Position: 30 degrees, 06 minutes south; 175 degrees, 23 minutes east

This is about 12 hours before the storm. Once it hit, we were kinda busy...

We got pushed about 100 miles west of where we wanted to be.

Wow, last night was a very long night. Before I tell about it, I’ll say that we’re doing well right now. Just had dinner, the wind is moderating and the seas are going down. We’re still under storm sails and will leave them up all night tonight if for no other reason than to have low maintenance and be able to get some sleep.

So, the storm. It was almost a cyclone. Labeled a “Tropical Depression”, it was a doozy. Very good that we were not further to the north where the center was. Up there the storm brought up to 74 mile/hour winds.

In fact (and very unfortunately) about 300 miles north of us a boat that was too late in leaving got caught right in the middle of it and apparently rolled sometime in the night or early morning. Their EPIRB, or emergency beacon went off and there was a search started. The boat has been found. One person is missing and presumed washed overboard in the rollover (why we wear harnesses at night and day during inclement weather) and there is some other injury on board. We don’t know any more, but it’s going to be 15 hours before a ship can get to them. The New Zealand search and rescue is flying planes looking for the person washed over. Our prayers are with them all. This all happened in the vicinity of Minerva Reef which is where we were a few days ago and is why we didn’t stop there. We were literally racing south to get away from it.

As for us, we were very glad to have switched to storm sails before the big winds and waves hit during the night. The wind was sustained over 35 knots gusting to 45 knots. I saw a 47 as the top speed when I was watching. The average sea height was in the range of 16 feet and I believe some were higher although tough to see in the dark. What you see is a white glow which is the top of the wave breaking and if it’s substantially above your head you duck and hang on, so not a lot of time to assess wave heights although this morning when they were still up I have to say they were impressive!

Charisma did well. Reaching along with the storm jib and trysail at about 6 knots, we were able to parallel the waves for the most part. If they had gotten much taller or the wind exceeded 45 knots for any length of time I would have hove to, as we were close to going too fast. We took a couple big hits, one was so big I involuntarily shouted, “Oh!” when it hit. The boat shuddered which I could feel through my feet and up my spine, but after shaking it off, Charisma was back on her feet and moving forward again. There’s no damage. One of the jerry cans of water came loose on the foredeck and I had to go up there. It was too heavy to mess around with in those conditions, so I just emptied it and brought it into the cabin. The Monitor wind vane did an excellent job steering so we could just hunker down in the cabin. At one point the steering lines came off the wheel, but Charisma kept more or less on course until I had time to put on foul weather gear, PFD, harness and go out and fix it.

There’s been some other miscellaneous damage to the fleet that we heard about on the net during the morning roll call. A couple of boats have blown out sails, one boat had a port hole blown and took on some water before they patched it and you could hear how tired and stressed people were. For our part, other than the jerry can, the head isn’t working. The water intake isn’t letting water in for flushing, so we have resorted to a flat bucket we have that we put under the seat and then dump over side. It’s working without too much trouble for now. I’m just too tired to deal with it at this point, but will fix it in the days to come.

Speaking of days; unfortunately we had to “run off” a bit to keep from smashing into the big waves, so our schedule has been delayed by a day or two. We were hoping for landfall on Sunday, but at this point with the wind changes coming that are moving the wind around to the south (which is right where we want to go) we’re looking at more like Monday or Tuesday. Tonight’s going to be slow because the wind is alternating between the mid-twenties and low thirties and the waves are very confused and still steep although not as tall, but it all adds up to the fact that we can’t make any kind of speed in the right direction. So we’re kind of trimmed to go slowly but comfortably (and safely) and we’ll catch up on sleep. Tomorrow should bring better conditions and we’ll drop the storm sails and get going again. Fortunately we have lots of food, rum and beer, so we’re set.

There it is. We’re in the Tasman, we met Gale and she was a beaut.

P.S. For Orcinius watchers-they reported on the afternoon net that they are two hours from Opua as of 4:30 this afternoon (the 8th in New Zealand. The 7th for you all). We are thrilled for them and a bit jealous too! Soon we will join them. Our advance team has landed!