[password] Ridingmore
[position] 19 50.5S 162 13.5W
[weather]18-22 knots from SE
[status] Well crikey, what an afternoon we had yesterday! You've heard the gist from Asher and Dani, but we had sustained 35-40, with gusts to 48 knots for about 6 hours, and more torrential sustained rain than I've ever thought possible - it was raining sideways and upwards at one point, and the only dry spot one could find on the entire boat was inside my mouth.. As it started to build to 30 knots, my wonderful wife-to-be convinced me it would be a good idea to put the third reef in, and I'm rather glad we did as the wind continued to build. But the rain was so intense that the 3rd reef was acting as a rain catcher and filling up the folded sail and lazybag faster than it could drain out - to the point that the whole thing was bulging with what I suspect was at least 500kg of water, and threatening to break the sail, lazy bag, and boom! So we dropped the rest of the main to reduce the rain collector, massaged the flood water out of the sails (I now know what its like to sta
nd under the Hooker Falls), and wrapped the lazy bag up tight to stop water accumulating further. Job done!
Kinda?
We spent the rest of the day and early evening trying to keep watch in 40 knots with a hanky for a headsail in horizontal rain with vis down to about 50m, whilst dodging lightening bolts and being blown way off track and North towards the Island of Aitutaki about 15 miles away. Fortunately we weren't nearly as close to land as friends of ours 50 miles behind us on Bacchus (check em out on YouTube), who are a few miles behind us, who got uncomfortably close to being blown into the atoll of Manuae at the same time - phew! Anyhoo, we're enjoying a 6 hour respite from the rain and drying everything that we own - 5 people breathing in a locked-up cabin makes a lot of moisture!!

Despite the weather, we do like to stick to our routines. And being that its Sunday, banana pancakes were enjoyed by all this morning, and we'll be working on banana bread, banana muffins, and maybe some banana cake later on today, perhaps followed by some sort of banana curry for dinner this evening. You'll never guess whats ripening rapidly on Patea. It could be my adolescence, or my socks. But its actually not either.

Unfortunately in yesterdays blow, we lost our best boat rod (boo hoo) to the briny. We got knocked over yesterday by the combined forces of a wave and a bit of extra wind - who'd have thunk that we got so sideways that the siderails that the rod was mounted to must have been completely immersed to pull it out of its holder. Glad I wasn't sitting there at the time. Not that I could have got any wetter..

Our good friends the Spacegrazers arrived into Opua today, and Windchase is only a day away too - congrats to them, and cant wait to join the party when we arrive! Friends on 2 other boats left Bora Bora yesterday too - the race is on! :)

Peeling-off, prancing pony Patea parlaying across the (partially) peaceful Pacific.

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