Honey

Honey

Sailing around New Zealand

Emily is sailing solo around New Zealand on her 32 foot yacht Honey, from Lyttelton south down the east coast, around the bottom of Stewart Island, up the west coast of the South and North Islands and down the east coast back to Lyttelton. The whole adventure is expected to take 3 months. This blog will provide updates as I travel (when I have mobile reception to upload).


Tuesday 19 February 2013

Back to Doubtful (14th February)


Thursday morning dawned a very wet one, but the forecast was for 25 knots of SW so reasonably good for a sail up the coast. We headed out down the sound with rather limited visibility and quite a stiff head wind. Passing Uncle Uni on our left we carried on with some rather large gusts hitting us, hopefully it would be a bit more consistent once we left Breaksea. As we passed between Breaksea Island and the mainland, we raised the main reefed down fully, and then the headsail. As it turned out, there was very little wind at all once we cleared the entrance to the sound, but a rather sloppy sea. We ended up having to shake out the reefs, and for the last bit of the trip back up to Doubful we had to motor. With sloppy seas and not much wind, we were only catching what wind there was when we were on the crests of the swell, although at least the swell was helping to push us in. Once we got around Hares Ears we pulled in the sails and motored in towards Blanket Bay down the south side of Bauza Island. A warship passed close by us (clearly they had heard we were coming). When we were half way along the stretch next to Bauza Island, the day breeze suddenly picked up and we had a good sail at 6-6.5 knots the final way to Blanket Bay, where we stayed the night, and tried to dry out.

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