Today I rose at 6.20am in order to be in Auckland at 8:30 to go sailing with Jason and three other people. It poured with rain all night here in Hams and while we were hopeful, the weather was just as bad in Auckland just no rain and no wind (not good for sailing).

We walked down the marina, there were heaps of really cool launchs and yachts, I am definitely going to have one one day and use it, Jason commented that when apparently lots of them rarely go out.

As we pulled out of the marina on the yacht, the skipper (thats sailing lingo for captain) commented that there was more wind than he had thought there would be. Hold on he says the wind speed display says 20knots but it's definitely more than that!! Apparently more than 20knots is a reasonable amount of wind, the boat was going in seemingly every direction including up and down almost simultaneously, Jason comments "I've never been out when it's been this rough before".

We then began pulling up sails, there are a lot of ropes and when someone says pull on that rope it is somewhat ambiguous I got the hang of it. As we hoisted the jib (more sailing lingo - its the smaller one at the front) the skipper starts yelling stop, pull it in, pull it in!!! We all turn to look to see the sail not clipped on to the deck , only being attached to the deck via Paul who is desperately trying to pull it down. I went up to help and started pulling the sail out of the water as Paul pulled it down. The sail got caught about halfway down followed almost immediately by the wind catching the said sail, and as you can imagine I am not exactly equipped with the weigt density reqired to hold a large sail against a strong wind. I managed, just, to hold it without being propelled overboard until the sail was down enough to let go.

It was decided once the jib was proberly up to swap it for a more suitable one for the weather, someone else with more sail pulling down experience went forward this time. Jason (who claims he had DEFINITELY clipped on the last sail) wen below to pass up the new jib. About 15 mins later, remebering these are particularly rough conditions, Jason returns to the deck having turned a rather remakable shade of yellow-green. Now I was feeling a wee bit ill myself at this stage (hmm, maybe I won't buy that yacht and stay a land lubber, or maybe buy the yacht and not take it like those others at the marina) and was able to sympathise with Jason who looks like he's about to hurl, then it starts to rain. Jason says "Oh, I've never been out when it's raining before".

Once we were under way it smoothed out a bit and everything was good. The wind was reasonably and the boat was on a bit of an angle, then it keeps going up and up and up, water almost over the side , Team New Zealand styles, Jason says "woah, I've never seen it go up this high before". Sailing up the course like this was pretty fun, we continued round the next few legs for a couple of hours, with some tacking required which again gave some valuable experience in working out what rope was what. The the sun came out for a while and the wind dropped while we went round the island. Here there were some pretty huge swells though, well above the deck when we were in the foot of the swell.

On the last leg the rain started again but the gearI had borrowed was warm and dry, we picked up a bit of speed and were making some headway on the boats ahead. It was actually quite exilerating, like what sailing is supposed to be really heading downwind into the rain as we attempted to overtake a another yacht about 20 metres to starboard. Unfortunately while be took one of them, the other pipped us over the line by mere seconds.

Overall, I was really suprised to find we'd been on the water over four hours as we made our way back to the marina, it certainly didn't feel that long! At this stage I subsequently decided that I would certainly have to have one of these one day, (on my teacher salary : ))