Lady Musgrave - Riding out strong southerly winds...

Ryan and I spent the next few days snorkelling at low tide despite the arrival of stong southerly winds.

There were no more dinghy trips to the island...unless you really wanted to get wet so Sam and Eric (with some help from Emily) baked up a storm - fresh bread, chocolate brownie and other goodies. Emily also spent a far bit of time at the stern desperately trying to catch a fish for our dinner.

We used our Spectra watermaker to top up our fresh water tanks and most days made enough water to keep our tanks full. We can only make about twenty litres per hour, but we don't use much water aboard and we still had heaps of power (despite the clouds reducing the efficienty of our solar array) to run the watermaker for several hours a day if required. The watermaker only draws about 9 amps at 12 volts, but you still need to be careful when you don't have a wind generator to produce power on cloudy days.

Most of the other boats left the lagoon before the wind pickup and during the worst of the conditions two fishing boats anchored on the leeward side of the reef. Sam was despertate for fish and suggested that we take the dinghy out to ask if they had any free. But given the conditons we decided that the idea was not a viable option - there would be no return if anything happened to the dinghy or outboard motor.

Our anchor held fast in the windy conditions and even at high tide we were generally comfortable in the 30-35 knot conditions. We did break one of the anchor bridles as the surf rolled over the reef at high tide, but the rope had been fraid a little anyway so it was bound to fail sooner or later.

All agreed that at least the sunsets were still great!