Position: 34 degrees, 30 minutes south; 174 degrees, 24 minutes east 107 miles yesterday

The distance traveled above has no context to the amazing varied speeds we have been doing the last two days. From 11.7 knots to 3 knots, we’ve run the gamut over the last two days.

It’s still a bit rough, so I’ll try and keep this short as it’s hard to type, but here’s the gist: For the last 40 hours (prior to 1400 this afternoon) it’s been blowing 30-35 knots with 9-12 foot seas, despite what the gribs show. Gusts in the squalls have been into the 40’s. It’s been a bit of a tough couple days. I have slept in my foul weather gear for two days straight now. Haven’t even taken off my boots! Ann has been helping out on deck and has now joined the club of sailors who have slipped and almost slid off the deck at sea (she had her harness and tether). Everyone does it one time or another and you should have seen her eyes go wide 😉 Seriously though, she has become one hell of a sailor (beyond the already obvious fantastic and spectacular partner she is). Certainly she is not having the fun I’m having, but she’s holding her own despite these challenging conditions.

So…about the modest distance-our boat speed has varied from 11.7 knots last night (I hit it four times) while I was hand steering through a squall to 3 knots while we had the storm sails up. A couple days ago, we were set up pretty well and going fast, but once we hit this low pressure zone it became very squally and as I noted, the gusts were into the 40’s. I can set Charisma up to sail with 35 knots of wind, or 20, or 40, but not when the wind is going through all three of the above in a short period for two straight days. Basically after a particularly vicious squall came through yesterday, I took the main down in the middle of it. Even though we had the third reef in we were on the edge of going out of control (we were sailing downwind). We went pretty nicely with just the jib up, but then last night the high winds had me hand steering as the wind vane was beyond its capacity as we were careening down the steep waves in the high wind and the gusts in the squall were 30 degrees off the standard wind direction. After hitting 11 plus knots four times, I decided to throw in the towel and furl the jib and go bare poles. Even with no sails up at all, we were doing 6 knots. Just not in the right direction. That’s when we decided to just put up the storm sails and accept that we were going to go slow, but more or less in the right direction. So…with the trysail and storm jib, we’ve been clunking along at 3 knots-still in the high winds but more under control and heading toward Opua instead of Antarctica.

Anyway, that’s a little view of the last two days. Now (as of 1800 Thursday NZ time) we are back to a reasonable 20-25 knots and 1.5 meter seas. We’re sailing 60 degrees to the wind with our regular sails-main double reefed and yankee jib, at 6.5 knots and have 37 miles into Opua. We expect to arrive at the Customs dock at about 0500 (bleah).

We are chilling the Champagne (thanks Chris and Kelly-this is our wedding Champagne you sent us that we’ve been saving for this day) and looking forward to seeing Opua again as well as all our good friends-some of whom are already in and many of whom will come in in the next week (and especially Orcinius John, who we haven’t seen in six month and is taking time out from re-commissioning Orcinius to come up from Whangarei to see us). Yay, yay and yay!