We left for a nine day passage to Cairns, Australia. Being that it is such a long passage, we had some serious getting ready to do. We spent all day Thursday and most of the day Friday doing chores.

Jaime volunteered to scrub the waterline, which delighted Christi. Christi thinks that the waterline is by far her hardest job duty. She was pretty happy about passing it off onto Adrienne, and even happier to have gotten out of it a second time in a row. He hopped in and hopped right back out, realizing that there was no way he could fight the aggressive two knot current. At slack tide he hopped in and got to work, but wasn’t able to finish the job before the tide picked back up. When the tide was slack again, he got in to finish the job. Jaime is planning on buying a Nordhavn and is trying to decide between a 43 and a 47. After finally completing the waterline, he came inside and announced that he had decided on the 43 he couldn’t possibly take doing the waterline of the 47, which is actually 50 and a half feet

Christi did the bottom when Jaime finished the water line. As she prepared to get in, she managed to breakher fin and Eric managed to break her snorkel, which she viewed as an ominous sign. She hopped in and was horrified by the amount of growth. The entire bottom was covered in fine green grass, with some patches of red grass, and tons of little red spots that looked like chewing gum. She had to scrub much harder than she has ever scrubbed before to get it all off. Since she didn’t have a lot of time to work because of the short amount of time the tide was slack, she had to do the job in three shifts over two days.

Eric and Jaime plotted the course to Cairns, changed the mail engine oil, rearranged the lazarette, cleaned the sea strainers, changed the water maker filter, checked all the anti-siphon valves on board, and checked to make sure all the systems were working properly. Christi cooked up everything on board that might go bad before getting to Australia and did some cleaning.

We went into shore on Friday and had lunch, took the laptop to an internet café to check e-mail and do a few things on the Internet, got a couple of last minute things at the grocery store, then checked out of the country with both customs and immigration. We went to the Aore resort for dinner, wanting to enjoy a couple more hours on dry land.

When we first left, we really struggled with the powerful current. We were doing 2.5 knots at 1700 RPM through the channel between Aore and Espiritu Santo. Out from between the islands, it got a little better, but was still unbelievably slow. As expected, the seas were calm while we were in the lee of the islands. Much to our surprise, once we got out into the open ocean, it was still relatively calm. So far today ranks high in the best days at sea category. Speeds have picked up, but we are still moving slow.

The most exciting news of all is that Jaime caught a tuna! We think it is approximately 8 pounds. He made us all a fabulous tuna steak dinner to celebrate his accomplishment.