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Oh silly me. What does a new radiator cap cost these days? Ten bucks? I wouldn’t know. I don’t have one on board. I have a used one that came off the exhaust manifold when I first got the boat. I decided to bring it along as a spare. I put it in a ziploc and tucked it away in a hole and there it sat unused for 4 years of sailing. On to the irony…

I’m sitting in the companionway on nightwatch, shift one (8-11pm), watching an episode of “Breaking Bad” on the iPod when I get a big whiff of coolant. “Hmmm…that’s odd. We’ve been motoring for hours and I haven’t smelled any coolant before,” I said to myself. Having learned that when an odd noise, or vibration, or smell occurs on a boat there’s probably something that needs immediate attention, I went on the hunt. Opening the engine room I notice a splatter of green towards the back of the engine. Uh-oh I think, a leaky hose. Access to the major components of the cooling system on Dosia is through the starboard cockpit locker so I closed up the engine room door and headed outside. Upon opening my shiny, newly painted, bright white cockpit locker I was greeted by what looked like a green explosion on top of my battery box immediately beneath the engine’s cooling expansion tank. Great. Why is there coolant leaking/spraying out around the cap? Throttle back, engine off. After 13,000 some miles on Dosia, 96 miles from the finish line, a radiator cap that has never given me a single problem decides to bust and my only spare is an older, rusty, slightly less leaky one. It is functioning enough to give me 1500 rpm’s with an occasional spit and dribble so I can’t complain. But I can sit and wonder how something so small can know exactly the right time to break. We were on schedule to make it into Brisbane mid afternoon tomorrow with plenty of time to check in and get legal before the weekend. Now, at our measly 5 knot pace, we’re hoping for a night arrival tomorrow. Boats are freakin hilarious.

(posted by Marge)

Birds have become an intriguing species since I started doing passages. Here we are hundreds and hundreds of miles from any solid piece of land and there they are just flying around. I mean…what the heck are they doing way out here!?! It baffles the ever living tarnation out of me. I can’t make the assumption that there’s not a whole lot to see on the big open blue cause things are probably totally different from their perspective. I bet if we had the view they did then passages might be a little more interesting. Nonetheless, don’t they get tired? Don’t they get bored? Aren’t there plenty of fish to feed on right next to a coast where they can go take a load off and eat their meal perched on a palm tree? I just don’t get it…

Still their company is welcomed as long as they aren’t taking a different kind of load off on our boat, if you get what I’m saying. They dive in and out around the sails and before you know it they are as bored watching us as we are watching them and off they go. If only we could communicate, I bet they’d have some pretty intriguing stories to tell…

And on that note, day 6 of mission “Delivery to Trev & Alli” went well. We spent the day enjoying some pretty awesome weather and we can definitely feel the difference in the temperatures between here and New Zealand. I spent the afternoon cutting out recipes from what I like to call “sophisticated and intelligent reading material,” otherwise known to Drew as “trashy, celebrity, gossip magazines.” Sometimes I wonder whether my love for them is equal to, less than, or far greater than the loathing he feels for them. We are currently in the process of drawing up a bargain deal stating if I am never to purchase another gossip magazine that one day we will in turn purchase a king size bed. Something I desperately want so, naturally, Drew has no interest in having one . A deal must be reached. That IS how you get what you want in a relationship, right?

Drew whipped up a stir fry for dinner last night that was so good it’d make you want to slap somebody. We’ve had to back our watches and clocks up two hours in order to coincide sunrise and sunset with night watches. Hopefully only 4 more of those as we greet day 7 with 364 miles to go!

(posted by Marge)

You know those times where you sit down to write an email, a blog post, what have you, and just feel like nothing you have to say is going to come out interesting? That’s how I felt yesterday. Not a whole lot to tell. The passage continues to go well and we, along with our parents, are grateful. Yesterday we posted our best day yet and from 8 PM Saturday to 8 PM Sunday we covered 167 miles. That’s good. Real good. Two great days of sailing have left us in a good position. Granted we keep up speed there is a possibility we may be able to pull in on Friday but lessons learned from all passages prior, you never get your hopes up too much…

Today was the epitome of laziness as we had our first rain of the trip. Cooped up inside for most of the day, I snuggled into my little nook in the pilot berth while Drew vegged out on the couch. We watched several movies in hopes of passing the time and as always, the motion of the boat rocked us gently in and out of quick cat naps. Pre made lasagna did the trick for din din although I haven’t felt exceptionally well today so Drew took down most of it. Constant teeth issues continue to plug at me on a daily basis and despite the nagging I try my best to keep it amongst my teeth and not let the annoyance spill out in the form of me taking it out on poor Drew. Another lesson to be learned…procrastination when it comes to your teeth does not in fact pay off in the long run.

As my boat monkey snoozes next to me, I’m watching the GPS, while keeping a lookout on the horizon for any traffic, and we have 520 nautical miles to go, HOPEFULLY, 7 more night watches a piece. We’ll keep plugging along!

Many, many months ago I posed this question on the http://www.cruisersforum.com website (I’ll link the post as soon as I get to land). Which place do I chose for arrival and which to store the the boat in NZ while we visit the states? I got a lot of great answers, many of which led me to choose Opua as our entry point. Now that I’ve actually sailed into and out of NZ I feel like I can throw in my own opinion for the upcoming (and rather large I hear) 2010 Pacific Puddle Jump Fleet. I’ll be bluntly honest with my opinion and it will hurt a few feelings out there.

Opua is not my favorite place on Earth…that’s for sure. For those of you planning on joining the All Points to Opua Rally, I don’t recommend it. You arrive in this nice marina and at first, you’re feeling great. You check in and go ashore to check out the rally event schedule on to find out that everything costs at least $15. You figure, why not, and go to get some cash only to realize there’s no ATM at the marina. No problem. You’ll just walk into town and hit the bank. Where’s the closest town with a bank? Oh, that would be Paihia…an hour plus hike away. So you settle for a cab and ask the marina office to call one for you. Huh? What’d you say? Twenty bucks each way? But it’s only 3 miles down the road!?! So you head back to the boat and turn on the radio for the morning net. You wade through some attempted humor for a few minutes, listen to some guy yell at all the new arrivals for using the wrong VHF frequencies to chat, and then that same guy reads a weather forecast that’s already repeated 20 times a day elsewhere on the VHF and loops continuously on WX station 8. A bunch of people call in and thank him for this and you are confused why. After listening to all this, the most awkward radio net in the world, you deduct that the Yachtie Shuttle run by one of the locals is a decent option. It’s $6NZ but you go on his schedule and are therefore stuck in town for a few hours even if the only reason you went there was to get some cash. On top of all this, you decide to get a night at the marina to get some internet work done and wash the boat. After paying a premium for the marina (12m slip for me was $33NZ compared to $24 in Whangarei and $16.50 in Kerikeri), you log on to the internet only to find out that 1gb of transfer, enough for a few iTunes songs and to watch 5 youtube videos of your new nephew, costs $45 dollars and the company charging you for this access is owned by NO OTHER THAN THE GUY WHO ORGANIZED THE ALL POINTS TO OPUA RALLY!

My recommendation. Check into Opua and unless you broke something on the way that needs an immediate fix, leave Opua. Anchor out at Russell or behind Motumaire Island off Pahia. Go to the bank, use the internet, hit the store, grab some meals and then go out and see the Bay of Islands. I do have to comment on the few things that made Opua nice. The burgers, the seafood chowder, and the eggs benny at the Marina Cafe are awesome. Bob, the American who works in the most expensive chandlery I’ve ever seen, Cater Marine, was the super helpful. And Melita, at the Marina Shop, who sold me a liability insurance policy I needed for keeping the boat in a marina, was great. I also have to add the disclaimer that it’s only by word of mouth that I heard the guy who organized the rally runs Pacific Wifi. I didn’t have time to check my facts on that but will as soon as we get to OZ.

I also have some thoughts on Whangarei, where we ended up storing the boat while we returned to the states for a month. But I’ll save those for a later blog post. All in all, my official opinion is this. Don’t make set plans to remain in any one place in NZ for the season. There’s good cruising to be had and absolutely no reason to sit around on your boat in a marina or at a mooring. If you’re only planning to drop the boat off somewhere and travel by land to the South Island or head back home for a few months, anywhere will do. Find the cheapest and stick it there. I would look somewhere like the Kerikeri Marina in Doves Bay, or the marina in Tutukaka, or on the pile moorings at Kissing Point in Whangarei where we kept Dosia. $120NZ/month isn’t bad when you’re only looking for a parking spot. These places don’t offer much in amenities but who cares when you won’t be there to enjoy them. Don’t fall for the hype!