Lines Off

After a week of provisioning and generally foul weather, we had a brief break and tossed the lines at Ship Despair bound for Great Barrier. For those who have been following for awhile, the following shots might be familiar.

A picture of the Hen of the Hen and Chickens – seems every place we have ever been has a Hens and Chicks.

A picture of the Chicks.

A picture of Little Barrier which perpetually seems to have its head in the clouds.

And finally, a shot of the screen from our new Maretron N2K program. The boat has always had a significant array of sensors which monitor and provide information to two small DSM250 displays keeping us well informed about key systems and their status.

This year we added N2K which makes the same information available over WiFi to all of our onboard computers including our iPad. Actually, the same information can be monitored from anywhere in the world over the internet. There are even modules which allow us to return on and off systems from Pittsburgh no matter where the boat is. Very cool.

Another great feature is a simple user interface which permits us to design our own screens with drag and drop boxes. No doubt there will be many iterations, but the following is my first attempt.

While the day started out beautifully as you can see, the next front arrived as we were entering Man O War passage on Great Barrier and the weather has since turned cold, windy and rainy but Port Fitzroy on Great Barrier offers some great all weather anchorages.

We had a quiet night at anchor and are busy running all the boats systems hard today, making sure the dink is in good running condition, organising and lashing down items in the forepeak, making sure the hatches are all dogged securely, firing up the water maker, running the genset and powering the boat off the battery bank and the inverters, testing out the SSB for email and weather, making sure the sat phone is operational,and a hundred other things.

Those are really the reasons for a shakedown cruise – prepare for our leap to French Polynesia – good thing the weather is crappy today so we aren’t tempted to go out to harvest some mussels at the mussel farm or catch some snapper.

Cheers