ahead of us.....



The sky in these shots is telling us something



and after a short interval, the sun goes down a bit quick this time of the year.. we headed ashore to enjoy the Pardeys hospitality.
They really do go to quite some trouble to make us all welcome and its a real pleasure to catch up with all the Mahurangi CC and North Cove people.



as was promised by the clouds and the weather forecast, the next day ( sunday) was overcast with patches of rain, the forecast for monday was heavy rain and 30 knots.. so we left sunday for a nice broad reach all the way home in about 15 to 18 knots....

and that...


was that.

[John B]

But wait, there's more.

surprisingly we made it out for another night. The weather was 50 knots on sat and the Fiji ocean race start was postponed. When it dawned sunday clear and sunny we decided to watch that and then head for Drunks bay for the night.
The old orma 60 Tri Geant , now Team Vodafone is the odds on favourite


but they mauled the start and returned leaving the brand new TNZ 70 foot RTW boat to lead the fleet out.

Small fleet of about 18 boats



Talent , a nice Townson for Graeme.

[John B]

And a nice afternoon and evening up at Drunks/ Islington.

Iorangi was just about to leave but we had them hop over for a cup of coffee.




Wairiki slotting in past two of the boats we cruise with..





Nice night and good to get out, even if it was just motorboating.

[John B]

2011 is looking up as I have a crew job on Riada's young sister called.. RiadaII .
She's a 1980 revision of our 1975 Riada. Originally built in a way that she looked very similar apart from the obvious ketch/ sloop rigs ,but with some racing rating influenced bumps in the run aft and some reasonably subtle alterations particularly in the bow sections. 10 or 15 years ago she had a major makeover with a pilothouse hard dodger added and the rig changed from masthead inline double spreader to fractional swept spreaders and a boom furler.( edit .. she was inline fractional rig, not masthead,changed to swept spreader fractional, )
Nice boat , fast, and great cruiser with the shelter we don't have.
We first met them on our 08 cruise in Whangaroa harbour in Northland and have caught up periodically since..

[snow(Alan H)]

Will be good to see you sitting on the rail again...........

[John B]

interweb prollems.. couldn't post me pics.




similar but different..

[John B]

Will be good to see you sitting on the rail again...........

I dunno about that , I quite fancy the look of that dodger.

She's just been repowered. re propped and log and shaft done, rig checked, new mainsail ,storm jib and trysail.
Ready for anything!

[Duncan Gibbs]

Great stuff JB! Gotta do the pilgrimage one of these days... Direct flights from GC to AKL y'know!

[Phil Y]

nice

[Larks]

2011 is looking up as I have a crew job on Riada's young sister called.. RiadaII

what do you define as a "crew job" over there? Is that like a paid job helping to "polish the hull" so that you can continue to pay the upkeep on your fleet or the more obvious "helping to polish off the cellar??

[Hwyl]

It's a much bigger rig.

Are you planning on adding to the fleet?

[John B]

what do you define as a "crew job" over there? Is that like a paid job helping to "polish the hull" so that you can continue to pay the upkeep on your fleet or the more obvious "helping to polish off the cellar??

Well ,I'm not going to polish a hull, I've got enough maintenance of my own to do. I've made myself useful troubleshooting a few minor things but i think I'll get some steering and a bit of trimming . A wheel though!

No I'm not adding to any fleet Gareth.. if you'd heard me on a rant a month or so ago you would have heard about ' sellin everything'. Mostly car driven at that time with a fried waterpump on my car , a big service bill on my wife's and two I couldn't sell. ( one company car and one was our old family 7 seater more recently used as the boat/ marina truck)
Easily solved. I traded the 2 on another car for Kirsty, and paid the money.

[John B]

One day to go. oo yeah.

Apart from one little home crisis down. burgled today... bad enough but not too bad.

Were' off up the coast tomorrow, there's a big low lurking off the tip of Northland and we'll have to wait for that to get past far enough to clear on outa here and give us the slingshot off. Its the 20's in a couple or three days!.

[John B]

We bolted up the coast on the 2nd july with a breeze that grew and ended up having us doing exactly what we didn't want to do and that was sailing 10/ 10ths flat out in the middle of the night with a boat loaded for a 3 month cruise.
On board was the owner and his partner , and us 3 delivery helpers for the leg to Tonga. The fact that we ended up doing 10 knots in the black and what had developed into a wind warning had its benefits though because it caused us to make a couple of small modifications . One modification being to the boat ( a teak cleat the length of the cockpit... something for a toe to bevel into ) and one to our collective attitudes ie , we're in for the longhaul, not a broach off Tutukaka.
We stopped at Mimiwhangata at about 1 am and next day fiddled around making sure of our storm gear and trying out another sail from deep within the sail locker. It was going a wind advisory by then so what better time to get the storm jib out and try a really deep reef for the sail around into Customs at Opua.
Joy o joy , who woulda thunk it. ... 8 square metres of jib and a main up to the spreaders only and we went just as fast, flat, comfy, pass the biscuits will ya Kev me old mate.
Johnny gets a shot at the big round thing.


did you know ( for all those tiller guys out there) that wheels are different to steering on proper boats, which have a stick attached directly to the rudder.

We spent a day watching the weather and topping up provisions etc and finally cleared on the 5th, leaving in a gale warning for later that night on the basis of making some North and sailing out of the systems cartwheeling up through the Tasman and making life miserable in NZ.

Storm jib and little main.. lovely.

[John B]

The sailing was pretty damn exciting as we moved offshore. People always talk about wind strengths as a gauge to weather, I do it myself.. but the reality is its sea state that counts.
We had a SE swell with an overnight NE overlay , plus a SW wave from the last 12 hours with the new and current wave from the NW on top. Basically there was some sort of water coming from everywhere. It was mixed up and messy and a not nice motion depite us sailing an angle from a reach through broad reach ,to make speed and go for the driest ride with least slamming.
This boat is fast cruiser.. 46 ft and firmer aft than Riada, she'd squirt away and maintain speeds from lows of 8 and through to a medium of high 9's and 10's. The log would read 8, 9, 9, 10, 10 ,10 ,10, 11, 11 11, 12 8 8 9 etc. grrreat sailing. I hit 13's a few times and that was it given the length of wave and general conditions.. shame we never really got a nice long ocean swell with those breezes.

Great old mate Tony on the helm.

[John B]

The forecast was NW going SW and we wanted to go NNE. Sailing that angle was a mission though so we continued off at more NE on the basis of turning left when the SW came in. Over a couple of days that led us to a point 70 miles off the Kermadecs and aiming so we'd only just clear em should we continue.. dang SW hadn't come in and we'd gone through the 180 degrees longtitude. The seas were building , the barometer dropping a bit quick and after some discussion we decided that we'd turn her around and heave to... have a little rest and see how she handled while it was still early in the day. I certainly did not fancy continuing on to shoaling water and coming any closer than where we were to a place we subsequently heard was busy having an earthquake and producing a tsunami of some degree.
This point then became the fabled 'JB 70' and was used for the duration of the trip whenever it was felt we were coming closeish to anything with a consistency of hard.
JB " we should give that reef a bit more room"
" You heard him Tone.. give it the JB70 "
" haw haw ha ha haw"

all in good spirit.. we did the right thing.

[Larks]

Is that it?? Or are you just teasing us out?? Don't make me do a JB70 on this thread mate!!!

[John B]

I was interrupted by people who were asking me about things, something called www, wwww,,wwork. Its not good.

By this time we'd had 3 upchucks and 3 falls. The upchucks were fixed pretty fast by patches and a change in diet. [YES, says very big loud background voice, YOU shouldna pigged out on that lasagne, the bacon and eggs, the pie, the porridge, the creamy rich soft cheese, DYA think yer cast iron gullet JB? eh? eh?]

yeah, but where'd the carrots come from, thats what I want to know.

The falls, minor dings ,and a warning to be more careful....

[John B]

So where were we, I'm home now.... Roight, hove to. Well, before we were hove to we actually got a little bit tricked. I will say now that this trickery had some influence on my JB70 stand .The day before, the wind moderated to about 20 knots and we thought that meant we were in for our weather change including the much aforecasted SW or yes, you guessed it, 20 knots from the SW. This 'we've broken the back of it' feeling and attitude was unfortunately a tad premature as later on in the evening we( our watch of Tony and myself) awoke to hear the shakin and shimmying of flogging sails. Kev and Skipper Dave were luffing through something like 45 or 50 knots. Tony and I climbed out of our comfortable bunks aka the cabin sole and got dressed in our wet weather gear( put hats on cos everything else was already on) and together we proceeded to reef the girl down to something a bit more suitable to the conditions. At that time we guessed that perhaps the SW20 knots hadn't actually arrived per se.
But at least now we get to the hove to bit.
" Y'ever hove this boat to Dave"
" Is it hove to or heaved to or hoven to, Have I heaved it to, you certainly heaved a lot to two nights ago"
" at least I ended up dry rea(t)ching unlike this boat, which was very wet"


" No"

[John B]

The storm jib had gone away the day before when the wind moderated so now we had a seriously well reefed {furled}cruising jib on, and its shape wasn't horrible, and the main was also rolled right down to a scrap smaller than the trysail. We tacked the boat and didn't tack the jib, locked the helm off to windward and she took to it like a duck. Big waves rolling and hissing past and breaking around us.. she loved it.
Tony had a kip on the transom seat



I took a LPBC photo



we had a nice cracker and cheese and salami lunch



Bliss.

[John B]

Its always hard to get a true idea of sea and waves from a photo, but some of these were , er.. large, and there were large holes ..

[Hwyl]

Is that a roller furling boom? If it is, it's the best I've seen.

[John B]

Its a Reef Rite system Gareth. Kiwi designed product similar to a leisure furl but has no claw to control the sail.
In general I've massive respect for the quality of their gear, I have one of their jib furlers with the kiwislides so you load a jib onto the furler down, like hanking on.
I can see the appeal of the boom furler and it works well provided you do all the silly little things a boom furler wants. Quite frankly it just left me highly frustrated at the rigamarole of winching the entire sail up and winching the entire sail down.

[John B]

As the day went on it breezed up and ended up well into the 40's ,and the seas became big

http://s227.photobucket.com/albums/d...t=MVI_9631.mp4




]

and late in the afternoon after we'd plotted our course and position we flopped her about so we could settle in for the night on stbd, still hove to.
We'd found she was making 2.2 knots, but given the conditions and the fact she's a fin keeler, I thought that was pretty good.

We had a slightly different trim on that tack and the sea was biased a little more against us, so she was less comfortable... or perhaps it was just the wind was up significantly. We had a couple of decent breaks on the cabintop and one %#@& me wave which hit the boat very hard. Apart from that she was all lovely jubbly.
It was really pleasing to see how she'd handled , we'd made 9 miles South south west and then 16 miles NW back overnight so we'd had a nice little safe parking spot for 19 or 20 hours . By first light we awoke ( our watch) to a moderated sea and wind and glory be ... it'd backed to the south west.
3/4 main and full #2 jib and we were off again at 9 knots and heading straight for our destination, the Minerva reefs.



there's plenty of strange and exciting places in the world but this is up near the top of my list.

[Hwyl]

Mine too, how many miles from Auckland?

[John B]

800, near as dammit Gareth. 200 or so south of Tonga.
That satellite photo shows the two of them really well. in round terms , the North Minerva is about 4 miles across or about 11 miles circumference, and the South Minerva about 14 miles right around the two joined atolls. They're about 18 or 20 miles apart and according to the book , Minerva Reef by Olaf Ruhen , they were believed to be joined or an area of shoals until 1854 ( The Nicholson Shoals).
The book I mention I've owned for many years and I read as a boy. Its the story of 17 Tongan men who were wrecked upon South Minerva for 117 days in 1962. Fantastic tale of survival and written in a very frank, pull no punches and open style. I took the book with me.

[Hwyl]

Closer than I thought, but still a good haul.

It's hard to imagine that there's enough material for a book. There again I've read and enjoyed books about one Atlantic crossing: "Blue Water Green Skipper, Claire Francis and etc. I've done a few and am so taciturn I probably could not fill a page.


Edit, you must have added details of the book while I was posting, that makes sense.

[John B]

Its pretty entertaining.. My reknewed interest initially came about because the boat they were wrecked in was a product of the same designer or yard as Waione , Ngatira etc. Bigger of course and more of a sea boat, She was Ilex, renamed Tuaikaepau after she was sold to the islands.
She was a total loss, broke up completely after a few hours but as luck would have it there was a Japanese fishing boat already there , wrecked but high and dry only a mile or so away. they made that their home and lived off crays and fish until rescued. Made a still for fresh water. 5 Died.

We had the weather and it'd begun warming up finally so we timed our arrival for South Minerva in the afternoon and did arrive with the sun behind us and a nice clear view of the hazards. There's been a bit of a war of words going on between Fiji and Tonga as to who owns the Minervas and this culminated earlier this year in some perplexing action by the fijian navy. They threw some cruising boats out of North Minerva and then proceeded to destroy the light on south Minerva. Its hard to work out the logic in this, perplexing as I say. ( edit , I've since discovered that it was the North minerva light that was destroyed)

Anyway, just seeing this place ... nothing but breaking waves as far as you could see was erie to say the least. Its a strange feeling. The swell was a good 3 or 4 metres or so still( on the southern side) and they made big waves as they smashed the reef. We circled around the closed part of the figure eight from the SW and slotted in through the gap into the eastern atoll into turquoise water and about 15 to 20 metres depth, protected by the encirclement of the reef from the worst of the waves.

The areas are large and photos just don't do it justice....
Crew shot , Dave and Carolyn, still cruising Tonga the clever people. JB and Tony. Photo by Kev the Aussie.