Lows, Highs and Wind

Latitude : 31? 41' South
Longitude: 176? 18' East
A long couple of nights and one long day. Tuesday night the shore station we check in with twice a day told us to expect winds rising to 25-30 knots with gusts to 40. Well we prepared what we could, single reefed mizzen, a couple of reefs in the main and waited. Sleep was hard as we were all waiting for the wind. It never got over 20. The seas however got quite big and from astern and by 11:30, after passing through one frontal system and sailing into the second one, I decided to heave-to and wait it out. The boat hove-to well after a couple of tries to get her head through the wind and we sat with the wind and seas more or less on the bow quarter. We stayed that way for about 3 hours until the winds shifted around to the SW and then off we went again on a rhumb line to Opua. We have a heading of 207 degrees true but are generally only able to make 190-195 at best hard on the wind. We slowed the boat down last night and flattened her off to get a bit of sleep and now that it is daylight, I have more sail up and we are back around 5-5.5 knots hard on the wind. The forecast is for the wind to go more west which will help. Hopefully we will make Opua on Saturday as long as we can maintain some decent speed. We are 230 miles away so two reasonable days should see us in.

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