Hurry Up and Wait

We spent yesterday (NZ Wednesday) doing our final preps for leaving today for Fiji. Made our appointment for 9:00am with Customs and Immigration to clear out. A front moved through last night over NZ giving us some strong, but nice direction, winds for leaving this afternoon. Just one fly in the ointment, the GRIB models have now decided to agree with each other and significantly strengthen a low forming in the tropics just about the time we would be getting to Fiji. Fiji is the gray islands at the top middle-left of the image above. You can see the wind arrows with many feathers on them, ie, lots of winds, as well as the dark precipitation bands. The models have the low moving off to the SE, so we’ve decided to delay at least one more day. If the wave height was not predicted to be so large at 5.4m (17ft) we would go as far as Minvera Reef and sit inside there for a few days. But the reef is so low that those waves will just march through there making for a very uncomfortable stay.
Hard to believe we’ve trying to get out of NZ since the beginning of May. Our friend Bill from San Francisco has been hanging on trying to make the passage with us as crew-- we’re not sure how much longer he’ll be able to hang out.

All this waiting does give me time to catch up on the Circus that is our White House these days. The key question is how many self-inflicted wounds can one presidency take? Even a POTUS as huge as the Trump only has 10 toes and it is so hard to walk after shooting all ten of them off. It really is a bit disconcerting when you first meet people down here and very early in the conversation you hear them delicately (and some not so delicately) trying to figure out what side of the Trump divide we’re on before they continue the conversation.
Paul