Saturday 12th Jan, a little late but with good reason........

I flew back to Mackay after having 5 nights home. It was great to see Tonka and the dogs after being away for so long.

I got back to the boat late Friday night.
Christine and Gavin, the owners, arrived on Saturday late morning. They will be crewing for the last leg to Sydney which is perfect as they can find out how all the systems on the boat work.

After a nice lunch on Saturday we did a supermarket run then in the evening we went to the local steakhouse for dinner. Very nice!

While I was away I managed to arrange for the Cummins guys in Mackay to go down to the boat and service the engines and generator as it was about time they had some love.
There was a small issue with the belt on the starboard engine that they weren’t able to sort during the week but they came down on Sunday to sort that out. They were amazing getting that all done at such short notice and at this time of the year.

As soon as they left we started the engines and prepared to depart Mackay.
We cast off at 11:30, out the marina and back out to sea.

The day was really calm and we started the trip on a positive note until it all turned to shit later into the evening.
The sky all around started to light up with a lighting storm. It was in the distance so I was not too concerned and the forecast was for a few gusts to 20kts with sub 1m sea state. Hmmm, not exactly what we got.

We ended up in a bit of a storm. The seas went from being aft of the beam to just off the starboard bow and went to being sub 1m waves to our old favourite short chop and big, breaking white water over the bow. Our speed prior to this was around 10kts. During the crap I was back to hand throttling (constant throttle adjustments) slowed us down to between 2 & 3kts to try and stop the nose from diving into the next wave. This was not always successful as we took a few decent sized green waves over the bow and a couple of times the forward cockpit got flooded. I have drawn a line on the photo of how much water was in there after these waves hit. There was a lot! The good news is that it soon disappeared down the drain holes, so they work and the water tight door also held up well! All this happened just after it got dark and went on for a few hours then slowly calmed down around midnight.
This was the worst weather we have had on the whole trip and the boat handled it extremely well. Certainly a baptism of fire for Christine and Gavin though as this was their first ever night passage!