april 1 2005 : gulf harbor marina, whangaparaoa, new zealand
The new watermaker pump arrived early yesterday morning and within an hour or so it was installed, wired, and ready to go. We turned it on and we were making water again. Thank goodness. I wasn’t 100% sure of my troubleshooting skills or my abilities to rewire the thing, so it was a relief when it came on and worked perfectly.

After that was done we took a look at the weather and found that we wouldn’t be able to head out until the 2nd. Our visas are only good through the 7th. We decided that we really weren’t interested in hurrying up the coast to get to Opua in order to clear out of the country, especially since we still need to hang out in the Bay of Islands until the right weather window opens up for our Tasman crossing, which could be in three days or three weeks. So since we couldn’t sail north today and our boat work was completed we decided to hop on the ferry to Auckland where we could stop in and see immigration about getting a visa extension as well as catch a movie. The ferry is for commuters, so it left at 7:10, a little early for my tastes, but it sure beat trying to figure out the bus system here.

First stop was the immigration office where we were told our extension shouldn’t be a problem and we could either fill out this huge packet of paperwork or just apply online. So down to the internet café where we found the online application incredibly easy to do, and within ten minutes we had applied and paid our $85 fee. Nowhere on it did it ask us how long we wanted the extension for though, which made us a little nervous. The ferry didn’t return until 5:30 so we spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the market, hanging out at Border’s, and one more movie. Later on we checked out our application status and found that it had been accepted. And we were given until September 4th, nearly 11 months from when we got here! Sure hope we aren’t still here in September waiting for weather.

april 2 2005 : kawau island, new zealand
As planned we got back underway this morning. The wind was right on the nose and we were motoring along when the port engine suddenly overheated and shut down. This was something that hadn’t happened to us since the Gulf Stream if I remember correctly. So after getting settled in at our anchorage for the night we opened up the engine compartment and had a look. The first thing I noticed was that the hot water hose that I had just replaced had burst again. I half expected it to happen, so I wasn’t all that upset. The problem is that the hose I have to use isn’t reinforced hose. And that is because I have to use such a small diameter hose in order for it to be able to fit through the original pipe that is still glassed into the boat and can’t be removed.

So like I said, I was half expecting it to blow and I had already thought up a better way of fixing it so, without going into excruciatingly boring detail, that problem is “fixed” again. I then got to work on the overheating problem. The coolant was empty, obviously boiling and then shooting out the overflow tube. Luckily I now have the hose running into an empty oil jug for just that problem, so there was no cleanup involved. Next I pulled off the raw water impeller and found that 2 of the 6 rubber flappers were broken off, which apparently caused enough of a reduction in waterflow to overheat the engine. A quick replacement of the impeller and hopefully that is taken care of. The engine overheating did get me to thinking, once again, about how happy I am to have two engines. When this happened today we were only about 50 yards away from the rocks along the shore and if we had no second engine we would have had to act fast to either get a sail up or to get an anchor out. As it was, all we had to do was start the other engine. Took about 5 seconds.

At the marina store the last few weeks I had been looking at this new fishing pole. It is only about 18 inches long, but has a metal spring on the pole which is supposed to make it feel just like a 6 foot long fishing pole. I’m not a huge sport fisherman but a few times I had thought it would be fun to be able to throw a line off the boat when we are at anchor. Then the other night Ali told me, “You know, I think you should get that fishing pole.” I don’t know if she was just sick of watching me play with the thing every time we went in the store or what, but regardless, the next day it was mine.

So today at anchor I busted out the new rod. Of course I had no bait, so I stuck some hamburger (or lamburger actually) on the hooks (the new lure has three) and dropped it in. The first time I dropped it in all my hamburger immediately fell off. The next time I was very gentle with it and within a minute I had my first nibble. I set the hook and had nothing. Reeled in and found all my hamburger was now gone again. I repeated this cycle a couple of more times and then decided that next time, the second I felt the fish, I would set the hook. Hopefully getting him before he made off with all my hamburger. So I dropped it in and BAM! I set the hook and began reeling him in. He felt huge. I was sure he must be at least 10 pounds. After a long fight I finally landed him. It was, no lie, the biggest snapper I had ever caught.

april 3 2005 : whangarei heads, new zealand
On the move again today. Started the day out by raising the anchor of course. A seemingly simple thing, except our windlass seems to enjoy blowing $20 fuses. Seems like every time the anchor gets stuck a little bit the fuse blows while trying to lift it. Or if the chain jams in the roller the fuse blows. It only takes a minute to replace the fuse, but it’s getting to be expensive. The wiring is hooked to a 150 amp busbar fuse. I replaced it with a 200 amp fuse today hoping that might keep it from blowing so easily. At one point a few months back I had run out of fuses and had bypassed it completely, wiring it directly to the battery bank. That was nice because we didn’t have the problem any more, but I’m sure there must be a reason that it’s not wired like that to begin with, so I’ve gone back to blowing fuses instead.

We had some wind early on but spent most of the day motoring. At one point we were motoring along with just the port engine when it started to sound funny. Ali and I both looked up at the tachometer at the same time and watched as the alarm went off and the engine shut down. Overheated again. Guess I spoke too soon yesterday. There was clearly a good flow of water coming out of the exhaust, so I knew it wasn’t the impeller again. So I started thinking, what’s changed? The only thing that is different is that we have the hot water heater working again. The hot water heater is heated by having the engine cooling water flow through it. Since we have been back in the water we have found that the water coming out of the heater is way too hot, even though we’ve got it turned down as low as it will go. So my new theory is that the water is going through the heater and coming back through the engine too hot, causing the overheating. At least that is what we are hoping, we’ll be testing that theory out tomorrow. Everyday seems to bring a new problem on the boat.

On the bright side, we caught our first shark today! On my famous pink and blue lure. That lure will catch anything, despite the fact that the hook is rusty and half the lure has been chomped off. I love that thing. So I was pulling the line in and wondering what I had caught since I never hear Kiwis talking about mahi mahi or wahoo. As it got closer it came to the surface with it’s big white mouth full of teeth wide open and it’s Jaws fin sticking straight up. Cool! He was only about three feet long but hey, a sharks a shark. So I got him about 30 feet from the back of the boat and stopped, wondering what the hell I was going to do with this thing. Hauling him up onto the boat seemed like a really bad idea, and cutting him loose was out of the question. I wasn’t about to lose that lure. So as I contemplated my options he decided that he wasn’t going to wait around to find out. He started thrashing around like crazy and managed to spit out the lure. Nice shark.

april 4 2005 : whangaruru harbor, new zealand
Well it looks like my theory about the hot water heater causing our overheating was wrong. The engine overheated within 15 minutes this time. I think we are going to have to call in a mechanic when we get up to Opua, because I am all out of ideas. One thing after another.

This morning we left with the predicted no wind and two hours later we had 10-15 knots right on the nose and we spent the afternoon motoring again. We found a pretty nice little spot and we’ll probably stay here for a couple of nights. As we were motoring into the harbor, which is about two miles long, we saw a lady in a row boat right out in the middle of it. She looked like she was just sitting there splashing around with one paddle. While we were going by her we could tell something was wrong, so we slowed down and went over. Turns out she had managed to drop one of her oars, and for whatever reason couldn’t retrieve it, so she was just slowly drifting out to sea. We threw her a line and started to tow her towards home (yes, we did invite her onto the boat but she declined), which also happened to be where we were going to anchor, when her son came racing out in their motorboat. She told us it was her first time going out fishing by herself and she knew she would never live this one down.

Alright, it’s time I said something about this. All the piracy talk has got to stop. You all worry too much. We know everybody is just concerned about us and we really appreciate it, but piracy is something that we just don’t care to worry about. Before we head into piracy prone areas we will take some precautions but we certainly aren’t about to let a couple of incidents change our entire cruising itinerary. We have now received 50 copies of the reported pirate attack in Yemen in which some cruiser claims to have killed at least three pirates and disabled two of their boats, yet somehow he doesn’t have any information on the other two cruising boats he says were with him. Now I am in no way calling this story false, but let’s put it into a little perspective here. How many boats have safely cruised right through this area in the past? We’re all about playing the percentages, and I calculate the odds of being attacked by pirates to be somewhere around 1 percent. I’ll take those odds any day of the week. I think our chances of being mugged while stumbling home downtown Chicago on a Saturday night were probably a lot better than that.

And besides, if this guy just killed all these pirates and blew up their boats, then there probably isn’t much to worry about any more, right? I don’t know what it is about cruising that makes everybody so scared. We used to have subscriptions to SAIL, Blue Water Sailing, Cruising World, and Lats and Atts magazines, but when the subscriptions came due this last time we didn’t renew them. Why? Because 90% of the articles are about safety this or that, and scary stories of how someone lived through this giant storm, or in the case of Lats and Atts, the supposedly youthful fun magazine, they devote an entire page to the Piracy Report. Have you ever read that? Every incidence of piracy ever reported in that magazine relates to giant cargo ships, never to a cruising sailboat. So what is the point of that? I don’t know. Maybe we’ll be proven wrong and we’ll find ourselves in trouble at some point, maybe not. We’re not worrying about it. But anybody who wants to place bets on our being attacked we’re giving 10:1 and we’ll take as much action as you want. But seriously, thanks for the concern.

april 6 2005 : bay of islands, new zealand
Yesterday we spent in Whangamumu Harbor just a few miles up the coast from Whangaruru Harbor, great names huh? When we were on our road trips people at the hotels would always ask us where we had come from that day and I don’t think we were ever able to tell them. The names here just don’t roll off the tongue or lend themselves to being easily memorized.

Whangamumu was one of those nice little anchorages that you can’t even see as you approach it but then you come around a rock and find this completely encircled bay with beaches all the way around it. Very nice. We recently saw a movie where a little girl goes around collecting seaglass on the beach. Seaglass is just pieces of broken glass that have washed up on shore with the edges all worn smooth from years of being washed along the sand and rocks. Anyway, we found a whole bunch of it on the beaches here and ended up spending the whole day looking for it. It’s about as exciting as doing a 5000 piece puzzle, but it was strangely addicting, and not a bad way to spend an afternoon on the beach.

Today we woke up to just a little swell rolling into the harbor and with only about fifteen miles to go to the Bay of Islands we upped anchor and headed out. Immediately after coming around the corner of that rock we found the wind blowing hard right in our faces, which combined with a small opening, shallow water, and only one working engine, made for an interesting ride out. After an hour or so we were able to turn north and get the wind to help us out a little bit. It was sort of a strange feeling being back in rough seas. It’s been a long time since we’ve had to deal with them. Eventually we made it into the protection of the Bay of Islands where you pretty much have your pick of dozens of little bays to anchor in. It was nice being able to anchor in water under 10 feet deep again. Don’t think we’ve done that since the Bahamas.

april 8 2005 : opua marina, bay of islands, new zealand
Yesterday we got to work on the overheating engine. After picking up a mooring at Opua Marina we went in and talked to a diesel mechanic. After explaining what was going on to him he suggested that it might be the thermostat. As luck would have it we had a spare thermostat. He grabbed a manual and made me a copy of the page with directions on how to remove it. I got to work in the afternoon. The thermostat is just a small piece about an inch in circumference and two inches deep. Should be simple to replace right? Wrong.

First I had to remove the alternator, then disconnect the hoses and drain the coolant. After that I had to remove the heat exchanger. That was it according to the manual, but when I tried to slide the heat exchanger off it hit the starter which was buried in the engine underneath the exchanger. I wasn’t sure how to remove any of this stuff to begin with, and having an engine that was now in pieces was making me a little nervous, so when I couldn’t figure out how to get the starter off we called it a day and decided to call in the mechanic the next day.

The mechanic couldn’t come out until the afternoon so Ali and I got to work on fixing the anchor light which is at the top of the mast. She hauled me up to the top of the mast and I rigged up a rope step so I could stand up and try to fix the light. I took it apart and found water in the base of it where all the wiring goes. The wiring was pretty well corroded which explained why the light worked one day and not the next, despite the fact that we had just replaced the bulb when the mast was off the boat. So after WD-40ing everything and taking a wire brush to it I plugged it back together and flipped it on. Now the anchor light worked but not the tri-color light. I started exchanging lightbulbs (3 brand new $20 bulbs), and found that only one of them worked. I don’t know if the wiring and water was shorting them out or what, but we left the anchor light working and went to the store to buy a couple more bulbs which I’ll need to go back up top to put in.

In the afternoon the mechanic came out to give me a hand. Within a few minutes he had the starter off and we set about getting the old thermostat out. It was severely corroded into place and took some hammering and prying to get out. All of which made me think that this must have been the problem. We put the new one in and hooked everything back up. I had noticed when I was taking the engine apart that there was a little brown and white wire with a plug on the end of it that wasn’t hooked up to anything. I mentioned this to the mechanic and he immediately realized that it was the temperature sensor. Turns out that when the hot water heater was installed the sensor has to be relocated. From the looks of things the wire was no longer long enough to reach the sensor and so was just left off, instead of just attaching a 4 inch piece of wire with a couple of connectors like we did. It took about 30 seconds. We then filled the heat exchanger back up with water for the time being and left the cap off so we could see if there was water flow when the engine started up. I started the engine and that’s when things went from bad to worse.

Immediately the mechanic said, “Uh-oh, this is bad.” Which of course is not what we wanted to hear. I looked at the engine and saw smoke coming out of the heat exchanger and the water just bubbling out the top. We shut the engine off and he gave us the bad news. “Your cylinder head is cracked.” The smoke was combustion gases getting through the cylinder and into the heat exchanger. We sat there absorbing this bit of bad news when he said to start it up again. This time he took the crankcase top off (the part that you add the oil into). I started the engine and smoke was pouring out of this hole as well. We shut it back down. Now we could see that the combustion gases were getting through there as well, which most likely means that the pistons are warped, which was probably caused by the overheating. I can’t remember all the terms for these engine parts and problems, but you get the general idea.

Normally when an engine overheats it doesn’t really get hot enough to damage the engine because your temperature sensor sets off an alarm which would cause you to immediately shut down the engine until you could figure out why it was overheating. This is the same temperature sensor that somebody decided not to bother hooking back up because it would take thirty seconds and about 80 cents worth of parts. Well when our engine overheated last time it got so hot that it actually began melting the paint on the engine causing quite a bit of smoke in the cabin. An engine should never get that hot. The engine actually shut itself down when that happened. The mechanic thinks the reason for that is that the pistons may have begun to seize up.

So what does all this mean? He tells us we could try and just remove the cylinder head, and assuming that it is cracked we would replace that. That would stop the combustion gases from getting into the heat exchanger, but it wouldn’t stop them from getting into the crankcase, though he says it would probably run okay for quite some time like that, but you just wouldn’t know what the extent of the damage was to the pistons or when they might fail altogether. This option would cost us about $400 in labor plus the cost of the new cylinder head. Basically at least $1000 and we would have a half assed engine afterwards. The other option is to actually remove the entire engine from the boat, replace or rebuild the pistons and all that stuff, replace the cylinder head, and reinstall the engine. This would take roughly 50 hours, at $50 an hour, plus parts. Conceivably a $5000 NZ bill all due to some lazy installer not finishing his job properly.

To say we are disappointed right now would be a huge, huge understatement. We bought this boat only a year old for exactly that reason. It was only a year old! What could possibly be wrong with a year old boat? I’m not saying that Charles Kanter, our surveyor, should have caught every problem with the boat, but it sure would have been nice if he had caught even one. I guess maybe he thought the same thing we did, what could be wrong with it?

Just a day with a lot of highs and lows. We had started getting excited earlier in the day thinking that we would have the engine fixed by the afternoon and would be able to start looking at getting out of here soon. Now we find this problem which will take at least two weeks, but the way things always seem to go it will probably take closer to a month. That of course screws up our plans for Australia. What adjustments, if any, that we’ll need to make as far as that goes we won’t know for a while. Not to mention that we are once again throwing away a pile of money on something that we get no enjoyment out of. It’s like buying a new mattress, you’re a little more comfortable at night but will your friends ever look at your new $3000 mattress and say, Wow!?

To top it all off we went into the marina to take a shower after all this was done. We hadn’t used the showers the last time we were here in Opua. We get over there and find that it costs $1 for hot water. This isn’t some crappy old run down place, it is a brand spanking new marina that charges a lot of money for slips and moorings, yet they feel the need to squeeze you for a buck at the end of the day. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal if we had actually brought any money with us, but instead we got to trudge back down to the dinghy, motor out to the boat, back to the dock, and back to the showers. All for a buck.

One thing that I can say with absolute certainty is that we will never own a boat again for the rest of our lives. And if we did it would be brand new and come straight to us from an American company. We might as well have bought a new boat since there isn’t going to be much left on this one that hasn’t been replaced in the last year anyway.

april 10 2005 : opua marina
After a day of being pissed off about yet another setback on the boat we are feeling much better today. We spent pretty much the whole weekend sitting on the boat doing nothing, reading, and watching movies. Opua is a town with virtually nothing in it except one restaurant and a little convenience store. The restaurant isn’t very good and is way overpriced anyway, but the convenience store is well stocked and has plenty of fresh breads and mince pies. Today I finally broke down and tried a sausage roll. It took me this long because the things are pretty hideous looking.

It’s this roll of miscellaneous looking meat inside of a little pastry shell. It was delicious. I think I am beginning to understand why they all have tea (really a pre-lunch lunch) at 10:30 everyday. Still seems a little crazy to me to have four meals a day, three of which seem to be during working hours, but as long as I’m not the boss paying their wages, what do I care. Anyway, where am I going with all of this? I don’t know.

Tomorrow we’re going to talk things over with the mechanic, he’s supposed to have all the part prices for us, and we’ll get to work. I’m assuming that I should be able to pretty much remove the engine myself, unhooking all the lines and that sort of thing, and hopefully we’ll be able to have it off the boat by the middle of the week. After that we’re going to get out of Opua and cruise back up to the other towns around the Bay of Islands. And by the time we get back our engine should be ready to be dropped back in. That’s the plan anyways, we’ll see how that all pans out.

april 11 2005 : opua marina
So here is the situation now. We stopped in to see the mechanic who had two options for us.

Option 1: We could rebuild the old engine. After calling for prices on all the parts, he gave us an estimate of about $5300 NZ. Of course that is just an estimate. It could end up a lot worse or it could end up, at most, $1000 cheaper if the cylinder head was able to be fixed (it would then only cost about $600 instead of $1600). He could have the parts in about 10 days and it would require around 40 hours of work (at $50 per hour, included in the estimate). So we were probably looking at being here close to a month. And he would of course offer us his personal warranty, which is essentially good for about a fifty mile radius.

Option 2: We could buy a brand new engine. The cost for this was $7500 NZ. But he would purchase the old engine back from us for $1000 bringing the total cost to $6500. This he could have here tomorrow or the next day at the latest. It would take roughly four hours to lift the old engine out (I would do most of the work of unhooking it), and drop the new one in and hook it all up. Along with this engine we would receive a two year international warranty direct from Volvo covering virtually any problem with the engine anywhere in the world.

We walked out of the office and right over to a pay phone to call the guy who runs the Volvo shop at Gulf Harbor for a second opinion. We gave him the rundown on what had happened to the engine and he agreed that it would have to be rebuilt. He told us that the rebuild price might be a little high but that you can just never tell until you’ve actually got it off and torn apart. But pretty much the best case scenario would still have us looking at at least $4000 NZ. He called around for us and said the best price he could find on a brand new engine was $7400, so that looked good. And he agreed that $1000 was a fair price for the old engine saying that is what he would have given us.

So our choice came down to this, we could rebuild it and hope we got lucky and have it cost us $4500 or so, or we could spend $6500 and have a brand new engine with a warranty. The deal breaker for us was the time involved. Option 1 has us sitting around in the Bay of Islands for a month, while Option 2 has us on our way by this weekend. So here we go again, another $5000 dollars down the drain. We’ll drop the new engine in and keep our fingers crossed, and with any luck we may still get to Australia in April.

april 13 2005 : opua marina
Well our engine shipped out from Auckland, about three hours away, on Monday. Today is Wednesday and it didn’t show up. It was eventually tracked down to a warehouse in a town 50 miles away. Not sure how that could have happened but it did. We have been assured that we will be the very first delivery tomorrow. I’ve pretty much got the old engine ready to be pulled out, leaving just a few bolts on it so that the saildrive won’t get shaken loose when we motor over to the dock in the morning. We had to do a little searching to find a suitable dock for us to pull up to since the boat is practically impossible to maneuver with only one engine at low speeds. Luckily the Opua Marina has an outside dock that is completely unused because of construction at the moment, so we’ll pull in there and at least won’t have to worry about smashing into another boat.

We’ve gotten a lot of feedback and questions about the engine so let me try to explain things a little better. First off, I said that an alarm would go off when the engine overheated and then shut down. The alarm wasn’t the temperature alarm it was the low oil pressure alarm that goes off if you shut off the engine without turning the key into the off position first. Normally when you shut the engine off, the first thing you do is turn the key to the off position which cuts off the alternator, then you pull the fuel shut off handle and the engine shuts down. Well if you pull the handle before turning the key off an alarm goes off to let you know that the key is still on. So what was happening was the engine was overheating so badly that the engine was shutting itself down, and then the alarm was going off because the key was still on.

Also, we never did really determine what was causing the overheating in the first place. There seems to have been plenty of raw water flow, despite a slightly worn out impeller. And when we removed the heat exchanger we took a look at where the raw water flows into it and it was really clean, aside from one or two small pieces of plastic from the worn out impellers, but no serious buildup or anything in the unit itself. And since the engine was so messed up by the time we replaced the thermostat there is no way to know if that had anything to do with it or not.

A couple other notes about the engine. This engine had always run a half a knot slower than the other engine when they were run one at a time at the same RPMs. I had always just assumed that the RPM reading may have been incorrect, but now think that maybe there had been a problem in there all along. And there is no doubt that this engine does need to be rebuilt at this point. When we started it the other day it made a horrible knocking noise in addition to all the smoke coming out of every orifice. Anyway, should have the new engine in by tomorrow afternoon, then we’ll test her out and keep a close eye on it for a few days while we get ready to leave. Again.

april 15 2005 : opua marina
Tax day for us Americans. About two weeks ago we got our taxes back from our accountant and were pleasantly surprised that we owed a lot less than we had been expecting. Those feelings of happiness were quickly erased of course when we went in and paid for our new engine yesterday. Seems to be a recurring theme for us, every time we come into a little extra money the boat has a way of snatching it from us.

As promised the engine arrived yesterday morning. Around noon the mechanic came down to the boat and we got started. The engine was already unhooked so we began the process of moving it out. It wasn’t all that heavy for two guys to lift, it was just really awkward to maneuver in such a tight space. The door to get it out of the room was 17″ wide and the engine was 18″, so it took a little work to get it turned just the right angle to make it out. But it did, and we made it outside without too much drama.

Next step was to get it off the boat. The back transom would have been a little to risky, so we removed the lifelines and rigged up the boom to lift it up and swing it out over the dock. Again, no drama. We tied up the new engine and reversed the procedure and within an hour of starting we had a brand new engine sitting in its compartment.

It was well past tea time by then so the mechanic took off for a half an hour and I worked on hooking up simple things like fuel lines and water hoses. One thing I found interesting was that the engine came with oil in it already. The mechanic told me that was because of the number of people who would hook everything up, then start it without oil and after a few seconds wonder where all the smoke was coming from. When he got back we hooked up the wiring, the new tachometer, filled up the coolant, double checked the oil, turned on the battery, opened the raw water seacock and fired her up. It started on the first turn and purred like a kitten. No knocking!

The only problem we ran into was with the alternator. It wasn’t charging. Some modifications had been made previously and left us with a few extra wires lying around. I think the modifications made were so that the alternator would charge both the house bank batteries and the starter battery, but when it is turned off the starter battery will be isolated from the house batteries so it will not get drained down. A nice system, just a little hard to follow all the wiring. Fortunately I had taken a ton of pictures of everything while I was taking the engine apart and so with the computer sitting next to us we were able to hook everything back up the way it had been. This took us longer to do than hooking the engine up in the first place, but five hours after we started we had a brand new working engine.

april 17 2005 : bay of islands, new zealand
Back in Opua tonight after spending the weekend in Russell and Paihia which are just across the bay from each other about 4 miles away from here. Russell was the original capital of New Zealand and it was a great little town with a row of restaurants and B&Bs lining the road around the bay, a nice bakery for breakfast and an ice cream shop which Ali gave high marks for their double dark chocolate. The bay is filled with moored boats, most of which just sit there collecting barnacles, so we anchored out behind them. We went in and walked the beach and immediately found that Russell is also the seaglass capital of New Zealand. For the next four low tides we wandered along the beach collecting glass. I’m sure people were looking at us and wondering what the heck we were doing, but Ali was thrilled with the place and couldn’t have cared less.

The weather was great and it was just nice to get away from boat crap for a couple of days. Although I did use the time to take a close look at the engine and make sure it was running smoothly. What I found was a couple of litres worth of diesel sloshing around underneath the engine. Checked the obvious, which was the fuel lines, but they were dry and I couldn’t find anywhere that even seemed wet. Until I started up the engine again. Diesel was pouring off of the engine. I quickly traced that back up to a hose fitting that ran to the fuel filter and with a quick tightening we were rolling again. A simple problem, but my first thought was, How long is this going to take to fix? I had pictures in my head of another weeks delay.

Then this morning we went over to Paihia which is basically the starting point for every tourist activity in the Bay of Islands. We had passed through the town on a road trip a while back and for some reason had this vision of a big town with lots of stuff to see and do. I’m still not sure why we thought it was like that. Actually it consists of about three blocks of restaurants and shops along the main road running along the beach. Other than that it has a few motels and not much else. It’s still a nice enough town and we had a great lunch before making a stop in the small grocery store there for our last supply run before the Tasman passage.

The good news that came to us yesterday is that the 21st appears to be a good day to begin our Tasman Sea crossing. We’ve hired a weather service to do the forecasting for us and give us advice on the best route to take to help us make the most of the wind. So yesterday they emailed us with the news that Thursday should be a good time to start and we should have SE winds for a good chunk of the trip, which would be absolutely ideal for Bum. So now I’m really excited to get going and am surprisingly really looking forward to the passage. It should be an exciting test for us. Ali doesn’t quite have the same enthusiasm for the passage but she is excited to be in Australia soon.

One other note, we received a lot of feedback on the windlass fuse issue. Turns out my ignorance with regard to wiring could have been a bit of a problem. Seems that if wiring is only rated for 150 amps and you install a 200 amp fuse you could easily overheat the wiring causing a nice electrical fire, something many of our readers have done themselves as it turns out. As you can imagine, an electrical fire is not something we are looking to enjoy here on the boat, so we have replaced the fuse with a 150 again. We are also going to install a waterproof circuit breaker in the chain locker so that instead of blowing the fuse the circuit breaker will trip first, and all we will have to do is flip the switch to get it running again, after we unjam the chain of course.

april 19 2005 : opua marina
We’ve been super busy the last couple of days getting things ready for the passage. Yesterday I hooked up the hot water heater hoses to the engine and everything seems to be working fine. After that I decided to relocate the exhaust muffler, which is just a plastic box that the exhaust hose runs through. The mechanic had mentioned when we were installing the engine that the mufflers should really be located as low as possible in the engine compartment. He said it’s recommended that they be one foot below where the exhaust exits the engine itself. This is to try to prevent water from washing back in from outside and into the engine.

Well ours were sitting up on a platform in the engine compartment, but there was plenty of room on the floor about 6 inches lower, so I thought I’d just go ahead and bang that little project out. All I needed was a little exhaust hose. So I unhooked the hoses, cleaned the muffler, and began putting everything back together. While I had been taking the hoses off I noticed that they had all been cut on the ends so that they would be able to slide onto the muffler. A little shoddy I thought, but what else is new. So I had my new 1 3/4″ hose and began hooking it up. All was going well right up until I tried to get the new hose onto the muffler.

There was absolutely no way that it was going to fit. So I took a closer look and found that they had used a muffler which is for two inch hose. Typical Charter Cats construction. Apparently they must have had some excess inventory, or just got a really good deal on them. The reason they were able to make it work was because the hose they used was rubber with no reinforcing wire inside it, so after slitting the end of the hose, and probably heating the hose up they were able to slide it on. Well the hose I bought had reinforcing wire in it which made it impossible to stretch over the muffler. Eventually I had the shop here weld me an extension with a one three-fourths opening on one end and a two inch opening on the other. It all worked out just fine in the end, but once again a 1 hour project ended up taking all day long.

Then last night I decided to tackle another 10 minute job. The pump handle on the toilet had started leaking so I had bought a new o-ring and rubber spacer thing. As I took off the pump head assembly one of the screws wouldn’t come out. So I took out the other five and then lifted the assembly off. Turns out that this little plastic piece that the screw goes into had broken right off. So when I tried to put it back together water continuously leaked out because it couldn’t be tightened all the way. This is the same exact piece that had cracked on the other toilet which caused us to have to buy a new pump head assembly for that one.

So today we went into the marine store and looked around, they didn’t have the piece so we went to the counter to see if they could maybe order it for us. The conversation went like this.

“We had this piece on our Jabsco toilet break and we were wondering if you could order it for us?”
She said, “Did the little knobby thing for the screw break off your pump head?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“That thing breaks all the time.”

That’s pretty bad when the lady working at the counter of a small chandlery in Opua has seen this problem so many times that she knows the part number by heart. Jabsco must be aware of this problem, 90% of boats have the same toilet. They’re definitely getting an email from us about it.

Today we filled up the diesel, put our engine room back together, fixed up a little wiring on the freezer, brought the anchors inside and stowed them in the back room in order to try and distribute our weight a little better, made some phone calls home, settled the bill for the mechanic, caulked up the old toilet assembly since we were planning on leaving tomorrow and didn’t want to wait for the new piece, and cleaned the inside of the boat. All in anticipation of leaving tomorrow.

Then we checked email and got the bad news, the forecast had changed and they don’t think we should leave yet. Winds are supposed to be 30 knots from the southwest with 15 foot seas. Definitely not the kind of weather we are looking for to start the passage. They said they would get back to us tomorrow with more information. So we wait.

april 20 2005 : opua marina
Things change quickly with the weather I guess. We got an email this morning and the weather service seems to think we will probably get out of here tomorrow or the next day. So we did laundry this morning, and cleared out of New Zealand with customs.

april 21 2005 : en route to australia (tasman crossing)
While clearing out with customs yesterday we received a stern warning that we were to leave immediately and not to stop anywhere along the coast. We were to go directly from Opua to Sydney. That seemed a little excessive to us, I mean what had suddenly changed that made us such bad people that we could no longer be trusted to step foot on New Zealand soil? No other country had been that strict with us. The customs officer hadn’t even noticed that our stamps in our passports had expired. We had gotten the extensions online, but he would have had to check with a phone call. Anyway, so as not to incriminate ourselves I can’t go into details with regard to how we spent our night.

This morning we checked email at six a.m. to see if our weather predictions had held up and if we were being given the green light to go. Turns out the weather did look good and so after a couple more hours of sleep we got underway. The day started out the way it always seems to, with winds on the nose. We tacked farther east and motorsailed for most of the morning and then around 2 the wind started to pick up.

Just as predicted, a storm came up from Auckland and blew by us causing the wind to shift and allowed us to cut the motors. A couple hours later we had our first scare of the passage. Ali had just started to make us some dinner and I was sitting outside at the wheel. The wind had died down to 8 knots and Ali came out and said, “What’s this, the calm before the storm?”

About a minute later the boat veered violently into the wind and had jumped to 35 knots. We had full main and jib out at the time and were seriously overpowered. I turned off the autopilot, took the wheel, and was able to get us back under control and on track, but the wind was still howling. Ali got the lines ready and we raced around putting a double reef in the main. The whole time Ali was saying (not yelling mind you), “We’re gonna die.” Cracks me up when she says that because we live through it every time. Just as quickly as it all started, it quit and the wind dropped back down to twenty and we were once again under control, though still sailing at 7.5 knots with a double reefed main and a couple rolls in the jib.

After that less than stellar beginning to the passage we sat down and had a little pow wow to hash out some ground rules for this passage.

Rule #1: when somebody says, “the calm before the storm” we are to immediately double reef the main.
Rule #2: we would reef the minute the wind hit 18 knots and double reef at 23 knots. Amazingly the boat seems to sail just as fast but we feel much more in control.
Rule #3: we would sail with one reef in at night and would put the second one in at 20 knots.
Rule #4: we would actually follow rules 1-3.

So as I write this we are still sailing in the Pacific, up the north coast of New Zealand. Around 2 a.m. we will be entering the Tasman. The winds are doing what they are supposed to be doing at this point, so despite pretty high winds and big seas we are hopeful that we might make some good time over the next few days.

april 23 2005 : en route
Day two of the Tasman was great. We continued to have winds right on the beam all day long between 15 and 25 knots. We are finding ourselves probably being overcautious so far, reefing early and often, but have decided to sacrifice some miles in order to not get caught by a squall. We’ve been especially cautious at night, sailing with the first reef in even with winds at only 15 knots. Probably silly, but the peace of mind, especially at night when you can’t see the weather that’s approaching, is worth it.

Last night we had a little visitor just like back on our way to Panama last year. A tiny bird that found himself exhausted as night approached and he was still hundreds of miles from land so he thought he’d just pull in to this passing boat. He flew right up to us, stopped quickly on the outboard, scoped out a nice spot for himself and made a little nest in a coil of rope right next to the steering wheel. He spent the night then woke up with the sun and flew off again.

Today started out with the wind dying and shifting to the SW causing us to have to head off the direct line to Sydney and head a little north instead. We motorsailed for a few hours before the wind picked up again and we were able to cut the engines and head back on course. Actually a beautiful day today, the sun is shining, the waves are tiny and we’re sailing along at about 5 knots. Can’t ask for much more than that while crossing one of the most feared seas in the world. Yesterday we were saying to each other that we wouldn’t be watching any movies on this passage, but with the calm conditions today we were able to kick back and watch a movie. You’ve got to like that.

Another thing I should mention is that we seemed to have licked the seasickness problem. For the first two days we took a couple of Dramamine pills and we haven’t felt this good this early in a passage in a long time. Should have tried this a long time ago.

What else is happening? Something is wrong with the alternator on the new engine. Actually, the alternator is working fine, but the regulator that stops it from overcharging doesn’t seem to be working. So as the alternator charges the batteries it never slows down. Suddenly yesterday an alarm on the watermaker panel was going off saying that the voltage was too high. I hit the button on the Link 10 battery monitor and found that the batteries were charging at 16.5 volts, way above the 14.6 or so that they should have been. I immediately shut off the alternator.

I have an idea of what the problem might be but it will just have to wait until Australia. In the mean time we’ll charge with the other engine. It’s amazing how much power we use when on passage. I would estimate that it is three times more than when we are at anchor. That’s because we usually start a passage with both fridges running, we’ve got the autopilot going, which uses a surprising amount of power, the computer with the charts is on the entire time, plus you have the running lights on at night.

Alright, mince pies and green beans are being served, gotta go.

april 25 2005 : en route
Well I think all the people, including ourselves, that say we have just been lucky with the weather so far, are going to have to start giving us a little credit. Here we are now, five days into this passage and we have had nothing but perfect sailing weather. At the moment the wind is blowing 12 knots from directly behind us and we are surfing down waves at about 7 knots. Very nice. Last night things were a little windy at about 25-30 knots, but it was from the side so no big deal.

We did get pooped pretty good for the first time though. The waves had built up pretty quickly yesterday and didn’t have a whole lot of room between them. So the boat would lift up on a wave then slide down the back side of it and immediately be picked up by the next wave. Every once in a while though the second wave would hit before one side of the boat had had a chance to make it down the first wave, which would leave us slanted right into the oncoming wave.

Well one of those waves broke right over the boat as Ali was sleeping and I was sitting on the couch. We always have the cockpit doors open, so all I could do was watch the wave wash into the cockpit, ricochet off of the seats and flow right into the living room (saloon). It looked worse than it was, and was only about one bucketful which actually stayed pretty much in one place while we scrambled to sponge it all up. Within ten minutes Ali was crawling back into bed. The thing that sucked the most about it was that my blanket and my wool socks got wet. I was freezing for the rest of my watch until Ali got up and scrounged up a new pair of socks for me. Other than that though, things have been pretty uneventful, a lot of reading, a lot of reefing and unreefing, and a lot of sleeping. Basically a normal trade wind passage, which is exactly what the Tasman Sea isn’t supposed to be.

One nice thing that we have noticed on this trip is how much better the boat is sailing these days. We had been hoping that relieving the keels of hundreds of gallons of water would make a difference and it is obvious that it has. Another thing we’ve done to try and improve the sailing is balance the boat a little better. A couple weeks ago we got an email from a couple that said it looked like our bows were to heavy judging by the picture on the website. Something that we hadn’t given a lot of thought to before. So we took a look for ourselves and they were right, the boat was definitely front heavy.

So before this passage we moved two boxes of books back into our cabin, since we don’t sleep at the same time on passage anyway, and on the other side we moved a couple cases of beer to the back. We also took the spare anchors out of the locker up front and stored them in the back cabin, and when we lifted anchor for the last time we took that anchor off as well. Overall the difference has been pretty dramatic. The other day the wind was on our nose at 20-25 knots for a few hours and we were actually able to sail over 7 knots with a double reef in pointing at about 45 degrees. Our previous experience with that sort of weather would have had us moving at about 5.5 knots and not pointing any closer than 60 degrees. A huge difference. So we are pretty stoked about that. More than anything it is nice that the boat doesn’t seem to dive into the waves so much any more and instead rides over them.

We’ve also had the fishing lines out but haven’t had much luck. In fact the only fish we caught was a tuna and we caught him just as we passed by a big fishing trawler 400 miles from shore. I guess he knows the good fishing spots. Ali and I still haven’t developed a taste for tuna though, lucky for the fish, and we released him.

april 27 2005 : en route
It seems the Tasman had a change of heart and no longer wants us to have a nice easy passage. Yesterday morning the wind suddenly kicked up, yes, right on the nose. It wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near there, but there it was. So we spent the day tacking back and forth and generally making terrible progress as the waves continued to build throughout the day and all through the night. Thankfully this morning they died down to virtually nothing and we were able to get back on course and start putting some miles under the keels, motoring of course.

Then today I got an update for the next few days weather from the weather service. Seems a nasty front is going to come whipping out from Sydney in about 48 hours, bringing with it some big winds the likes of which we have never had to deal with before. They are predicting 25-30 knots with squalls a virtual certainty and saying those could carry winds of up to 50 knots! Then over the course of a day the wind should shift from the northwest down to the south/southwest and continue to blow around 25 knots. All of this while we will be only about 200 miles from Sydney. Bummer.

Other than that bit of news there hasn’t been anything of interest going on out here. No fish being caught, no dolphins or whales being spotted, nothing other than a few albatross and other assorted sea birds checking us out. We’ve each managed to plow through three books and half a dozen magazines in an attempt to keep ourselves occupied.

april 29 2005 : en route
Only 250 miles to go now. Yesterday was the most perfect day…to be laying on a beach. It was hot, not a cloud in the sky, and not a breath of wind. Not exactly ideal for trying to race towards landfall in a sailboat. So after 24 hours of motoring the wind finally filled in last night and we have been sailing along pretty good ever since then. We’re still expecting that nasty weather to show up though, which is going to make for a pretty uncomfortable day.

Yesterday we received a lot of different weather reports via email which shows just how impossible it is to accurately predict the weather. The first report was from the weather service we hired, their prediction for today’s weather is 25-30 knots gusting to 45 knots. Then we got our GRIB file, which is the only thing that I normally use (because it’s the only thing I know how to use), it showed winds of about 15-20 knots. And lastly we got some weather information from a sailor in New Zealand who was pretty sure we would see really light winds the rest of the way in to Sydney. So today’s forecast calls for winds out of the NW at 5-45 knots. That’s a lot of help.

When I woke up this morning Ali asked if I smelled gas. I did, which is a bad thing. So with us bashing into the wind and waves washing over the front of the boat every few seconds I got to crawl into the chain locker and investigate our propane tank. Luckily it was immediately obvious that the leak was simply caused by a loose fitting. When I hooked up this tank I must have gotten sidetracked by a different project because a few weeks ago when we tried to use it for the first time after being in the water again it didn’t work. I went in there and found that I had forgotten to open the valve. Now today I go in there and find that the hose fitting wasn’t tightened properly. I have no idea what other project popped up right in the middle of doing that but it must have been pretty important. Of some concern was the fact that the fumes from the tank were able to get into the boat, since that is the whole purpose of having them in an outside locker. I’ll have to give a little thought to how to solve that problem.

Then to complete my morning chores I pumped the dinghy back up. The leak is still there and is now requiring twice daily pumping up. If I don’t keep it pumped up it gets loose and starts to swing around when the boat is rocking which would be a little dangerous in big seas.

Anyway, we’re getting excited to get there now. Hopefully only two more nights. We’ve both been in pretty high spirits on this passage. Mainly because I think we were both secretly dreading this trip, well maybe Ali wasn’t so secret about it, because of the expected bad weather and really rough seas. But since those haven’t shown up so far it has actually been pretty nice. Though we are both ready for a nice cold schooner of Australian beer and a pizza. Alright, alright, the pizza idea is mine, not hers.

april 30 2005 : en route
Now we’re just plain desperate. It’s five p.m. and we have exactly 98 miles to go. We’re running both engines at the moment, something we never do, because we want to get there so badly. The passage hasn’t been bad, but my original worst case scenario of ten days expires tomorrow morning and if we don’t make it in by then, I’m afraid Ali isn’t going to believe me the next time I tell her how long a passage will take.

I said ten thinking more realistically that we would make it in eight or nine and everybody would be happy, but a couple of days with wind on the nose screwed up that little plan. Again though, we can’t complain, we seem to have made it across the Tasman Sea without a scratch.

Yesterday’s big winds did show up, but not quite as badly as we had feared. In the morning the wind quickly picked up to thirty knots, where it stayed the entire day. The sky was clear, which was nice, since we didn’t have any of the squalls we had been warned about. The waves built throughout the afternoon, Ali guessed fifteen feet, and I said twelve. Though honestly neither of us has any idea how to make an accurate guess of wave height. What we do know is that they took us on some pretty wild spins, making for a long wet day.

Amazingly, right before dark the wind died down. It never does that, it always seems to get worse so that we have to spend those hours that we can’t see anything wondering what is about to hit us. We were pleasantly surprised and enjoyed a nice sail all night, until this morning when the wind completely disappeared and we had to fire up the engines again.

A little after midnight we experienced a big lightning storm, which was a first for us. It is truly amazing to watch one of these storms out at sea. It’s something we give no thought to while living on land, but out here, when we know our boat is the only thing for hundreds of miles sticking up fifty feet in the air, it’s a little unnerving. We unhooked as many electronics as we could and settled in to watch the show. The vertical lightning was striking in a 180 degree arc in front of us but thankfully managed to always stay a few miles away. The horizontal lightning would light up way off to the south and reach in a spider web all the way over our heads. We were happy that the show never got any closer.