John B

Great news.

I'm checking each day for updates on the great crew.org motor mystery of the year. I dunno... I would have expected some warning on a bearing issue, noise, clatter, smoke etc. Not a catastrophic stop. How about back to the front and a concertina timing chain jam up? Or that big metal impeller, bits of, doing the same.......( if that's possible)

Geez, I feel for you. It's hard to imagine a hydro lock from idling ,and for it to lock enough to prevent turning both ways it's more than one cylinder. And it's not a rope on the prop. So it sounds mechanical to me, but by your own diagnosis you're well onto it and would see anything obvious like a thrown/ jammed up belt. Maybe drop off the belt anyway and check the water pump and the alternator moves. Best of luck

That's a crappy little survey isn't it. But bring the changes on. While everyone I've spoken to have found the IVC a simple process ,and the inspector I spoke to quashed my concerns , I think it's needs deregulation. At least they have loosened up the underwater inspections and give us a longer period than the old within 60 days departure, and I hear that will be freed up more. And I'd rather put a couple of thousand into the boat equipment than repeating sea survival and med courses we've done twice before but are past their 5 year thresholds.

The people I've spoken to have said it was simple. I don't know yet if there's a list of must haves like the old ynz book.

I agree that the elbow mixer is probably the problem..6 or 7 years is what the modern units seem to last . But no mention of an impeller check? Maybe I missed it but that is the number 1 thing to pull and change.

I wouldn't worry about that, the boatyard is empty because everyone goes to Whangarei , where every boatyard is full and buzzing, businesses doing well etc etc.

How come sense applies in Auckland, where we're free to anchor in infected areas and are asked to simply check our anchors and collect/ dispose, or dump the weed where we found it, yet in the BOI they just close down the anchorages. In other words Auckland has an educational ,reasonable, workable response, Bay of Islands a draconian one. If there was just one success in the Bay, if they just cleared and opened one of the closed anchorages after all this money and all this effort, they'd have support. But they can't even do that. Not one of the areas closed what 2? 3 ? years ago has been o

The barnacles arrived in Opua in 2016 according to the yard guys and other local boaties. Certainly an eye opener for transplanted Westhaven people like moi. We discovered them in 2017 when waiting for two weeks in the marina to depart. There were late cyclones / named storms in the tropics that year. The slime this year in the BOI is different, you're right. ( above post). It does just wipe off but it is fast to arrive.

YNZ decided to abandon cruising yachties , walk away from us and hand us to some understaffed , overworked VTNZ for boats in the form of Maritime NZ. I have no sympathy for YNZ at all , they can rot in hell, this is just another indicator of just how disfunctional that organisation is.

MNZ, shutting down offshore cruising for Kiwi registered boats. 3 months FFS. I suppose they'll want the third crewmember name that Insurance forces you to have as well. The system is broken , this was an opportunity to deregulate the process instead of putting more hurdles in front of us. I tell you what is funny, the old YNZ Cat system was criticized as difficult and yet it was downright holistic and simple compared to these guys.

The best program we had in 17 and 19 was ovitalmap. What it did was cache whatever you looked at down through the layers when in wifi or cell coverage. I did that at home in NZ for every place I thought we'd visit in Tonga and Fiji. Then I had Google earth with our position on it without using cell or wifi. Unfortunately they were using Google and Bing without permission and they were copywrited out and are now prevented from using it. We went with navionics on our old 2009 plotter and isailor on tablet, funnily enough our navionics was really good but some of the boats with the updated

Is it running on 12 Volts or through an inverter?

I've been in and out of that pass a dozen times perhaps, it's pretty straightforward, Looks like the bommie on the outer western side. We were part of a group swimming and diving the pass a few years ago, some of the guys were resting, standing on that outcrop.A superyacht arrived intending to go in, blew their horn at them to get out of the way.ah, um, we're standing on something very hard... He eventually caught on and did a circle for another go. As he went past and into the pass, several people called out the Fulaga mantra.. stay in the centre and at the end hang close to the rock(

John Mac Farlane did a boating article on colours. As I recall there was a surprising difference even between white and gray let alone the darker colours. Then again , our 49 yr old boat is blue over cold moulded kauri and a boat cloth sheathing, paint job needs to be done ,patches etc, but its 20 yrs old and serviceable. Waitangi is glassed, incidentally.