AKAROA – LAZY DAY AT ANCHOR

I had a lay in this morning, the sunrise is almost seven thirty so there’s no light shining through the hatch to wake me up.  The morning was cold, overcast and didn’t inspire me to action.  Instead I pottered around the boat and made pancakes and real coffee for breakfast.  Comfort food on an overcast morning.

I have missed out on the Akaroa croissants for breakfast but tomorrow I will try again.

There have been two cruise ships in port all day.  The ‘Azamara Journey’ and ‘Celebrity Solstice’, both registered in Malta.  The Celebrity Solstice has been belching smoke all day, it’s not right they can do this in New Zealand.  Boats from both ships have been ferrying hundreds of passengers ashore.  From the anchorage in French Bay I can see them all walking up and down the main street and crowding around the jetty.  That put me off going ashore, I don’t want to mingle with gormless cruise ship passengers.

I spent hours today downloading grib files, weather fax and weather forecasts.  It’s hard to get a thirty-six-hour period that has stable winds for my next leg south, and even harder to get different forecasts to agree with each other.  Some are wildly different, one showing 35 knot S’Wly winds and the other 15 knot N’Ely winds for the same time period.  Lots of head scratching.  My next step will be down to Dunedin, my studies indicate the weather is shaping up for a Tuesday night departure from Akaroa.  That should get me into Dunedin a few hours before a S’Wly gale sets in.  We shall see in the next couple of days how it firms up.

Mid-morning the sun came out and it’s been a nice day.  As the days are getting shorter, I have to be smarter how I charge my electronic devices.  Less hours of sunshine mean the solar panels are not feeding as much power into the batteries as before.  To date I have not had to use the engine for battery charging, but with only two 55-watt panels I think a couple of short cloudy days may put me into deficit.  Changing all the interior and exterior lights to LED has resulted in a tremendous reduction in power consumption.

The rest of the day was spent reading, listening to music and watching the world go by from the cockpit.  I concocted a fresh stew in the pressure cooker.  Potatoes, onions, carrots, peas and a can of red-hot chilli dog.  Gourmet it is not – but good solid grub on a cold day.

This afternoon I rigged up the dinghy for shore duty tomorrow morning.  I have been working on the outboard to get it running better.  Despite my best efforts it’s still not right.  It runs ok for a while then starts hesitating, like it’s not getting enough fuel.  Never really recovered from its last dunking.  I may need an outboard mechanic to service it $$$$$.