Author: richwest3

January 26, 2019

Assuming we do get a weather window to sail to Christchurch, can we even get out of this berth? Photoshop and Google Earth to the rescue.

If it’s windless, and if the tide isn’t running, it looks like it might be possible to pivot around the piling on our starboard side. We back to port so we’ll have to use lines to pull Legacy around. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Speaking of the Napier Sailing Club, we may be “trapped” for a another reason as well. This place is wonderful! We’ve been made to feel completely at home at their terrific facilities. And with the restaurants nearby, we could probably stay here indefinitely.

-Rich

January 8, 2019

Saw this fishing vessel (thus the F.V.) in the yard in Tauranga and it made me smile. Kiwis really have a great sense of humor. -Rich

January 18, 2019

We’re continuing our trip south today with a jump from Tauranga to Gisborne. It looks like that’s about as far as the weather will let us go. Here’s what our weather routing looks like on PredictWind…

The wind is already stronger than forecast at 22 knots, but it’s behind us, so it’s not bad. The almost 200 nautical mile trip should take us about 36 hours. These “short-long” trips are hard for us. There long enough to require keeping watches but too short to get into the watch-keeping flow.

Update: 5:47 AM.

The channel into Tauranga is always busy. It looked like we’d escape a close encounter of the huge ship kind, but no. The cruise ship below shared the channel with us (well, he took the channel and we ducked out around the edge).

After we squeeked by the floating apartment building, two freighters waited to have their way with us as seen above.

It’s 6:30 AM now. Cyndi’s on watch. Good night. -Rich

Update 1:53 PM:

Hello White Island. We see your volcano spewing smoke and steam. Please don’t corrode our stainless!

Update 6:05 AM (the next day):

Beautiful sunrise today. One of the few benefits of lack-of-sleep.

We’re making good progress. We should be in Gisborne around 5 in the evening. Fingers crossed!

January 15, 2019

I’m so sorry. I know it’s been a long time since we posted anything. And I know that this little note won’t necessarily assuage your lust for more from the Legacy crew, but here it is…

We’re in Tauranga on New Zealand’s North Island and getting ready to head further south. Weather looks OK for that trip this Friday. We hope to get two days further south to Napier. From there, again when the weather is good, we’ll make another two day hop to Christchurch on the South Island. At least, that’s the plan and you know how plans go for us!

More soon, including a video of our passage from Fiji to NZ. -Rich

December 31, 2018

We stayed late in Fiji by most cruiser’s standards but it was kind of the norm for us. We’re always late. I was wishing we’d stayed even longer and maybe we’d have had better weather for the passage, but we left because we were seeing the signs of possible cyclones.

Here’s the cyclone probability chart from New Caledonia’s met service…

We often live comfortably in the 20% range, without much worry, but when it jumps up to above 50%, wow. Time to leave!

And it’s looking like an accurate forecast. There are currently three invests heading to Fiji. (An invest is a storm that the meteorologist types think is worth keeping an eye on. The can be seen here at Tropical Tidbits.)

Here are screenshots of forecast tracks from Tropical Tidbits (I’ve added the red arrows to point to Fiji)…

Here’s a screenshot from Windy.com showing our neighborhood…

We think we might have been safe to sit out a cyclone where we were in Fiji, but I’m so glad we won’t get a chance to find out! For the wonderful Fijians, we hope you are safe.-Rich

Update: January 1, 2019 – Happy New Year!!!

This is what the ECMWF forecast looks like today, courtesy of Windy.com…