We made it. A ten day, 1200 nautical mile passage. Just us against the elements.

We’ll not just us there were four others on board. So six of us battling the unknown.

We’ll not exactly unknown. We did have GPS, a Predict Wind forecast every day and an email from a professional weather router. We still had to to take turns at the helm fighting to keep us on course.

Although, to be fair, the autopilot did help quite a bit with that. We still had to fight the fatigue of long hours at the wheel with our malnourished bodies.

OK so they were only two hour watches through the night and the well stocked fridges and freezers together with the mountain of fresh fruit and vegetables from Nadi plus a couple of tuna caught en route meant that there was no chance of anyone starving – except Sylvie who was sea sick for the entire passage and hardly ate a thing. We were still entirely at the mercy of the winds and the waves.

Maybe not entirely at the mercy of the elements. We did have two 80hp diesel engines that made a fair job of keeping us on course to New Zealand whenever the winds and waves were not cooperating.

There must have been some hardships!

The water maker started misbehaving just as we left Fiji and eventually stopped working all together. So we had to carry buckets of sea water below to flush the toilets and could only shower every two days. Oh how we suffered.

As you can tell we have thoroughly enjoyed this experience and are really looking forward to doing the return trip next year.

The images below show the route we took together with the comments left by Greer when she submitted our position report …