Five hundred miles to Cook Strait, the anticipation builds

We are sailing in a lovely sunshine, broad reaching towards the northern
tip of South island, New Zealand of course, some 500 miles to the North
East of us. From there we’ll have a final stretch of just over 100 miles
of tricky sailing in the infamous Tasman Bay and Cook Strait, often
battered by some of the strongest winds on the planet, it looks from the
forecast that Ross and Cambell on BSL may be in for a real pasting, with
forecast 40-60 knots headwinds, all depends on their timing to the entrance
of the strait.

All well on board, as usual anticipation makes time expand, the thought of
of being on land, celebrating this amazing voyage, means clocks seem to
have stopped, but in reality the miles are ticking by, first we broke the
1000 miles to go barrier, now we’re looking at the 500 miles mark, land is
to our starboard a few hundred miles away and yesterday for the first time
since Cape Town, after 30 days, we saw a ship, genuinely this was the
first sign that the human race exists at all having shared day after day
with albatrosses and pestrels, which kinda start looking sexy after a
while (just kidding).

We wont make it in time for New Year’s celebrations which we’ll spend at
sea, we may paradoxically be close enough to land by then to see the
fireworks, lets hope we dont need to use our flares at that time as i
guess they would not be noticed!!!

I am very grateful to Ventana Group, one of my sponsors, who helped us
sorting out the flights for my girlfriend Ella who i will be able to meet
on arrival in Wellington. No wonder we sped up so much in the past few
days taking more than 600 miles off the leaders, i really have something
to look forward to!

Posted by: firstclass