I never realised that spring in Nelson was so windy! Big fat highs lying in the Tasman Sea get squashed between cold fronts associated with lows deeper in the Southern Ocean. This results in nice bright weather but with strong southerlies almost all the time. The only change is when the front passes through and you get clouds and strong northerlies for a day or so. There’s been a few nights when we’ve been rocking around tied up in the marina!

Life on board has been busy as usual. The sails all came back from Pearl the Pirate who carries out most of the repair work at the local sail loft. She lives on a catamaran in the harbour and dresses up as a pirate when she is down at the market selling the bags and cushion covers which she makes out of canvas and old hessian coffee bags. A lovely lady, quite a character and she did a great job on the sails. We struggled getting the mainsail (with battens) back to the boat, I’m glad the police didn’t see us with it strapped to the roof of the car!!

All our lifesaving equipment (raft, jackets, EPIRB etc.) has now come back from servicing. We ended up buying a new EPIRB as the cost was much the same as replacing the battery on the old one. So now we have two! I spent a delightful morning with my sewing machine making better harnesses for our lifejackets. They had no leg harnesses so if you were being winched out of the water you’d have probably slipped through!

Neil’s been getting into the plumbing; he has sorted us out the hot water heater on the boat and installed new taps and a new shower in the aft head which is wonderful.  He repaired a leaky water tank and also fixed the bilge pump which is useful if all that plumbing didn’t work out too well! He has also been checking over our radios and GPS/navigation system but the highlight of his week was the arrival of our new Rocknar anchor. We now have a 40kg whopper loud and proud on the bow, made in New Zealand and reputed to be the best anchor on the market.

The struggle with the watermaker goes on but we did have a couple of bits of good news. The technician in Auckland replaced the grotty old membrane with a secondhand but barely used one which saved us about $800. We have also found out that the makers of the Clark pump will re-build it for about half the price it would have cost us in NZ. Luckily we won’t be needing it for the next few months so it’s not a problem to send it to the USA.

It’s not been all hard work, on Saturday mornings we enjoy going to the market. It’s a great market with stalls selling locally made produce as well as really creative jewellery, pottery, clothing and wood carving. We had another day off and went to Havelock which is a small fishing town on the southern end of Pelorus Sound. It’s a lovely drive through densely forested hills but, although it was a sunny day in Nelson but cold and drizzly up there. Havelock advertises itself as the “green lipped mussel capital of the world” so no need to ask what we had for lunch. We checked out the marina as we plan to spend a couple of weeks sailing up there in November, I hope the weather improves by then!

Cheers

Suzy and Neil