New Year's Eve

Today is New Year’s Eve and the first really bad weather of the trip so far. We’re safely moored in Resolution Bay, tucked out of the worst of the wind in the lee of the hill. But it’s blowing a gale out in the Cook Strait only a few miles away and most of the day has been torrential rain.

To get our daily exercise, we made the short paddle to the nearby beach after lunch while there was a gap in the rain. There is a Department of Conservation campsite there, and a path which links to the Queen Charlotte Track. We did a 3-hour return walk up to Tawa Saddle and got drenched on the return leg. I think our neighbouring boats must have thought us mad, paddling back to our boat in the middle of a downpour and gale winds.

Stormy skies

We were expecting some friends to join us on their boat for New Year at some point during the afternoon. We took the handheld radio with us so we would know when they arrived. Shortly after starting out on the walk we heard a Pan Pan (urgency) call on the radio. We could only hear the Coastguard's side of the conversation and the vessel was being referred to using its callsign. From the partial snippets of conversation we could work out that there was a yacht with engine failure, which was being blown toward the shore somewhere in the Queen Charlotte Sound. The Coastguard then asked to confirm the yacht’s name, and after a few tense moments we heard the Coastguard's acknowledgement of our friend’s yacht’s name. Needless to say, we spent the next 30 minutes listening intensely to a one sided conversation knowing our friends were in trouble.

The most frustrating thing was that we couldn’t hear our friends on the radio, only the Coastguard’s response. We were well over an hour away from their position and would not have been able to tow our friends out of trouble at any rate since their boat is bigger and heavier than ours. We listened as the Coastguard made contact with several nearby vessels and established how far away the nearest help was. The first two boats who made contact were both 30 minutes away! But then, to everyone's relief, a police vessel called in to say they were five minutes from their position.

Weather clearing in the evening

The New Year we had planned hasn’t quite worked out as expected, but at least we now know our friends are safely back in port, and are looking forward to seeing them in 2015.