With the summer racing now behind us, Craig and I decided to have a sail in the weekend to sort out some of the systems on the new boat. Craig was worried about the temperature in Turangi at this time of the year and thought it was too cold.

 

Craig in his "winter woolens".

 

As you can see from what Craig is wearing it was within Craig’s temperature range. We spent 6 hours rigging, a new record! With a nice 15 – 20 knots we finally left the beach. We had a really good sail and the wind came up to over 25 knots. At this stage we decided we should head for home as we were a little isolated and there were no other boats on the water.

 

We squared off and tried driving the boat directly downwind. This was going great till we tried turning the boat into a submarine and drove her down totally swamping the boat. The hull speed slowed greatly yet the rig kept going and we fell over to the sound of carbon breaking. It was a perfect clean break at the gooseneck…

 

We were now 1.5 miles off the beach with no rig, and no one around. We then recovered the bits and built a jury rig out of the jib. With night approaching fast we were spotted by a search plane who circled us a couple of times. We continued sailing until the wind completely died and we had to paddle the last half an hour to the beach, making it just (10 minutes) before dark. Craig is currently penning a novel on our harrowing 2 hours lost on Lake Taupo.

 

 

 Back to the drawing board…