...and we're back to bashing upwind again!
Living on our ears is slowly becoming the norm (between wind holes at least) as we work our way up the East coast of Australia. The 1,000 nautical miles to go mark remains just out of reach, but probably by the time you read this we will at least have passed the latitude where we turned off for Sydney back in December. Covering new water will certainly be welcome after so much re-tracing of our steps down to Hobart and back again.
December isn't over yet in the Nasdaq Bistro at least: we're still living off 'luxury' Christmas food. Santa Claus was kind enough to bring us a resupply of Mrs (Damien's Mum) Egan's excellent mango chutney, and we have a huge Christmas cake courtesy of Lorna Mackie. This forms part of the new 'Marie Antoinette' approach to victualing apparently adopted for 2018 - several other people put cake onboard for us, and our reason is cunning: Racing Rules forbid the tacking (moving from one side of the boat to the other) of stores or equipment, but allow crew to be tacked as self-propelled ballast. Therefore, put the stores into the crew, they become heavier and thereby more effective.
Actually, it's getting so humid as we travel north that any benefit is soon sweated away. Speaking of which, we are about to change sails again in a decreasing wind.
Cheers, Rob.