It's not always smooth sailing

I imagine quite a few of our friends and family have been a little envious at some point while reading this blog (well ok, they’ve told me as much), and most of the time, envy is probably justified. After all, why would we be doing this if most of the time it wasn’t a lot more fun than sitting in the office? But, I want this blog to reflect all of the realities of our sailing trip and not just the best parts. So, here are a couple of things that have happened in the last week that have not been so much fun. Admittedly, nothing too terrible, just enough stress or discomfort to make me wish for a few fleeting minutes that I was back on dry land.

The sun doesn't always shine when you're sailing

On dry land, you don’t have to worry about your home going walkabout!

Anchoring is definitely both a science and an art. When choosing an anchorage we must take into account the depth, the type of sea floor (mud, sand, rocky), tides, wind speed and direction, swell, and our distance from the shore and any neighbouring boats. In Abel Tasman, we also had to account for the wind shift that happens twice daily due to the sea breeze. This meant that Desolina would usually sit on the anchor during the day facing out of the bay into the sea breeze, but swing around to face into the bay in the evening when the wind dropped off. As the boat swings around the anchor, the direction of pull on the anchor changes, and the anchor needs to re-set itself.

The Anchorage

On one of our last days in Abel Tasman we left the boat to go for a walk after sleeping the previous night on the anchor and then waiting for the sea breeze to turn the boat around and the anchor to re-set itself. We assumed all was fine as we didn’t notice the anchor dragging at all before we left and the anchor had re-set itself all of the previous days without fail. However, we got a shock when we returned to the boat later that day and found that our neighbours had needed to secure Desolina after she went on a little walkabout dragging the anchor behind her. We can only assume that on this one occasion, the anchor did not re-set itself successfully and we didn’t notice any drag before we left because there wasn’t much wind. We are incredible grateful for the help we received in this instance. We hate to think what the outcome might have been if we had been anchored alone in the bay. This incident has definitely dented our confidence and no doubt we shall be double and triple checking the anchor in future.

On dry land you aren’t kept awake all night by violent rocking (except maybe in an earthquake!)

We have definitely had a few uncomfortable night bobbing up and down on the boat. Probably the worst night we had was at Adele Island in Abel Tasman the night before we had a 5am start to sail back to Marlborough. Neither of us got much sleep that night as the boat lurched back and forth in the waves and there was nowhere we could go to escape it. After a night of very little sleep, a 5am start and seven hours of beating into wind and waves to get back across Tasman Bay we were definitely two very tired and grumpy sailors.

Adele Island

But after all that’s said and done, to quote a cruising couple that we met who were in their 80’s, you forget the bad memories and remember the good one’s, otherwise you wouldn’t still be sailing.