Hey guys, yeah we had a great time.
We had planned on over three weeks up there to allow for some down time during any bad weather. But we got lucky and although a fair percentage of our days got up to around 25 knots it was still fishable every day. So after about two and a half weeks we were all fished out and ready for a rest
There wasn't much rest on our "rest day" between trips out. That day consisted of servicing the gear, cleaning clothes and boat, refueling, resupplying etc and then it was right lets go again!!!
Steve, as for fuel consumption I have a 115hp suzuki four stroke and with the boat fully loaded up it consumed just under a litre per kilometre travelling at mostly 20-25 knots (10 knots on the ugly days:(). There's 160 litres in the tank under the floor and we had five 20 litre jerry cans strapped across the transom. Plus another jerry under the floor at the nose that we kept out of calculations as a bit of a backup. So we had about 250km range which worked out just right for a three day trip to any of the island groups.
The jerries on the marlin board were the cause of the hydraulic line breaking, that and my dopeyness. At full lock the hose was bearing against one of the jerries just enough to eventually cause it to crack next to the fitting. That was one of the more major lessons learnt! Standing at the transom pulling on ropes to steer for 40km wasn't my idea of fun. For the previous few years there's always been a litre of steering fluid and a filler thing inside the console but Murphy made sure it wasn't there when the time came haha.
We were pretty lucky there really, we lost the steering just after Tony had caught a good fish out of some shallow country in a lot of current between two islands. There were some pretty ugly pressure waves standing up around us and I'm glad I had steering there.
