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28th Dec '24

First of all I would like to say thank you to everyone who sent me birthday wishes, it is much appreciated.

Another amazing sunrise this morning.  If you look closely you can see we even picked up a hitchhiker needing a rest!

We are only 100nm from the Torres Islands at the tip of Australia and the point at which we enter the shipping channels, turn right and head down inside the great Barrier Reef.  We are really looking forward to that.

Gone are the glassy waters and zero wind.  The replacement is 1m waves on the nose and 15kts of wind.  This is forecast to reduce as the afternoon goes on.

If you have been following us on my tracker page (https://share.garmin.com/FKHAP) you will notice we had a slight change of course, that’s to make it a more comfortable ride.  There’s not a lot of distance between these waves and they are coming from directly where we want to go.

If we head directly into the waves the boat rises up on the front of a wave, drops over the back and can slam into the front of the next wave sending a judder though the boat which isn’t pleasant for us or the boat. If we turn 10-15 degrees off either way the hulls go over the wave at slightly different times so instead of both hulls hitting the next wave at the same time they hit at slightly different times making for a slightly smoother ride.

Last night was a little bit more interesting.  We had a few ships pass us and we had 2 groups of our good old friends the Indonesian fishing boats a couple of miles away with their really bright lights on.  Amazingly they all had AIS so we could see all their information on our electronics.

Later in the day we managed to get back on course as the waves died down to make it comfortable again.

Not a lot else to report today

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