Gary's Deliveries

OK, well the conditions over the last 24-36hrs has certainly put the boat and her systems to the test not to mention her crew! The low up towards New Cal grew a little bit in size which meant we got a bit more of the crap weather than I thought we would according to the forecast a couple of days ago. As the wind and the seas increased and came more round to NE we slowly followed it to keep it all from behind so as to have a safer ride.   Well we ended up heading SW (Bundaberg is NW) and towards Lord Howe Island. At it's peak we had gusting 40kt winds and over 5mts breaking waves.  The throttles were set to 1900rpm and in nice conditions that gave us an average speed of around 9-10kts.  During the wide ride we were surfing down the waves normally around the high teens but the highest speed we notice was 22kts!!  At that stage I reduced the rev's cause although the boat and auto pilot handled it extremely well I was not overly comfortable doing that speed down a w...

Well disaster stuck last night!!  My favourite big, wide based mug took flying lesson but didn't listen to the instruction about dropping the landing gear before landing so ended up splattered into a thousand pieces.  I have taken that mug on all my deliveries, I even take it on holiday's wherever we go.  Anybody who has crewed with me over the years will know about this mug and how much I enjoy having a really big cup of tea and how stable it was.  Alas not stable enough last night when it was sitting on the dinning table and we got rolled by a pretty big wave.  Luckily I had finished and it was empty. RIP "Bearly Awake" mug ............Lucky when I bought it I also bought a 2nd!!  😎    Now on to the sailing stuff.... As I mentioned above it got a little lively last night, the wind was only 10-15kts but the waves were around 2-2.5m from aft quarter so we were picked up turned to port, autopilot doing a great job brining us back on course only fo...

After 9 days at home it's off to the next adventure on "Moonlao".  I flew up to Opua on Tuesday morning to jump onto my next delivery which is a new Dickie Boats Pacific 62 which I am taking to Bundaberg in Aus with my crew mate David. David's journey from Auckland to Kerikeri airport was a bit of an adventure in it's own right.  He was told his 16:00 flight was cancelled and told he could get on the next available flight in 2 days time!!  Or take the offer of a couch replacement which he did so instead of a quick 40min flight he had a 5hr drive and arrived around 22:00. In the meantime I was zipping around in the hire car getting the provisions for the trip.  Wednesday saw more provisioning and and filling out the multitude of paperwork required by the NZ Customs for clearing out of NZ then another mountain of paperwork for clearing into Australia.  I also booked our appointment with Customs to go through that process for noon on Thursday. Early Thursday and af...

 WOW, it's been a week since my last post.  How time fly's. To be honest very little has happened apart from the boys catching loads of fish.  I've lost count of how many but I will try to recount them - 4 small marlin, 1 small/medium sized marlin, 6 or 7 tuna and a Pacific barracuda.   If our cupboards and fridge/freezer were empty we would have eaten like royalty with all that delicious fish.  But, we didn't need them so they all went back into the deep blue sea.   All the meat we have in the freezers has to either be consumed before we arrive or the Fijian bio security team will take it all along with any fresh veg, fruit, eggs, honey and an assortment of other food as these are not allowed to be brought into the country so we have been using up all the steaks and chicken we can BBQ! As I mentioned, very little has happened on this delivery.  We have been at sea now for 11 days and in all that time we have only come across 1 ship and we di...

Today is Monday here (Tuesday in NZ) and we have so far covered about 650nm since leaving Bora Bora.  Weather has obviously been very warm and until last night very calm seas.  AC has been working hard to keep us cool and the seas have picked up as expected to keep us lively on our toes. Over the last couple of days the boys have managed to catch 2 small black marlin, 1 slightly larger black marlin and 2 decent sized (girthy) tuna all of which were sent back to the deep blue sea again as we don’t need the food.  One of those tuna alone would have feed the 3 of us for the whole trip. We were struggling to set up the Fijian charts on our nav system but after a call to the guru in Florida he managed to do his magic and I am very pleased to say we now have them on the big screens on the bridge and not having to rely on my iPad for navigation around and into Fiji.   

 Just over 24hrs into the trip and all is going smoothly. We have the luxury of air conditioning thought out, 2 large capacity water makers, 3 generators as well as 2 big alternators and vessel stablerlisers which do a very good job of stopping the rocking side to side motion so we only have to handle the rocking back and forth motion which at the moment is very limited so it's been a very comfortable ride so far. I have planned our route to go further north than the direct line to Fiji as there is some nasty weather further south causing decnet sized waves to head our way so the further north I can go the more those waves will dissipate, we are actually going to go over the top of Samoa before heading back towards Fiji. The conditions so far are fairly decent, we have wind off the starboard bow at about 10-15kts and seas are around 1/2 to 1 metre mainly aft of the beam.  We have had a bit of rain but that's all good as we are a motorboat not a yacht so we are snug inside with...