Now that we’d met up with our buddy boat Santana (who had arrived in Coffs a couple of days earlier), we just had to recover from the trip up from Port Stephens, prepare the boat for a long passage, and wait for a weather window.
The next destination is Noumea in New Caledonia, nearly 1,000 miles straight out from Australia across the Coral Sea. With an average daily run of 120 miles this should take around a week; the key is picking the weather so that it’s not a week of motoring through calms, but also not a week of battling gales.
We had a few more things to finish on the boat; fit another solar panel to keep the fridge and freezer powered up, stocking up on more spares, and food for a voyage of months (apart from a brief stop in Noumea, the food we put on board now needs to last us well into the end of the year). I ordered a new autopilot pump, but decided against fitting it as the old pump seemed to have sorted itself out, with no troubles during the rest of the trip up to Coffs. We have an emergency tiller steering system if all the hydraulics failed, and I have an electric tiller pilot aboard which with some “hack engineering” should cover us. For the long passage to New Caledonia, we also have an extra crew member.
As it’s the girls’ first real offshore passage, and the boat is still new to us, we’d decided to get someone to join us. Thibaud, a young french traveller, had replied to a “crew wanted” post online and we’d had a few phone calls and a video chat. He seemed spot on.
Tilly got to know the kids from Santana ; Tasman a 10yr old boy and Sierra an 8yr old girl. They were all pleased to have more kid company around; especially Tilly who had been cooped up with us on board for many weeks with only a few excursions with other little ones.
Funny to think I had sailed into Coffs from Tonga almost exactly 7 years earlier on Rafiki, and then again 3 years ago the three of us had driven through Coffs on a road trip, no inkling that we would be back here again so soon on another adventure.
So, after nearly a week of prepping, playing, and shopping for even more food a suitable weather window opened up for the following week. Time to go!
Road and Ocean 