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

Photo



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In Hong Kong commissioning "Pikorua"

Image
Today is Saturday 23rd Nov '24 and we are in Hong Kong on a beautiful 2024 GranOcean 60 that we are delivering to Sydney.  We have been here for just over 2 weeks now.   We are tied up to a barge in Kwun Tong typhoon shelter which is along side the old Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong.  We don't have the luxury of a "normal" marina as in the western world, no power or water connection and a very large construction site 200m away bang poles into the ground all day!  The only place to tie a tender to if we go ashore is a concrete wall covered in barnacles, not a good match with inflatable tubes so we have to use the local sanpan (water taxi) whenever we want to go ashore. Commissioning any newly launched boat always has a long the list of jobs to get ready for the maiden voyage.  It seems you tick jobs off the list and all of a sudden there are replacements at the bottom of the list!   We are now at a stage where virtually everything has been ticked off...
Read more

Tuesday 3rd day 4

Image
The higher fuel consumption and slight vibration mystery has been cleared up.  The pic above is of the starboard propellor and rudder.  Unfortunately a Chinese fishing net has decided to tag along for the ride.  At lunchtime today the conditions were safe enough for us to stop the boat, go out onto the duckboard and put the afore mentioned camera and 3m selfie stick underneath the water and have a look and would you believe it we are trailing what's left of a fishing net.  Now real surprise there! The sea conditions are not safe enough to go diving down under a 30+ tonne boat bobbing up and down in 1-2m swell so that is going to have to wait.  In the meantime we are now running the port engine at 1800rpm (30lph) and the starboard just in gear (600rpm) to lube the shaft.  With this set up the vibration has stopped and we are burning 32lph at an average speed of 7kts. As for the fuel contamination, the port side which had the major problem yesterday is lookin...
Read more

Saturday 30th Nav - Departure day!

Image
Today we finally departed Hong Kong!   There were a few last minute organising and making sure the boat was ready for the passagand by just after 10am we cast our lines off and away we went. We had to dodge all the shipping entering and leaving HK and there were quite a few!  We picked our spot between ships and went for it crossing the shipping lanes without getting in anyones way.  Once past them we then had to navigate our way round all the local fishing fleet with the multiple longlines streaming out the back.  I somehow managed to forget about them from previous trips but it all came flooding back once we were in amongst them all. “Pikorua” is going well, we are running along at 1550rpm averaging 8kts and sucking 15lts per hour on each engine.  It's just under 1,100nm to get to our first fuel stop at Kota Kinabalu in Borneo.  We should arrive on Friday or Saturday all being well. 
Read more