Our hope is that we can tuck in tight enough (the advantages of being a cat!) that we can get at least some protection from the SE. By Monday the winds look more likely to be E for which we have reasonable protection. Fingers crossed, anyway.
Yesterday's good news was that with the main down, the solar was back to full potential and with the sun we had, the batteries were full by mid-afternoon. This is particularly pleasing because when sailing downwind, in big swell, the autopilot works quite hard. The ‘new’ autopilot (the one we installed in Panama) has some gyros built-in and it reacts to the waves so actually works harder and uses more power than the old one. The bad news is that we’ve picked up some wear on our mainsail at the top of the bolt rope. We’ll work on a temporary fix before we leave Suwarrow or Samoa, as we’ll need the main then. Its unlikely we’ll need it until Samoa as its all downwind in the prevailing conditions. Samoa to Tonga may involve a bit of upwind work as the wind angles are tight - even between the groups in Tonga (Vava’u, Ha’api and Tongatapu) it can be hard on the wind. A proper fix will be done in NZ (possibly even new sails as these have done a fair bit of work now!).
Still no fish though, and I’m craving a nice poisson cru...