s/v Cordelia

Keeping to my tradition for last-minute posts, it’s time for another update. On Wednesday (the day after tomorrow), we’re flying to Ft. Lauderdale to bust Cordelia out of the marina in which she is presently incarcerated and sail her home to Marion. Weather permitting, we plan to set sail on Friday or Saturday. The passage should take us about 10 days, depending, as always, on the winds. We’re hoping to catch a ride on the Gulf Stream, and we hope the Atlantic is nicer to us this time than it was in November 2011 when we started this adventure.

In between other things, we’ve been making and freezing casseroles for the past couple of days. Since we’re not leaving the country, we can take food with us, and we’re both looking forward to not having to prepare our evening meals at sea.

In case you’ve lost track, at last report, it was February 2 and we were in Brisbane, getting ready to load Cordelia on the Dockwise vessel for her journey home. Here are a couple of pictures from that event.

The first is Cordelia’s ride, the Super Servant 4, with her stern lowered below water, during loading.

The next shows the view from Cordelia, after we motored in, while tying up.

And then there’s one of Cordelia from the bridge, as we prepared to depart — looking quite small amongst the super-yachts.

That’s her just aft of the yellow boat, all set for her long trip back across the Pacific, through the canal, and up to Lauderdale. She arrived in late March, giving us a nice excuse for a mini-vacation in Florida when we went down to retrieve her. We parked her in a marina down there, waiting for the end of the interminable winter before we could sail her back home.

But back to Australia. As you’ll recall from the last post (if you remember that far back), we ended up spending more time in Queensland than originally planned because of the delay in the loading date. This was no problem for us; we had a lovely time in Lamington and Noosa National Parks (see my last post), a couple of great nights at an eco-lodge in the Glass House Mountains, and a fun day visiting the Australia Zoo. I took a fuzzy picture of Roy, pretending he’s Steve Irwin.

And there’s a picture showing the view of one of the Glass House Mountains, while we were hiking up another.

After that, we flew to Perth and spent a couple of days touring around there, including a day trip to the Pinnacles National Park, a beautiful and other-worldly place, as shown in the picture of Roy in his yellow shirt.

There’s another picture that is one of the strangest sights you’ll ever see, an enormous mobile dune. The prevailing breeze picks up sand from the south edge and deposits it on the north edge, so the dune moves north at about 12 meters per year. We saw several; this one was at least a half mile from the beach.

While in Perth, we also spent a bit of time touring around the city and taking a day trip on a ferry to Fremantle.

From Perth we took the Indian Pacific train to Adelaide, a 2-day trip across the vast Nullarbor Plains.  We had a nifty little cabin with a lower bunk that turned into daytime seating, an upper bunk that folded up out of the way, and a teensy little bathroom (far smaller than Cordelia’s head).  It was a lot of fun — the food was terrific, the people were friendly, and the liquor was included in the price, which is a good idea because there’s just not a lot to see in the western half of Australia, as you can see in my picture looking out the train window at the view.

The “highlights” of the trip were a nighttime stop in Kalgoorlie to visit the “SuperPit” gold mine and an insanely hot daytime stop in the ghost town of Cook, which was abandoned when the railway was privatized in the late 1990s.

It was 105F in Adelaide, but we didn’t let that stop us. Well, maybe it slowed us down. We had some nice walks through the city and the botanical gardens and some excellent tours of the nearby wine country.

Then we returned to Sydney for several fun days with Roy’s high school exchange student buddy Rob and his wife Carolin, and another high school friend, Tom, who joined us for a mini-reunion. Check out my picture of the fabulous view from our hotel.

I’ll close this post with a charming anecdote that will restore your faith in humanity. Remember back in November, during our first stop in Sydney, when I left my camera in a taxi? (See “A Feeble Post.”) Well, a couple of months ago Roy got a Facebook message from a young man in Australia who had picked up the camera in the cab, thinking it was his girlfriend’s, and taken it home with him. He didn’t look at it for a while, but when he did, quickly realized it wasn’t hers. So he looked at the pictures, googled Cordelia, tracked down Roy through Facebook, and sent the camera back!

The picture of me and Roy at the Sydney Opera House one of the hundreds of pictures I thought I had lost.

Many, many thanks to Joshua B.

Stay tuned for updates from Florida and offshore.

P.S. for our little granddaughter, Matilda: there’s a picture of one of her gas stations.

Hi y’all. Today is Sunday, February 2. We are back at the marina in Brisbane, getting ready to load Cordelia onto the Dockwise vessel tomorrow. Naturally, at the last minute Roy decided that he needed to wax Cordelia’s topsides and change the engine oil. Meanwhile, I decided that I need to buy some more books for my Kindle and write a blog post.

As always, Roy’s last minute impulses involve more sweat, by a couple of orders of magnitude, than mine.

We’ve had a great time touring around coastal Queensland for the last several days. First, we spent 3 nights at O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat in Lamington National Park, which is a couple-hour drive south of Brisbane. There’s a picture of Roy in the main room of our beautiful villa, which – believe it or not – was quite affordable.

My guide book describes Lamington as “home to a staggering variety of plants, animals, and birds, with isolated populations of species found nowhere else in the world.” I’m not sure I’d describe our sampling as staggering, but we did see a lot of wildlife. Check out my pictures of:

(1) a wallaby hanging out near our villa;

(2) a brush turkey, one of dozens we saw pecking around everywhere we went;

(3) a parrot, one of several we saw in a tree near the reception building, hopefully awaiting people (not us) who would ignore all the signs and feed them;

(4) the back half of a python camped out beside the road leading to our villa, with his head up under the leaves in the shade. According to the Aussies, these guys are harmless, but keep in mind that the Aussies have a different rating scale than the rest of us, and I bet it’s no fun when this guy wraps himself around you;

(5) a black red-belly snake hanging out in the picnic area – which even the Aussies admit is dangerous, with venom that causes “severe morbidity but is typically not fatal.”

We took a nice hike to a waterfall the first day, stopping to walk along a cool “treetop walk” along the way. I took a picture of Roy on the walk. And he took one of me, at the top of a ladder you could climb up 30 meters (about 100 feet) to get a better view.

For some reason, this ladder made me more nervous than going up Cordelia’s mast, but after a false start, I made it. That’s my head, looking down from the top.

There’s a picture of the waterfall and one of Roy beside a danger sign (he likes danger signs, in case you haven’t noticed).

In Australia, even the trees are deadly. There’s a picture of a strangler fig. The tree starts when a bird deposits its seed high in another tree. As it grows, it gradually extends its roots downward and around its host tree. Over the course of a couple hundred years, the roots wrap around and eventually kill the host tree. Weird.

The second day we started out on another hike, hoping to do a circuit that was billed at 5-6 hours. Unfortunately, the trail was literally crawling with leeches, so we gave up after a couple of hours. There’s a picture of a leech – this is what they look like before they attach themselves to your leg and feast on your blood.

Fortunately we met another couple who warned us, so we were on the lookout and managed to pluck them off before they sank their teeth in. Or whatever they bite with. The other couple wasn’t so lucky – their legs were covered with red marks.

Roy put a short video about this hike on Facebook.

Leeches notwithstanding, we had an awesome time at Lamington.

Next we spent 2 nights in another very nice villa at Noosa Heads, near another small but lovely national park, Noosa National Park. This is on the Sunshine Coast just north of Brisbane, very popular with surfers. There are a couple of pictures we took along the coast track during one of our hikes.

Our only disappointment at Noosa was that we didn’t see any koalas, which our guidebook said we would “almost certainly” see. Since a koala sighting generally means vaguely seeing a small grey ball of fur high in a eucalyptus tree, it’s probably not that thrilling, but still.

Our evening back at the marina yesterday was enlivened by a GIGANTIC cruise ship, which sounded a very long and deafening blast as it barely cleared under the bridge next to our marina.

I am really glad I was not trying to motor upriver while this guy was heading out, because he was hogging the entire river and moving right along.

After we get Cordelia loaded tomorrow, we will spend our last 3 nights in Queensland at another eco-lodge in the Glass House Mountains, where we hope to do more hiking and also visit the zoo. The lodge has free WiFi so I’ll strive to do another post before we fly off to Perth on Thursday.

Hello from the land down under. I left for Sydney on the evening of Thursday January 16 (Boston time) and arrived on the morning of Saturday January 18 (Sydney time). I believe it was Friday for a few hours there, somewhere over the Pacific, before we crossed the date line — but I slept through it.

Roy arrived in Sydney several days before me, and – Tom Sawyer style — managed to persuade his Aussie buddy Rob that it would be great fun to help him with a bunch of boat jobs. Fortunately for me, Rob bought into it, so most of the heavy lifting was done by the time I got here. I’m pleased that I was able to give them the opportunity for this important and memorable male bonding experience.

Rob and his wife Carolin also invited Roy (and me, after I arrived) to stay with them, which was lovely. Their home borders a beautiful conservation area with lots of wildlife. Check out the picture I took of the little parrots at their bird feeder!

On Saturday, we moved Cordelia from White Bay down to D’Albora Marina in Sydney. Here’s a picture I took of Roy and Rob, with the Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge behind them.

On Sunday we bought our provisions, and on Monday January 20, Roy and I departed Sydney for the sail up to Brisbane. The total distance is somewhere around 500 miles, or a bit more, so we hoped/expected it to take no more than 4-5 days.

Our first indication that this wouldn’t be our easiest passage came about two hours into the journey, while we were still motoring out of Sydney Harbor. First we noticed that the engine was running very hot. Then we noticed that the gauge registering the supply voltage to the batteries was pegged at the top end (over 16 volts).

Neither of these are good things. We briefly considered turning back, but decided we’d try to diagnose and deal with the problems in transit. We immediately reduced the engine RPMs and, thankfully, the temperature gradually returned to near normal. Ultimately we never figured this out, but since it didn’t recur, concluded that it might have been a combination of a high load on the engine, high ambient temperature, and high cooling water temperature. (The water temp in Sydney Harbor was almost 80F.) Or, since I don’t believe in coincidences, it might somehow have been related to the voltage problem.

The voltage problem took another day to deal with. We have both an internal and external voltage regulator for the alternator (which charges the batteries), and another part called a diode pack that splits the voltage between the starter battery (used to start the engine) and the house batteries (used to power the lights, frig, electronics, etc.). Roy messed around for a while and managed to get the voltage under control by switching to only the internal regulator, but later discovered that the batteries weren’t charging enough, and the starter battery was warmer than it should be. So after swapping out the starter battery for one of the house batteries, and conferring via satphone with his favorite helper back at Burr Brothers in Marion, he figured out that the diode pack is shot. He jury-rigged a temporary fix by connecting the batteries all together while the engine is on, so that they would charge, and disconnecting them while it was off, so we didn’t drain the starter battery.

I realize I am not doing a good job explaining this stuff in this blog. Electricity and magnetism have never been very interesting to me, which is why I took physics-for-dummies (8.023) at MIT. But anyway, the problem is under control, we’ll get a new diode pack, and hope that fixes the issue when Cordelia arrives in Florida.

The winds were fair and we made good progress for the first day, but on Tuesday they backed into the northeast and we spent most of that day and the wee hours of Wednesday morning under power. My morning watch on Wednesday was enlivened by the little brown bug/moth you see in the picture, who came to join me in the cockpit.

Quiz for the day: what the hell is it? Keep in mind we were more than 10 miles offshore so this guy was on quite the voyage! When I needed to use the genoa furling line he was resting on, he moved to another spot, quite annoyed. Later, after resting a few more hours, he went on his way.

Late morning on Wednesday the wind shifted back to the southeast and began to strengthen. During the evening and overnight the winds started blowing pretty good (25-35 knots, and I know that was poor grammar) out of the southeast. We also started to encounter the famous Australia current, flowing at 3 knots or so from north to south, while we were trying to sail south to north. This created some pretty crummy sailing conditions for the next day or so. Nothing too exciting, just a lot of uncomfortable bashing and crashing and rocking and rolling.

I did take one big wave over the side that filled the cockpit while on watch during the wee hours, which provided a bath that I probably needed but didn’t want. These waves are quite loud when they crash into the side of the boat, so this particular one caused poor Roy to bolt wide awake, jump out of bed and rush wild-eyed to the companionway to ask me if I was okay. It’s quite endearing.

The most aggravating aspect of this part of the passage was that our boat speed was 7-8 knots but our SOG (speed over the ground) was only 3-4 knots because of the current. It’s a bummer to endure nasty conditions while not getting anywhere very fast.

By Thursday evening and throughout Friday, the winds had subsided, so we alternated between motoring and sailing, but we were still fighting the foul current. It was also quite rainy with occasional thunderstorms. Roy spent the better part of one watch huddled up under the dodger, literally sitting on the housetop, trying to keep out of the rain coming from astern.

To get to Brisbane, we had to travel farther north to circle around some islands that form the eastern part of Moreton Bay, which is quite large. We arrived at the entrance to the bay around 8 pm on Friday, but it took another 6 hours to motor through the bay to get to a suitable place to drop anchor for the night, which we were finally able to do at 2 am. Then we got up on Saturday morning to travel another 3 hours across the bay and down the Brisbane River to the marina where we are now.

Total passage time was a bit over 5 days, not that horrible – although it might be a new record low for miles per day, and it sure felt a lot slower.

In other words, the passage was really not that much fun, but we successfully fought off grumpiness for the most part, and rewarded ourselves by breaking out the liquor for cocktail hour last night. The marina is quite nice, and we had a great view of a bridge over the Brisbane River from our cockpit.

Meanwhile, our plans are changing yet again. Our latest information is that the Dockwise boat will probably not be ready for loading until February 3. Based on prior information we were assuming this would happen during the last few days of January, so we had booked a flight to Darwin on February 1. As a result, we’ve had to cancel our plan to go to Darwin (and Kakadu National Park).

So we’ve made alternate plans. Tomorrow, we’ll leave the boat, rent a car, and head off to spend the next several nights at two national parks that are reachable from here — Lamington and Noosa National Parks – and which both look to be beautiful and have plenty to do. While enroute to Noosa, we hope to stop and visit the Australia Zoo (of Steve Irwin fame).

Saturday we’ll return to Cordelia to get ready for the loading, which we’re hoping will happen on Monday as planned. After that we’ll spend a few days in and around Brisbane, and then we’ll fly to Perth on February 6 (the same day we were originally planning to fly there from Darwin).

So we’re going with the flow, we’re expecting to have plenty of fun while staying near enough to come back if plans change again, and we expect everything will still work out just fine.

P.S. If you’re not from down under (or a Commonwealth nation) you might be confounded by the title to this blog, so let me google that for you: Bob’s Your Uncle.

Abject apologies to those of you who took me at my word when I promised to post New Zealand pictures when we got home a couple of days before Thanksgiving. What can I say? My sorry little procrastinating butt just didn’t get around to it. Thanksgiving, Christmas, the New Year’s Day first birthday of our adorable granddaughter Matilda, and the usual mix of work stuff all conspired against me.

So here we are. I have one day left to do this post. Fire is lit under said butt.

Roy left for Australia Monday evening. I leave tomorrow. Roy traveled a few days ahead of me so he could repair the damage to the track on the mast, do a bunch of other smaller boat jobs, and get Cordelia back in the water. I’m showing up when we get to the fun part.

Last I wrote, we were waffling between a couple of options for shipping Cordelia back home. In the end, we decided on the option that we are most comfortable with because we’ve used it before, the Dockwise float on-float off service. If you don’t know how that works, take a look at this nifty little 2-minute video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Nb-LMc3sgM

The plan is to leave Sydney on Sunday or Monday (weather permitting) to sail Cordelia up to Brisbane. Sometime around the end of the month, we’ll load her onto the transport vessel. Then she gets to kick back and carpool (boatpool?) with some new buddies all the way to Florida.

Sometime in March, Cordelia will arrive in Port Everglades, Florida, where we’ll meet her, get her cleared through Customs, and park her somewhere for a couple of months. Then we’ll go back in early June and sail her back up to New England. Should be fun sailing back into our home port of Marion MA after all our travels.

After we see Cordelia off in Brisbane, Roy and I will tour around Australia for a few weeks before we return home on February 17.  We’ll be traveling around a bit, visiting Sydney, Brisbane, Darwin, Perth and Adelaide. (Please keep your fingers crossed that the horrendous heat wave they’ve been having in Australia abates a bit.) We’re really looking forward to it.

Meanwhile, back in New Zealand. What a lovely country! We had a fantastic time and thoroughly recommend it as a vacation destination if you haven’t been there, or even if you have. (In fact, we hope to go back.)

We arrived in Auckland on November 8, rented a car, and drove straight to Rotorua, where we spent our first two nights. Rotorua is famous for its geothermal activity, and we had a good time visiting an unpronounceable (see the sign in the picture) Maori village that is part of the Te Puia thermal reserve.

The second day we visited the Rotorua Museum, which is very beautiful and interesting. Unfortunately, Roy’s wallet got stolen (or lost and not turned in), which meant we had to cancel credit cards and get replacements while in transit. It worked out okay but was a pretty significant hassle.

After Rotorua we traveled to the Tongariro National Park, where we did the all-day alpine crossing. This was awesome. If you haven’t seen it already, check out Roy’s video on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkuFq1v-XGQ

From Tongariro we continued traveling south on the North Island, visiting Napier and Wellington before taking a ferry over to the South Island. In Napier we toured around town to take a look at the cool Art Deco architecture, and visited the New Zealand Wine Center to take a fun tasting test and learn more about local wines. In Wellington we visited the fabulous Te Papa national museum, and took a cable car ride up to botanic gardens overlooking the city. I took a picture of one coming up that shows the view.

And check out the cool clock. See if you can figure it out from the two pictures.

On the South Island we started out by visiting the Abel Tasman National Park, where we stayed in a lodge that you need to take a sea shuttle to get to. We had a wonderful time hiking around and coming back to fresh, delicious, locally grown dinners in their fantastic restaurant.

Next we spent a night in Blenheim, near the winery district on the South Island. There’s a picture of Roy with our purchase at one of our favorites.

We bought several bottles at various wineries and cracked one (or two) every night for the remainder of the trip.

On the South Island, we had two long days of driving, the first from Blenheim over the mountains and across the island to Franz Josef, one of the famous glacier areas. The town and snowy mountains are shown in one of my pictures.

Here’s a link to Roy’s video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVEV7bNriss 

Besides the fun of driving on the left, New Zealand abounds with one-lane bridges, so I took a picture of one of them. The road signage as you approach tells you whether or not you have right of way. If not, you wait until approaching cars get across and the coast is clear before you cross.

After a couple of days in Franz Josef, we did another long drive, this time from west to east, back across to the town of Dunedin. There’s a picture of the scenery from the car, which is very typical of everywhere in this lovely country.

Dunedin is a university town so it is lively, an interesting juxtaposition with the gorgeous gothic architecture, as shown in a couple of pictures.

New Zealand is overrun with possums, imported in the early 1800s to enable growth of a fur industry. In the late 1980s with the anti-fur movement, prices dropped, the industry faltered, and the possums procreated with abandon, causing serious harm to vegetation, livestock, and local wildlife, including the kiwi. My guidebook says there are now 70 million possums in the country and the government spends $100 million a year on possum control. We saw the poisoned traps on many hikes.

Nowadays even ardent environmentalists encourage you to run over a possum if it happens to cross the road in front of you, and given the amount of roadkill, I conclude that everyone follows this advice. And there is renewed enthusiasm about possum fur.

The possum fur gloves made good souvenirs for family.

From Dunedin, we took a train trip up the gorgeous Taieri Gorge, and another day trip to the equally gorgeous Otago Peninsula.

Finally we traveled down to the southwest corner of the South Island to Manapouri, and took a day-long cruise into Doubtful Sound, part of New Zealand’s Fiordland, a remote and stunningly beautiful part of the world.

Then we visited Queenstown for a day, flew back to Auckland for another day, and traveled home.

This post is getting long and it’s becoming abundantly clear that I am not going to do justice to New Zealand — nor do my pictures, taken with my iPhone since I lost my camera in Sydney. I hope, at least, it whets your appetite to go there.

Stay tuned for updates from Australia (someday!).

It is approximately 9 pm on Saturday November 16. Roy and I lost track of the exact day and date some time ago, so this is a guess.

We had a great week in Sydney. There was quite a bit of work to do to get Cordelia ready to haul out, but we managed to tour around a bit, and we spent two lovely evenings with friends.

Sydney is a beautiful city. I took gobs of pictures. I also took a boatload (haha, get it?) of pictures of Cordelia getting her mast unstepped (which means pulled out) and then getting hauled out of the water and put into dry storage.

But then I lost my camera.

Don’t ask me how. I ALWAYS keep the wrist strap around my wrist. I’m paranoid about that. But the camera got lost somewhere between the Opera House and our hotel, most likely left in the cab, although I NEVER take off the wrist strap, dammit.

A call to the cab company didn’t help, and so far, the person who found the camera hasn’t gone to the trouble to track me down. So all those pictures are gone. The silver lining is that we’ll be back in Sydney in February, so I’ll get another chance.

Anyway, as you recall, Cordelia will sit high and dry in Sydney until we return in late January or early February to get her ready to ship home. Her exact route home is still tbd. There is a chance we’ll sail her up the east coast instead of shipping/trucking her the entire way. I’ll keep you posted.

All of us left Sydney on Friday November 8. Danny flew home, and Roy and I flew to Auckland. (Remember we decided to sail straight to Australia instead of sailing to New Zealand first, but we had plans to tour here all along.) So we’re still in the midst of our tour of New Zealand, which is totally awesome. We’ll be here a total of 17 days, and we’re already wishing it was double that.

I suppose since we flew here it doesn’t qualify as part of our travels aboard Cordelia, but I’ll post more details and some pictures (taken on my iPhone) when we get home.

I hear there were snow flurries back home a few days ago. Wonderful. (Not.)

Have a happy Thanksgiving.