M/Y Iron Lady

Meanwhile back at Ship Despair, FPB 64 Tiger showed up today and our two gals were parked across the way from each other.

Time to bunker the tanks as Tiger is headed off to Fiji and we are headed off to Tahiti. Fueling may best be described as a painful financial experience – Iron Lady took on 6700 liters and Tiger wasn’t far behind. When empty it takes roughly 12,800 liters to fill the tanks. John, the owner of Tiger and I commiserated as the fuel came down the hose at 100 liters a minute.

It took two fuel trucks the size of the one behind Tiger to deliver the required diesel for our boats. Generally, this is only made less painful by the fact that we don’t have to do it very often, but with our travels this year and the distances involved, we will bunker again in Tahiti after burning roughly 5000 liters enroute. While we could probably make it to Hawaii without refuelling again, there are no gas stations along the way so we will fill again in Nuka Hiva in the Marquesas.

Out to dinner tonight with John and Sandy of Tiger and Val and Stan from Buffalo Nickel – all FPB64s. There is an Irish pub in town with a jam session by local Irish folks. Should be a great night and a few Killian’s will help to ease the pain of our fuelish endeavours today.

Cheers (and another beer please)

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

Arrived back in Whangarei on May 9th after a 38 hour travel ordeal which was punctuated by a dastardly act by our dear friends at TSA. Upon arrival I found they had left an inspection card inside my luggage – fair enough – it was loaded with all manner of boat oddities and a six month supply of tooth paste, deodorant, shampoo, and body wash et. al. packaged in one large plastic baggy so they wouldn’t leak. Until TSA opened the large plastic baggy and then opened two shampoo bottles (factory sealed) to inspect the contents I guess. Ok – still fair enough. What wasn’t fair, and in fact, was downright nasty was that they left the shampoo bottle spouts open and the plastic baggy open as well. The result was that just about everything in that suitcase was coated with shampoo. Our tax dollars at work.

The time since has been spent bringing Iron Lady back to life, finding all the stuff that we so carefully put away last year so we would remember where it was – and didn’t. Then there was changing the oil, filters, zincs and raw water pump on the main engine before embarking on the 2300 nautical mile run to Tahiti, sorting out lots of small issues and getting familiar with the new systems. In our spare time (Steve – our captain from year one is with me), we provisioned the boat with all the staples we would need for the next 4 months for family and guests, placed a monster order with our favorite butcher for meal sized portions of flash frozen meat and poultry to fill our two big freezers. The necessary wine and beer which is simply too dear to purchase in Tahiti (if you can get it and you can’t in the remote places we will be going). Then there was all the other stuff – from bug spray to toilet paper. You really don’t have a feel for what it takes for 5 people to live for 4 months until you procure it all in one go. We certainly did get strange looks at the super market when we arrived at the checkout with two full trolley loads of toilet paper. Hopefully our estimates are all correct – it would be a terrible thing to run out of toilet paper with 5 of us on board – what would I tell the guests – not to mention Deb. More importantly, what would she tell me? I’m full of you know what and a whole lot more no doubt.

I have always been a bit critical about how much stuff Deb buys when she provisions – this will obviously be her chance to get even when we run short of something.

Iron Lady has accepted the lot without a complaint – she simply seems to swallow it up no matter how much we bring aboard.

The boat is currently parked at NZ Ship Repair (we have affectionately named it Ship Despair) just down the street from Circa and close to town. To be fair, a resort marina it isn’t – it is a full on working marina so it isn’t the nicest place to be – so no pictures this time. It is, however, an enormous advantage to be close to Circa. Circa, as usual has been an enormous help in getting things back up and running – can’t say enough good about Bruce and his people.

We have now been here 8 days and the “to do” list is pretty well down to a minimum. Next on the agenda is a local shakedown cruise to put Iron Lady thru her paces and identify and last items that need attention. As soon as the weather breaks (it is pouring down rain) it is our intention to run down to Great Barrier for a few days – about a 6 hour run each way – and spend sometime on the hook exercising the batteries, genset, inverters, water maker and other boat systems that we will rely on for the next 4 months. Not to mention that Great Barrier is a really fun place to go.

Once back, we will put enough fresh produce aboard for our trip up to Tahiti- we will restock fresh fruit and produce in the open air markets once there – bunker the boat, fix any remaining items and head to Marsden Cove Marina where we will clear out when we get a weather window.

More to come.

Cheeers

As promised, here are the sources we intend to use on our journey across the South Pacific.

INTERNET: Internet resources will be available via 3G and WiFi before our departure and via our satellite FB150 when underway.

US Navy (www.fnmoc.navy.mil)

Tropical/Oceania Surface Sreamline Analysis

and precipitation analysis.

NOAA (aviationweather.gov/obs/sat/intl)

Area F Visible Satellite

New Zealand Metvu (metvu.com)
Forecast Charts Southwest Pacific NZ – Fiji – These charts are available in various time increments up to 7 days.

The above were all taken from the sites for the same time period. Interesting as to how well they all depict the same weather freatures.

SINGLE SIDE BAND HF RADIO:

Our single sideband radio is connected to a Pactor modem which is utilized to send and recieve emails and decode weather information from a variety of sources. More is available on this in our posts on communicationd and Iron Lady’s office.

VIA SAILMAIL:

Using the Sailmail program Viewfax. Many of the available sources are preprogrammed and requesting the information is a simple matter of selecting the source from a dropdown list and sending a short email to request the data. The data is returned via email over the SSB radio. The same information can be requested via the internet thru the Sailmail program as well when internet service is available.

Gribs: – Gribs are binary files that encode weather data. They can be requested over various time periods (ie 4 days) at various intervals (ie 12 or 24 hours) for various items (ie surface pressure, wind direction and strength, wave heights, rain and surface weather features). The area of interest is user selectable by drawing a rectangle on a map. Scanning your mouse over the GRIB displays data for the location of the mouse in text format. This is a current GRIB for the same time period as above.

NADI Fleetcode: Surface Charts which are sent in Morse format and can be decoded in to graphical surface charts using Physplot.

Pacific High Seas Forecast: – South Pacific from 0-25S, 120W – 160E Text Forecast

Offshore French Polynesia forecast: In text format in French

Offshore Pacific NADI Sopac: from Fiji Metservice in text

(These last four are not shown in the interest of brevity)

VIA SSB WEATHER FAX:

Weather FAX is the equivalent of receiving a regular FAX except via our SSB radio.

NOAA Hawaii: 30 S to 30 N Surface Forecast

New Zealand Metservice:

Finally, various private weather forecasters offer weather forecasting and routing for offshore voyagers on a fee basis.

That’s pretty much the lineup. As you can see there is plenty of stuff to acquire and look at. From our voyages over the last few years we have discovered that even using all of them doesn’t guarantee that nasty weather (both forecast and unforeseen) won’t be encountered. The good news for the ocean voyager is that both the availability and accuracy of weather forecasts is much better then just a few years ago.