Tuesday 8 Jan Mercury Rising

For the last couple of days the forecaster have been predicting today was going to be 43C hot with the wind blowing hot, dry air off the interior and out over the coast. From breakfast time we watched the temperature rise steadily from 24c to 37c at midday with a corresponding drop in humidity from 55% down to 20%. The barometer was also dropping sharply.

Noel Coward sang about mad dogs and Englishmen going out in the midday sun. These English lived up to this and topped it with cycling in high 30s heat, wind straight out of a pizza oven dry and hot, up and down hills to visit a rigger, sailmaker and then a chandlery. I liked the chandlery because they had great air conditioning and somewhere to sit down while I read the books for sale. David, unfatigued, shopped and found a replacement LED deck light to replace the one which fell overboard on the way from Fiji to New Caledonia and an LED for the man overboard dan buoy. We cycled home slowly before collapsing in a lethargic sprawl occasionally raising a head to sip iced water.

I looked forward to night time; although the air outside had dropped to 34c, night time is when we run the generator to charge the batteries and generator equals air conditioning! We closed all the hatches and repaired to the aft cabin with our books preparing for the cool relief. It felt good for less then ten minutes when the gennie coughed, spluttered and cut out!

Poor David got dressed and went down into the engine room where he found a jellyfish had been sucked into the seawater cooler blocking the intake and causing genie to over heat. He said we had to wait for it to cool before we could try switching on again. For the next hour we kept trying and it wouldn't start; like us far too hot. Then sometime after midnight David remembered there's a reset button which we'd forgotten about. Switch that and suddenly we had power and cold air once more. However, the irony of this tale is less than half an hour after we got AC there was a dramatic reverse in wind direction for the hot inland blast to cold, moist air off the sea and we needed blankets for the rest of the night.