No More 9 to 5: Fiji to New Zealand

Saturday December 7th- happy Birthday mamma Julia!!!

This is our 3rd day of our passage and I am just now getting used to the sea again. As always it takes about 3 days for me to feel normal again. We caught a fish but it was a small blue fin tuna so Ty threw it back. He said that it was small and also they are overfished and need to repopulate. We motored for the fist day and a half and now we have about 18 knots of wind coming from the east which couldn't be more perfect for our journey south!:) we are sailing right along with little swell so it's almost comfortable....almost. With all the wind the water is a bit choppy. We should hit some rain n stuff Sunday and Monday if we stay on course but after that it should be smooth sailing all the way to NZ. We are hoping to get there no later than Friday so we can check in and check out the city on a weekend. Ty and I are changing watch every 4 hours and today we will have our first dinner on this passage....spaghetti! Customs will take absolutely everything so we need to eat it up. They take all your grains, dairy and meat. So basically anything not in a can. Unfortunately we stocked up on a lot of rice, pasta and oats n stuff in Am Sam thinking we were going to Vanuatu and the Solomon's. oh well. We will eat what we can then buy fresh food in NZ!:)

Sunday December 8th-

We caught a huge Mahi Mahi!! After 4 bites we finally got one on and kept him. It was a pretty big bull and we have about 4 meals separated to eat durin this passage. We picked up a good coating recipe from Bob on Wind Witch where we use crumbled ritz crackers and all purpose season. He uses tony sasheries but we haven't come across that stuff in a long while.

It rained a little today but the trough is supposed to hit us around 2am ...it's just supposed to be lots of rain and maybe some moderately high winds.

Our main sheet traveler broke today so we took the main sail down:( another fix for NZ.

Tuesday December 10th-

We are truckin along in 20-25knts of wind and we are beating into the swell on a close haul...making about 6.5knts on average I would say. I think we are going to be stuck in this low until we get there which is fine because we actually have wind and we are sailing. We lost 2 of the new baton car receptacles tho so we will need to replace those once we get to NZ. We still have the main sail up on the first reef and the genoa is reefed a little bit depending on how much wind we are getting. It's easy to adjust the genoa so we just keep taking in or letting it out with the wind speed changes. It's a little too hectic to make dinner tonight so we just snacked on Brie and crackers. I've got the dorado in a marinade so it will still be good tomorrow:)

We had a small aircraft buzz us the other day! It was crazy! At first it looked like his engines were failing and he was gonna crash because we saw smoke coming from both props but he got low and buzzed right over us. I didn't get a chance to catch it on camera and not sure what or where it was from. He didn't say anything to us on the radio so who knows. Ty said it may have been a weather plane but I think it was a bomber! Looked like something out of a movie!!!

Friday the 13th

I just spotted the most northern tip of Land! We have 11-16 knots of wind and we should be there in about 9-10 hrs!

Saturday December 15th

We made it!!! This place is beautiful! There are an insane amount of boats here. I mean they are everywhere! There are so many anchorages just on the way in that we saw...we are currently waiting for customs to show up at the quarantine dock. I imagine that this is what Maine would be like if we were to sail up the east coast. Reminds me of Popeye the movie. It's pretty cold for now but summer is coming up next month. It should be like south Africa's summer. Warm but chilly at night. I gotta say it's really nice to feel some cold weather. I was kinda missing it with the holidays coming around and all:) I gotta buy some jeans n a couple sweaters or something tho...yaya Christmas presents!!:)