The swell flattened out as we rounded South Cape on our way back East from Port Davey. The wind was behind us, a preventer on the enormous boom to insure against mishaps. The stars came out.
Night watch
C Watch grabbed some sleep between midnight and 4am, and then again after coming off watch at 6am (love these short two-hour watches!), waking to glorious sunshine as we rounded the dolerite stacks of Cape Raoul.
Rounding Cape Raoul
It was a beautiful day, but somehow bittersweet. Our little group of disparate travellers had spent the last week together in the wilderness of buttongrass country. With only ourselves and our wits to rely on, we had weathered storms and breakdown, supported one another with good humour through times of hard toil and not a little pain. We had learned one another’s little quirks, and had knit ourselves together into a cohesive and reasonably effective sailing team.
But now, rounding the Cape, our telephones reconnected to the outside world. Messages appeared that had been waiting days to be delivered. The crew started to interact with loved ones and civilisation outside of the boat, and the group began to lose cohesiveness. We were still effective, but we were aware of the outside world and the outside was aware of us; in the back of our minds, we knew that the end of the trip was approaching.
We headed north and into more sheltered waters, although there were still almost no other vessels to be seen. We passed Mount Brown and Crescent Beach, with views across the to the Tasman Peninsula, home of the Three Capes Track.
Mount BrownCape Pillar and Tasman Island
The buildings of the historic colonial site of Port Arthur hove into view. We could see people moving about, the first humanity since we bumped into those pilots half way up Mount Rugby. We dropped the pick and took the dinghy in to the end of the jetty.
Supplies had been low on Silver Fern for some days, and the crew were keen to hit the restaurant and eat some fresh food. I started out with similar intentions, but quickly felt uncomfortable with all the unfamiliar faces of the milling tourists. I left the others to it, and instead wandered off to explore the farther reaches of the historical site.
The Port Arthur Penal Colony was active from 1833 to 1877 as a place of incarceration for repeat offenders elsewhere in the colonies. The curators of the historic site have done a great job of bringing the characters to life, whether convicts or the military or their families, through historical and court records. I had a very pleasant time ambling poking around in the extensive gardens and restored buildings.
I hadn’t eaten lunch, of course, but my watch were still looking after me. Knowing that I prefer more fat and protein than were available aboard, they brought me back a big bag of nuts and fruit, as well as some left-over wine. Thanks, Ange and Mish.
Back aboard Silver Fern, we nipped around the corner to Safety Cove, and dropped anchor for the night.
An advance party swam to the beach, and the rest of us joined them in the tender for sundowners.
We were really plumbing the depths of the ship’s stores now, with sweet white wine and mid-strength beer, so I was delighted to discover a forgotten bottle of Jaraman Merlot at the bottom of my kit bag.
There was much hilarity and general fooling around, until finally we launched the tender into an increasingly rambunctious surf, getting thoroughly soaked in the process.
Impromptu swim while launching the dinghy
Brendon and I had already pre-prepped dinner. Again, supplies were really low, so we had to get creative with chopped-up beef sausages, butter chicken sauce, and frozen vegetables. For the vegetarians, we made a packet coconut vegetable curry topped with fried tofu. It all actually tasted pretty good.
We woke to a lovely morning in Schooner Cove off the Bathurst Channel, with fair winds forecast tonight for a run back around the South Cape. It was bittersweet, but we would have to move on.
Exploring Schooner Cove
We still had a full day before the weather-window opened, and Silver Fern had run out of drinking water. We had been wary of running the water-maker in the brackish black buttongrass peat water of the Bathurst Channel. John and Liv decided to take the boat out into Port Davey to run the water-maker for a few hours in clean salt water, a trip that would take most of the morning, so I volunteered to take the dinghy to explore Schooner Cove, and most of the crew hopped in.
We tied up the dinghy on a handy beach, and had a long and mostly enjoyable romp over the now-familiar low scrub, looking for an ‘aboriginal cave, ochre and midden’ which was marked on a mud-map in Ian Johnston’s excellent book The Shank. We never did find the midden, but did end up on a very pleasant little beach close to the site on the map.
A stroll around Schooner CoveWet socks are a feature of the terrain
Rather than hike back over the hill, I took off my boots and waded back along the shoreline to fetch the dinghy, picked everybody up, and then did a boat tour around the cove ending at the ‘swimming hole and fresh water’.
The swimming hole was a small bay inset into the larger one, fed by a small spring that ran over the narrow shingle beach. I went for a very pleasant swim in the sun-warmed waters of the bay, then dug a shallow basin below the spring and washed my sweaty clothes for the first time, hanging them out to dry on the bushes above.
It was a glorious day, and we knew that we were leaving tonight, so we all took the time to just sit by the buttongrass water and soak in the peace.
The crew of Silver Fern, at rest in Schooner Cove
Down Bathurst Channel to Port Davey
The Bathurst Channel
Silver Fern returned to Schooner Bay in time for lunch, and we spent the afternoon tidying ship and making ready for sea. As dusk fell, we weighed anchor and motored out of Bathurst Channel and into Port Davey, with the teeth of the Breaksea Islands looming out of the ocean ahead. Here’s a short movie clip.
We were all a little contemplative as we watched the quartzite rocks of Port Davey fall away astern. Bathurst Harbour is a magical place, satisfyingly hard to get to, and we were well aware that perhaps we might not be able to visit again.
Out in the Southern Ocean, we were greeted by three-metre swells and a flotilla of albatross and petrels. A fur-seal popped out to perform back-flips and then raced to catch up, farewelling us to sea.
Still looking astern, the comforting words of Deny King, the famous bushman who lived here for most of his life, ran through my mind:
‘Those who drink the buttongrass water always return.’
We awoke stiff and creaky after our ascent of Mount Rugby, and worked our way through a quiet breakfast. The wind started to build, hitting 50 knots out in the harbour. We could see the white-caps further out, but all was calm at our Kings Cove anchorage.
Clearly we weren’t going anywhere today. Some of us dozed. Pieter fixed the vacuum cleaner. Ange taught herself knots, and replenished the coffee supply by emptying endless pods from the Nespresso machine (which isn’t that useful as it only works when the generator is running). I fixed the cutlery drawer (again). Stuart busied himself making quesadillas and pies. Mish baked scones.
Pieter repairs the vacuum cleanerReinhard and the cutlery drawerMish baking sconesAnge saving us all
Later in the day, we played some cards and finished the last bottle of wine. This prompted us to turn out all the cupboards and fridges and freezers and bilges, not specifically looking for wine (honestly!), but because we had run out of fresh food and menu-planning was starting to become a problem. We located a handful of carrots, some frozen chopped vegetables, assorted cans, a trove of curry sauces, a number of unlabelled soup packets of uncertain vintage, and – somewhat incredibly – some frozen chickens and joints of pork. We even found some more wine.
Liv and John enjoy Mish’s scones
Live-action filming in Bathurst Harbour
By the next day, the storm was blowing itself out, and the wind was down to 35 knots. Skipper John wanted to make an instructional ‘Man Overboard’ video for the company, and we all agreed that this would be fun.
John provided a script and we had a rehearsal, and then headed out into the open water of Bathurst Harbour. The weather cooperated splendidly by blowing a gale and whipping the water into white-caps, which made the whole thing more visually appealing while tending to drown out the dialogue, some of which we had to dub over afterward.
Since Shien was an accredited cold-water swimmer, we had originally planned for her to be the casualty (suitably dressed in an immersion suit). We had got clearance from the owner via satphone, but in the end we used a rather natty dummy, which was just as well because it was a bit rough and we needed to do a couple of takes. In the end, though, everyone was happy with the result, and we called it a wrap.
Liv and Mish filmingAnge calls MaydayPieter brings the casualty aboard
This is probably as good a point as any to discuss the broad practicalities of sailing something the size and weight of Silver Fern. The reason that John wanted to make a movie, was that most instructional Man Overboard videos feature a slick fibreglass yacht crash-gybing and a burly crew member hauling the casualty up over the rail. This is all very well out on the lake, but Silver Fern is 72 feet of steel and her boom – which is comfortably wide enough to stroll along – weighs well over a tonne. Even a gentle gybe in an ocean swell would bring it smashing across the deck, and something would break. Far better to calmly bring her round in a circle and send a swimmer down on the end of an electric winch, as we had practiced on our first day.
I’ve mentioned before that she is easier to steer on auto-helm than by hand, due to the lack of feedback from the hydraulic rudder. Another steep learning curve for me was that it takes at least four people to tack, and at least three just to furl the foresail. Putting a reef in the mainsail requires most hands on deck.
One of the hardest things for me to learn was that, when operating a winch on a boat this size, all you can see is that winch. Mostly the other end of the sheet or halyard is out of view, so you have no idea of progress. It all comes down to the skipper calling out commands; “grind” and you grind, “ease” and you ease. You don’t know when to stop until he says “hold”. Even furling the foresail, you can’t even see that from the winch aft of the cockpit, so you have to rely on the skipper to tell you when it’s rolled away.
This all means that the skipper is conducting the orchestra in intricate detail, a grind here and a sweat there and an ease over there, and he needs to get everybody’s move perfect every time otherwise an electric winch will be merrily grinding away until something breaks.
Breakdown in Schooner Cove
With the film in the can, we set sail for Schooner Cove, westward along Bathurst Channel towards the sea, and away from Bathurst Harbour proper. Since the winds were still up in the mid thirties and the river channel relatively narrow, we were motor-sailing on the main. With Schooners Cove ahead, all hands came on deck to drop the main, and we prepared to anchor.
It was at this point that the engine alarm went off. The temperature was showing over a hundred centigrade and there was a smell of burning rubber from the exhaust. John switched the engine off and we unfurled the genoa to make what was suddenly a very important tack. It quickly became clear that we weren’t going to make it round, so despite it still reading 109 degrees, we fired up the engine for just long enough to clear the shore, then off again.
We were going to have to tack our way in.
Tacking this big vessel on foresail alone in high winds and limited sea-room calls for intense concentration and a strong skipper. Those of us in the cockpit stayed focussed, those below stayed quiet and listened. Together, under firm command, we pulled off a good tack. Then another. Then another.
The wind howled. I was entirely focussed on the port winch and sheet. I think Rob was on the starboard winch and Brendon was tailing for us, but I wasn’t looking up from my task, I was in the zone. None of us could see what was happening out there in the world apart from John, calmly calling out the action, “Grind… grind… ease… ease… hold”. We cocked up the fifth tack, losing power on the turn, but recovered in time for the sixth. A few minutes later, John commented in a slightly strange voice, “OK, this one matters. This one needs to be perfect”.
The seventh tack was perfect, and we slid by an arm’s length from the shoaling beach. “Furl the foresail, drop the anchor!” We had arrived.
Tacking into Schooner Cove
We needed somebody to swim underneath to check the propeller for lines or kelp. Rob had a go, but remember that the water is totally black with button-grass peat, and he couldn’t see anything. Shien, our cold-water specialist, got kitted out with fins and mask while we rigged a hand-line under the boat. She was easily able to hold her breath in the cold dark deeps, but was handicapped by never having seen the underside of a yacht. Each time she came up, I tried to make sense of what she was feeling with her hands, and attempted to explain how the rudder and propeller were arranged, while worrying that she was going to smack her head against some unseen sharp edge. She was starting to weaken with the cold and went down for one last attempt. There was a delay of nearly a minute, and then up she popped, triumphant. She had found the propeller, and had turned it freely in both directions.
John and Pieter had been labouring in the engine room, which although nicely appointed, is still a hot and cramped space to work. The obvious target was the impeller, but the housing was partly hidden behind a loosely hanging pack of electronics, and not at all easy to get to.
Eventually they got to the impeller, which of course was jammed solid onto its shaft, and it took some effort to finally prise it out.
It was completely shattered.
Silver Fern’s impeller, not looking too great
Looking closely at the impeller, I found that it was a cheap copy. This was odd, considering that there were half a dozen genuine spares aboard, any of which could surely have been used at the last service, but there we were.
We certainly hadn’t found all of the missing blades; presumably some of them were inside the heat exchanger. We hooked up the anchor-locker deck-wash and led the hose all the way aft down to the engine room (it only just reached!) and reverse-flushed the exchanger. Several large chunks dropped into the inspection tank until it ran clear.
Then it was simply a matter of sliding a new impeller onto the shaft…
Perhaps two hours later, the new impeller was still only half way into the housing. John and Pieter had improvised an ingenious compression clamp from cable ties and a filter strap, and it had worked up to a point, but there just wasn’t enough space to get any leverage. They came up for air, and I climbed in to have a look.
I have probably fitted more impellers than anybody else aboard, and muttering the twin mantras “If in doubt, find a bigger hammer” and “give me long enough lever, and I can move the world”, I went hunting for something that would work. Eventually I put together a kit comprising a long steel bar, a socket of about the right diameter, a sizeable piece of wood, and – of course – a very large hammer. The impeller took one look and slid gracefully into place.
And because nothing is easy, on the way in I must have snagged a lead, which had torn away from the earth rail. Simple enough to solder a new connection, but the ship’s electrical toolkit had vanished. While the crew turned the lockers upside down in the cabins above, we were gloomily contemplating twisting some old bits of rusty wire together… but then a cry went up from the saloon and down came a complete set of soldering and crimping equipment.
She started first time, and ran at a steady 72 degrees. We emerged blinking into the daylight, to applause and a roast dinner.
The expected storm was building up outside Port Davey, but it was flat calm as we motored up Bathurst Channel. Even so, we were anticipating 35 knot winds even in these protected waters by lunchtime, so we went deep into the river system toward Bathurst Harbour to find a good anchorage.
On either side of us reared stark rocky hillsides, brushed with startling patches of the white quartzite schist which is a feature of these parts.
Quartzite schist exposures
The water itself is dark brown from the acidic peat of the ubiquitous buttongrass, a dark freshwater layer above the salt, forming a shaded haven beneath for species that would normally be confined to the ocean depths. When we arrived, the dark surface had been recently stirred, and was punctuated by white chunks of flocculent bigger than my fist.
The black water is caused by acidic run-off from the button-grass
We anchored in King’s Cove, looking up at the steep slopes of Mount Beattie, which stands a little over 200m above sea level. On the other side of the channel rears Mount Rugby, well over 700m high.
The crew were tired after our night passage, and so after a leisurely breakfast, we relaxed until lunch. Pieter and Shien went for a swim, then Pieter and I pottered around fixing various hinges and catches that had come loose during the passage.
Mt Beattie
We had read in the anchorage guides that there were trails up both of the nearby mountains, so after lunch, a few of us took the dinghy to shore to tackle the smaller one as a ‘practice run’ for the larger.
Mount Beattie beckons
The path was a bit notional in places, but sloped steadily upwards through the buttongrass, and stands of flowering honeymirtle and swampheath.
Forging a trailPink SwampheathSilver Fern at anchor in Kings Cove, Bathurst HarbourLooking back from Mt Beattie toward Claytons CornerAt the summit of Mt Beattie, with Mt Rugby in the background
The weather started to bluster, so we scurried back to the boat, made some dinner and opened some wine. Rain set in. We had some more wine. The sky turned angry purple. Liv said she would only put ‘Purple Rain’ on the stereo if we all sang along…
Mount Rugby
We made a gentle start to the morning, eating breakfast and then putting together stuffed wraps for lunch. Up came the anchor, and we motored around to a small bay to the North of Bathurst Channel, which put us within dinghy-strike of the path up Mount Rugby.
The climb is hard and unrelenting, on wet buttongrass peat. The path appears to be kept open largely by wombats rather than people, so each step is a choice between putting one foot directly in front of the other in a narrow boggy crack, or of hopping from side-to-side hoping that you don’t slip. Some stretches can only be navigated bent over double through scraggy forest.
A deceptively easy startLiv and John in a copse
Thankfully the hillside was lined with small sturdy trees, so we hauled ourselves up hand-over-hand, slipping and sliding in the treacherous mud, until we reached a small outcrop of quartzite that was level with the summit of yesterday’s Mount Beattie.
With spectacular and unobstructed views of the whole 150-square-kilometre expanse of Port Davey / Bathurst Harbour, we knew that we were the only vessel in this incredible untouched wilderness. It was a surprise, then, to hear an unfamiliar voice and then to see an unfamiliar face. A young couple strode into view. “Where on earth did you come from?” I asked.
They explained that they were the pilots of a charter plane which had just dropped a handful of clients at the Melaleuca airstrip (a short band of crushed quartzite occasionally visible in the distance). They had a few hours to kill and had borrowed a spare boat from their company, and thought that if they made haste they could get up and down the mountain before their clients returned. I stepped off the path to let them through, and off they scampered, making me feel old and slow.
Back in the real world, the going got harder, every foot placement necessarily more intricate. Often the track was obscured by tufts of button grass, so you never knew if your questing foot would encounter solid rock, slippery mud, or a quartzite slurry akin to quicksand. At about a hundred vertical metres from the summit, we stopped for a breather and a bite to eat.
View of the distant anchoragePandaniMountain Needlebush
After that, the trail got really difficult. Every step was steeply upward, either on mud, tree root, or quartzite. Some of the route was bouldering, some genuine rock-climbing, particularly closer to the summit where we were climbing over or crawling under huge fallen boulders.
Attempting an interesting traverse, I encountered the pilots on their way back down. Spreadeagled against the quartzite and reaching for a toe-hold, I glanced up as the lady slid down on her bottom and the man slipped in mud and tumbled down the slope. “I’m getting too old for this shit,” I joked. The man looked ruefully at this mud-stained trousers. “Youth isn’t helping me at all!” he said, before sliding down the next section.
I’d been dawdling, playing on the rocks and taking photos of the plant life, but eventually caught up with the vanguard of our group, who had stopped to rest on a large flat rock. However, the summit was within sight, so I clambered up the final stretch, and found myself standing at the top of the world.
The views were truly astonishing. Most of our crew have travelled extensively, and we all agreed that the 360-degree vista from the top of Mount Rugby was equal to anything we’d seen, anywhere. Click here for a 360 degree movie.
Views from the summit of Mount RugbyThe crew at the summit of Mount Rugby
It had taken us three hours to reach the summit, and it took us another three to get down again. Going down was, arguably, even harder than coming up. Visibility of the steep and occluded path was even worse from above, with the added complication that our feet had stirred up the mud on the way up.
We fell, and fell again. Sitting or lying on the undergrowth and contemplating the sky for the umpteenth time, it was sobering to reflect on how easy it would be to sprain or even to break something, but we made it almost to the bottom in relative safety.
Close to the bottom, just above the anchorage, is a small subsidiary peak. For reasons that remain obscure, John and Rob and I set off to climb it while the others continued on down to the boat.
There was not even the hint of a path, and the going was very hard through low-growing scrub and soft wet peat. We fell, and we bled, and we fell again, but once more the views were rewarding.
Looking back up at Mount Rugby
Back aboard Silver Fern, we motored back around the corner to Kings Cove. We were expecting a big wet storm and we already know that the holding was good and that Mount Beattie provided protection from the West. A hearty dinner, a few glasses of wine, and then we all drifted exhausted to bed.
We woke with the dawn at our anchorage in Deephole Bay, to confirm that the tiny predicted weather-window for our westerly run to Port Davey was holding steady. The three of us that enjoy a cold-water swim were treated to clear skies and a beautiful sunrise.
Sunrise over the d’Entrecasteaux Channel from Deephole Bay
We weighed anchor and ate breakfast as we motor-sailed out past Southport Bluff, site of yesterday’s hiking, and with views up to the King George monument that John and I bumped into yesterday. It was a lovely day for a sail.
Brendon avoiding the reefs and hidden rocks
Threading our way between some private fishing boats, Deepwater Bank, and the ominously named Black Reef, we turned inland around the bluff and anchored in Recherche Bay. We could see snow on top of Arthur’s Peak that hadn’t been there yesterday, but were now positioned in the most Southerly safe anchorage that we could find.
At anchor in Recherche Bay
Consulting the forecast, we were excited to see that the Westerlies out in the Southern Ocean were predicted to abate overnight, picking up again tomorrow at midday. We settled on a plan to start our westerly passage at dusk.
What to do in the meantime? How about a nice picnic on the beach?
Silver Fern crew, November 2024, at Recherche Bay
Recherche Bay
We had the rest of the day to kill. We found a path behind the beach, which led to a statue of a whale and a 1792 quotation from Admiral Bruni d’Entrecasteaux:
It would be vain of me to attempt to describe my feelings when I beheld this lonely harbour lying at the world’s end, separated as it were from the rest of the universe – ’twas nature and nature in her wildest mood…
We were enjoying a similar state of mind when we were surprised to encounter a gaggle of tourists, so there must be a road somewhere close by to “world’s end”. We also bumped into a pair of grey nomads who were attempting to walk the trail to Fisherman’s Point, which seemed as good a plan as any, so a few of us set off behind them along the marked path.
The track was only indifferently signposted, and much of it was below the tideline of the beach. After a number of false turnings, the people in front gave up, but we ploughed on, just enjoying the views and the sunshine.
Recherche Bay
At length we arrived at the point, marked by a light and some cairns. A few steps inland was a ruined building, apparently once part of a pair of infamous pubs, both called the Sawyers Arms. Today there were only some brick walls, some lilies, and a rather surprised black Tiger Snake which swiftly slipped away to shelter.
On to Port Davey!
As dusk fell, we secured Silver Fern for sea, hoisted the main, and poked our nose out of the heads. The persistent westerly gale had, as promised, died away. Perhaps ironically, this gave us no wind to sail with, but we had plenty of fuel and a big engine and a short window of safety to get around the South Capes. Motor-sailing, we took it.
Time to go!On whale watch
To lead us on our way, a pair of humpback whales, probably mother and calf, breached off the bow, played around for a while, then swam beneath us to pop up astern. A little later, a lone dolphin caught up to investigate. An albatross took station, swinging endless circles around us as we motored into the light swell.
Darkness slowly fell. It wasn’t my watch, but I stayed up anyway to see the sunset and enjoy the feel of the ocean. Venus rose, followed by the first stars. At 8pm I was joined by the rest of C Watch for our official two-hour stint, rounding South Cape and setting course for the Maatsuyker Islands.
Rounding South Cape
At the end of our watch, we grabbed some bunk time and were woken as planned by A Watch at 2am, to calm seas and a diamond-dusting of stars glittering over our phosphorescent wake. Every now and then, we caught a flash of white as our albatross crossed in front of our running lights.
I always revel in a night passage, but this was a first for my watch-mates Ange and Mish. We soon got them set up with blankets, cushions and (just in case) sick bags, and I think that in the end they enjoyed it.
Silver Fern, like most modern boats I suppose, is equipped with a touch-screen electronic chart at the helm. This gives the helmsman a clear moment-by-moment picture of the entire situation, with instant overlays of radar, AIS, and a whole host of systems information available to the fingertip (except, in our case, for wind instruments, which were all out of commission due to a wiring fault). In the past, I have been used to regular forays down to the chart table to check that we are where we are supposed to be, and to commit to memory any upcoming reefs or shallows before my next visit below, clinging to the chart table and trying not to vomit while attempting to focus on blurred marks on fiendishly furling paper… I found that I didn’t miss it.
Just as our watch finished at 4am, the barometer fell by 4hPa and the stars forward started to haze over. According to standing orders, any fall of more than 1hPa per hour triggers waking the skipper, so we got John out of bed and then, feeling slightly guilty, went down to our bunks.
I woke naturally at 6am and made my way onto deck, to find that we had passed through Port Davey and were cruising up Bathurst Channel.
Sunrise over Port DaveyEntering Bathurst Channel
The weather was still fine. The falling barometer had presumably just been heralding the forecast change later in the day, but it didn’t matter what happened now, there are endless safe anchorages within Bathurst Harbour. We had made it!
Lifting Silver Fern’s anchor and sailing out of Quarantine Bay, we emerged into 30+ knot winds gusting 40. With a reef in the main and flying the staysail we were still overpowered. Before long, the staysail developed a big hole and we quickly replaced it with a tough orange storm jib. Thankfully we’d replaced a broken reefing line yesterday, so we were able to put another two reefs in the main until she was able to balance on the autohelm, and then we had a fun and breezy sail down to Southport.
Slightly overpoweredShien’s expression…Our mate Liv
Deephole Bay, Southport
As we sailed round Pelican Island and dropped the anchor in Deephole Bay, Stuart noticed that Southport on the other side of the bay was home to the Southernmost Pub in Australia. There was nothing for it, then, but to winch the dinghy into the water and (after first remembering to replace the bung… whoops…) motor across.
Ange, Rob and Stuart at the Southernmost Pub in AustraliaRob and I share a dropJohn ferries us homeSilver Fern at Deephole Bay
On arrival aboard Silver Fern, we were delighted to find that B Watch had had a lamb roasting in the oven all afternoon.
“B” Watch in the galley
Southport Lagoon
The next day dawned, and we eagerly checked the weather in the Southern Ocean. It was not looking fun at all, we’d have been beating directly into 40+ knots for our Westerly passage. The weather was fine here in Deep Pool Bay, though, so we hopped into the dinghy and went ashore to explore the local lagoon.
There was a path of sorts behind Deephole Bay beach, which wound its slightly muddy way between stringy gums, she-oaks and melaleuca. Native flowers were out in force, and there was evidence that the track was maintained at least in part by Tasmanian Devils.
The crew had separated naturally into two groups, depending on whether they had arrived in the first or second dinghy shuttle. The path split at a marked sign, and the first group headed for the bluffs, whereas our group headed for the lagoon.
Pieter makes a decision
The lagoon was quiet and pretty, the water brackish and peaty and fenced around with a continuous beach of small shells. In the South, mountains loomed, with a hint of the bad weather behind them, but here at the lagoon it was warm and still.
Southport Lagoon
After returning to the boat for lunch, a few of us came back to the lagoon. Skipper John is always up for an expedition, and he and I mused that surely there must be a way to hike around the lagoon and over the dunes, meeting up with the path to the bluffs.
Without much preparation or forethought, off we went. The going was reasonable until we reached the dunes backing on to Southport Bluff Beach. There wasn’t any obvious way down through the tangle of densely packed trees, let alone up the other side, and we couldn’t even see the ground through the thick underbrush. Remembering the method that Tasmanian icons Tim Christie and Reg Williams used to forge the Three Capes Track, I hurled myself onto the top of the foliage, rolled down the hill and then crawled up through the tree tops until I reached the top of the dune. It wasn’t easy, but the view was worth it.
Southport Bluff from Southport Bluff Beach
Safely on the beach, we reflected that the one thing that we hadn’t seen was any sign of the path from the bluff to the boat. We looked back at the dune, and really didn’t feel like retracing our steps to try to find it. But we were on one side of a peninsula, and we knew that the boat was on the other side, perhaps we should try walking cross-country over the middle. What could possibly go wrong?
The first part was easy, along a pretty beach. A small cliff rose up, but we skirted the edge of it, and found ourselves at the monument to the George III, a convict ship that sank here in 1838 with heavy losses. From the monument we reckoned that we should be able to find a path, but there was none visible, and we later found that this was because the monument has been closed to the public for some years, something that wasn’t apparent when approaching from our unusual direction.
So… faced with miles of peat bogs and thorny underbrush, and armed only with confidence and a cheerful demeanour, we set off.
Visually, it looked like waist-high tussock grass. In detail, each tussock was defended by sharp woody brush, and separated by deep peaty puddles. We came to recognise the boggiest areas by the colour of the foliage, and yomped over ridge and gully, aiming for the treeline behind which we knew Silver Fern must lie at anchor.
Finally, weary and with aching thighs, we clambered up the final slope. John couldn’t wait, and forged ahead to enjoy the view from the top. I stumbled along in his wake and toiled my way up behind.
John was standing stock still, apparently admiring the view. “What do you see, young man?” I called out, as I topped the brow. Then we both broke down in helpless laughter; there was nothing ahead but yet another boggy expanse of tussock grass to yet another distant ridge.
We did eventually make it across to the beach, where the rest of the crew had set up a sundowner fire near an old railway platform, part of a disused rail network designed to move limestone from Ida Bay quarries to vessels berthed in Deephole Bay.
Terminus of the Ida Bay to Deephole Bay quarry lineSundowners on Deephole Beach
After a certain amount of beer and wine, we returned to the Silver Fern for dinner, and to check the wind forecast. We thought that we could see the hint of a tiny weather window opening up between two low-pressure systems spinning up from Antarctica. The picture wasn’t clear yet, but tomorrow we would move South again, edging closer to the Southern Ocean.
For my significant birthday this year, I have gifted myself a sailing trip into the Southern Ocean with Ocean Sailing Expeditions. Our aim was to sail from Sandy Bay near Hobart, Tasmania, down the d’Entrecasteaux Channel into the Southern Ocean, around the South and South-West Capes and then up to Bathurst Bay and hopefully on to Macquarie Harbour.
The rest of the crew were flying in from the mainland, but the expedition yacht Silver Fern was moored only a hundred metres away from my own Cheval de Mer, so on the appointed afternoon I strolled across and gave a hail.
Skipper John popped his head out, and almost immediately I found myself repairing a broken flag mount. Over the afternoon the other seven paying crew members arrived, along with the yacht’s mate Liv. Everybody seemed interesting and agreeable, and together we fitted the furling genoa which had just come back from being repaired. At some point in its life, it had been converted from a regular genoa, and thus had far more batten pockets than you might expect, aligned in different directions, but in the end we got it sorted. Unfortunately it was clear that there were still some areas that were worn out, so we’ll have to hope for the best in the Roaring Forties.
Getting the battens inShe’ll be right
The next task was to hank on the staysail, which was an easier job, but it soon became clear that the sail itself was full of holes so we took it off again and replaced it with an orange storm jib.
Having been assigned our bunks and our safety gear, we assembled a chicken risotto dinner, washed it down with beer and wine, and then popped out to the local pub for a pint.
The crew retired to quarters. My bunk is in the bow, upper starboard. Instead of a lee cloth, the upper bunks have pulleys that allow them to be folded up at an angle, trapping the occupant safely in a small space against the hull when at sea. I’d not seen that configuration before, and while it seemed practical, I wondered how much space would be left for me and how I would ever get out again.
Forepeak cabin. My bunk is top right.Mid cabin
The bedding consists of a sheet and a single thin blanket. We had previously been assured by the owner that the temperature below is maintained at a steady 21 degrees, but in fact the boat is unheated and next morning those of us who had not packed sleeping bags woke shivering. Presumably the owner is used to the South Pacific and has not encountered Tasmanian conditions.
Luckily, as the token Tasmanian aboard, I still had access to my car, so I drove a bunch of us in to the Hobart camping shops to purchase sleeping bags and fleeces.
The tasks for the morning began with a trip to the fuel dock to fill the tanks with fuel and water. She’s a big boat – seventy-two feet – and the wind was up and the crew untested, but with the help of the bow thruster and willing hands, we warped her in. I was given the task of checking the spare jerry-cans lashed to the deck, and found that they were nearly all empty, so we fixed that.
To Quarantine Bay
Out in the Derwent, we practiced our man-overboard procedure on a sacrificial fender. With a big boat like this, you can’t crash-gybe and stop dead in the water and haul the casualty back over the rail. The boom itself weighs several tonnes and you really don’t want it moving quickly, and the freeboard is far too high to reach somebody in the water. The plan was to drop the sails and motor back to the victim, winch Pieter in a waterproof survival suit into the water to grab them, and then winch them both out. It all worked rather well.
Approaching the “casualty”Bringing the “casualty” aboard
On the way down the Derwent to Bruny Island, we spent some time getting used to Silver Fern. The steering wheel is connected to the rudder by means of hydraulic rams, which give no feedback at all to the helm. The only way to understand the rudder angle is to keep an eye on the electronic display on the binnacle. Generally it seemed that the easiest way to steer was to use the controls on the auto helm.
While hoisting the main, it had quickly become clear that the first reefing line had lost its integrity, with the core separated from the sheath and about as much use as a wet noodle. On the way in to Quarantine Bay, with the main still up, we spent about an hour replacing it. We needed to attach a new line to the end of the old one and thread it through the system, but there wasn’t enough room to get a splice through the pulleys, so we needed to sew the two ropes together. This took a few attempts, but luckily Mish had been a trauma nurse and was a dab hand with the needle.
Mish sewing the lines togetherForedeckies sorting the lines
Finally we dropped the pick in Quarantine Bay in North Bruny Island, not so very far from our starting point but with a lot of essential tasks under our collective belt. The bay promised shelter from the current northerly and the forecast westerlies.
The anchorage was calm and comfortable, and in the morning Shien, Pieter and myself dropped into the water for a refreshing ocean swim.
Shien’s morning cold-water swim
Breakfast was a free-for-all from the available ingredients, but once we had cleared up, we all separated into our assigned watches. We have three watches, with a four-hour rota during the day, which is more about cleaning and food preparation than navigation, and two-hour cockpit watches if on passage overnight.
Ange on the daily vacuumPieter washing up
Then it was time for passage planning. Up until now, we only had a vague plan that we would head South, round the South Capes and then try to spend some time up the West coast in Bathurst Bay or Macquarie Harbour or both, but we knew that there were a bunch of fast-moving lows in the Southern Ocean.
Silver Fern has a Starlink internet connection, so we use Windy to forecast the pressure systems. Usually this displays average wind speeds, but for the Southern Ocean’s extreme conditions it is more helpful to use the gust overlay. On the Windy snapshot below, pinky purple is around 40 knots and blue is around 60 knots. It is clear that we won’t be going West into the teeth of the storm today, but there is potential for a gap opening up around Tuesday.
We settled on a plan. We would squeeze as far South as we could manage while remaining in the sheltered d’Entrecasteaux Channel, and wait for a weather window.
Our nominal driveway junction exits onto a nominal road. Both of these have been variously constructed and reconstructed over time, both by myself and by the farmer on the other side of the road.
I have never been entirely happy with the initial turn-off into my property, which is fine for my Land Cruiser but not traversable by lesser vehicles. I’d taken some advice from a proper landscape engineer, and the junction needed to be reshaped to be less of a curve and more of a ninety-degree turn-off. I had hired an excavator for the weekend to sort out the creek crossing, so I seized the opportunity to do something about the junction, too.
An early attempt to ease the camber of the driveway junction in 2021Driveway to the left, nominal road to the right
Part of the problem was the nominal road. Why do I call it ‘nominal’? Before I purchased the property, this end of the official road existed only on a map. On the ground, there were only a winter creek and lots of trees. I asked a friend with a bulldozer to push the road across the creek and about half way up the hill, giving access to a small track into my property. Much later, I had a new driveway cut on a better route, and at the same time my farming neighbour pushed the nominal road further, over the hill between our properties and down the other side. This gave him fire trail access to some of his farther fields; you can see the extended road to the right of the photo above. The road is fine in itself, but it is steeply sloping clay and it sheds water across my driveway junction, washing away and undercutting the exit.
The other part of the problem was that the gravelly surface of the turn was heavily cambered and just too darn steep for a two-wheel-drive car to navigate.
I decided on a two-pronged approach. Firstly, I would try to reshape the junction to make it easier to navigate, and secondly, I would put a French drain across my driveway exit and pipe it all the way down the hill to the creek.
I used the digger to remove the upper edge of the curve, to straighten it out so that the driveway met the road at right-angles instead of curving into it. Then I used a mixture of forest earth, spall, road base and blue metal – basically whatever came to hand – and raised the level of the driveway junction by about a third of a metre.
Road base mixed with ‘organic stuff’ Raising the surface of the driveway, to make the junction less steep
This photo gives quite a good perspective of how much I lifted my driveway junction above its original height.
Since the treads of the excavator have a tendency to rip up the surface, I tamped down the surface by repeatedly towing a trailer full of rocks over it.
Tamping down the surface
So far, so good!
Now that I was happy with the height of driveway junction, I dug it up again to put in a French drain.
Digging it back up again!
At around this point, my friend Pete arrived with a shovel, which made things go a lot faster because I could focus on driving the excavator, loading Pete’s trailer and barrow, and pointing at things.
We took advantage of the natural rain gully that had formed on the upper side of the driveway, and teed it into a trench that we dug coming down from the top road. This part is a proper deep French drain lined with 20mm aggregate and containing a sleeved and slotted ag-pipe. There’s a bit of excess sticking out in this photo which has since been cut off.
Two French drains come down from left and right and meet undergroundThis drain (pale rock) used to be the steep driveway, but now will be re-wilded
Pete and I were pretty tired now, so we set up camp for the night, ate steak and drank negronis by the fire, and then retreated to Pete’s van when the heavens opened.
Pete enjoying the wet and windy night
We wondered if all our hard work would be washed away by the torrent, but in the morning both the creek crossing and the half-finished French drain had coped admirably.
Back on the tools, we led the combined run-off from both French drains all the way down the road to the creek. I didn’t put quite so much effort into digging and lining this channel, as it’s nice and steep and exists only to move the water down the side of the road.
In fact, by the time we (well, Pete) had shovelled our way halfway down the hill, we were knackered and called it a day.
Rough channel at the bottomDropping in the ag-pipe
In the event, other projects intervened, and it wasn’t until some six months later that I was able to return to finish up. Even with just bare ag-pipe for the bottom stretch, it was clear that the French drains at the top were working as there was no erosion across the driveway junction and equally no erosion down at the creek.
Hand-selected blue spall from my 10 tonne pileNone of this has washed out……but I’ll protect it anyway
On this second visit, everything had to be done by hand, because the bottom stretch is so steep that it makes working with an excavator quite tricky. I had hoped to rent a skid-steer but the rental place told me that theirs wouldn’t be able to work across the slope, so it was out with the rake and shovel.
I had Duggans quarry deliver another 12 tonnes of 20mm drainage aggregate. I had kind of hoped that they would be able to pour it out of one side of the truck as they drove up the hill, so that I could simply rake it sideways into the trench. That wasn’t an option, but the driver did a great job of backing across the road and dropping the load in a series of piles to make my life easier.
Great piles of aggregateThe trench is finally filled
The raking and shovelling was still a lot of work and it took me all of the morning. Once I’d finished the bottom half, leaving some excess on top as I had nowhere to put it (I’ll put up road markers to stop people from driving on the crunchy bit), I still had quite a few tonnes of aggregate left over about half way up the slope. I tried to barrow it up the hill but it’s far too steep to push. I could have got the trailer and shovelled it in, but it had already been a long hard day and the gravel isn’t going anywhere, so I’ll save that task for another day.
On holiday in England, we stopped at a chemist in the country town of Aylesbury, to buy some Olay skin products. There was an entire short aisle given over to Olay, but the shelves were completely empty, and had been replaced by a sign directing us to enquire with staff.
I located the manager, resplendent in her thick blue shopwalkers dress, who told me that all Olay products were now hidden, because they were continually being targeted by shoplifters. She mentioned ten thousand pounds a week in losses, and the ineffectiveness of hired security guards who refused to tackle knife-wielding teenagers.
The manager further told me that the products were now only available from behind a particular cash till. We waited in line until it was our turn at the correct till, and asked the waif-thin and malnourished girl in the ill-fitting blouse to help us out. She was eager to help, but it turned out not to be as simple as we might have expected.
The Olay products were not in fact behind the till, but hidden away in a locked store-room on a different floor. The till girl had no specimen jars, no list of products, and clearly no idea what the products even looked like.
We all did our best, trying to describe different coloured jars that we vaguely remembered from previous years, and pointing at pictures from the internet, as the queue grew longer behind us. Each time we managed to explain a product, she locked her her till, extracted a bunch of keys from their safe place, disappeared upstairs to the back room, and then returned either empty-handed or with something quite different. We went through several cycles of this, before giving up and shopping somewhere else.
It slowly dawned on me that everybody we encountered in England this year was being angrily nice, even offensively nice. Being originally English myself, I am conversant with the classic art form of being simultaneously rude and polite, and perhaps my long years of living abroad have made me more sensitive to it, but it seemed to me that there was now an extra edge of anger.
Perhaps it is a feature of the surveilled and terrorised world that the English now seem to inhabit. Signs and announcements everywhere with the tagline ‘See it. Say it. Sorted’. Numbers to call if you see anything suspicious. Continuous exhortation to dob in your fellow countryman, and endless cameras everywhere, pointing at everything.
Ask for any item in a shop, not just missing Olay products, and the response is always immediate and lengthy and yet strangely unhelpful. First, a complaint, a railing against some aspect of life that has sadly rendered your question necessary in the first place. Then a convoluted explanation of the circumstances, politely given but with an edge that suggests firmly that you should already know this. The fact that you do not is inherently suspicious, and you have the feeling that at any moment they might turn and denounce you for being an outsider.
Then, finally, an answer to your question, which is always technically accurate but also in some sense lacking, so that you are left wiser to the intricacies of the situation and to the personal woes of your interlocutor, but no closer to your goal, such as perhaps locating the bread aisle.
Everybody I meet is polite, but wary. The tension is continuous, reminiscent perhaps of wartime. Nobody meets your eyes in the street. There are endless signs and announcements, endless new and apparently pointless rules. You can carry a bicycle here, but not there. Unless it’s this particular kind of bicycle. Just definitely not that kind. And don’t ask, you are supposed to know already.
Loose lips sink ships. See anything suspicious? See it. Say it. Sorted.
I have finally come to that part of the rebuild process where I have dealt with all the big stuff – the engine and the windows and the larger leaks – and can focus on fixing the little things.
The Switch Panel
I had already spent some time already tracing mysterious electric lines around the interior, stripping out the unused ones and labelling the useful ones. One of the tasks that I kept putting off was to decipher the switch panel, because behind it was just a huge ball of loose wires. It was impossible to get my hand in to unthread them, because all the earth leads had been wired into a single brass block that lived in the middle of the snarl.
Snarl behind the switch panelEvery single earth went to this
One sunny day, I arrived with my soldering iron, some reels of wire, and a lot of patience, and began to unravel.
The reason for the snarl was that, although generally the wiring on the boat is sound, it had had decades of additions and changes, every one of which had all been led back to the same switch panel (and especially to the same earth block).
I slowly traced all the wires, and labelled each one, and excised excess cable and replaced it where it was a bit short. I made up a wooden board with more earth blocks than I will ever need, so that each earth wire is separate from the others and easy to distinguish.
No beauty prizes, but that’ll doJust need to secure the panel
Cheval’s Eyes
Cheval has these lovely old chromed navigation lights on either side of the bow. The lenses are faded, the starboard one is smashed, and neither of them are connected to the electrics, having been replaced by a modern unit on the pulpit.
Nevertheless, I rather like them, so one day I took them off and had a think about how I could make them look a bit better (and less leaky).
My first task was to fix the starboard lens, which was broken. I had some Pinkysil silicone left over from another project, so I made a mould of the inside of the port lens. Then I strapped the broken lens into the mould, and filled the whole thing up with F-190 polyurethane.
Of course, the starboard lens was now solid instead of being a transparent shell, but this was fine because I wasn’t going to use them as navigation lights. In any event, the lenses were so degraded from decades of sun that they had barely any colour.
I popped out the repaired shell, and – after quite a bit of experimentation to find something that would stick to both acrylic and polyurethane – discovered some spray paints that gave a bright finish, and gave them a few coats.
MendedPainted (nearly)Modelling the new eyesCheval de Mer’s eyes are back in place
Leaky Lazarette
The locker hatches in the cockpit will, naturally, allow rainwater to seep in along the hinge line and down the edges. There are supposed to be drainage channels to catch it and shed it into the cockpit sole, but some of them had rotted completely away, allowing rainwater to drain into the bilges underneath the engine. This would have been part of the problem that caused my oil leak.
Some new wood, a lot of elbow-grease, some industrial glue, and some left-over window sealant saved the day.
We went away for 7 weeks and came back, and the bilges were bone-dry.
Keeping it Tidy
I bought some No-Wear chafe guards to protect my new paintwork. They are flexible stainless steel with a strong adhesive backing, so you can mould them to the shape of your boat. Handy if you don’t have hard gunwales, and your boat is made from soft plastic.
I added some rope bags and a solar-powered extractor fan…
The final touches of deck paint
I’ve been slowly moving around the deck, checking fittings and filling holes, applying two-pack undercoat, and finally finishing off with either Kiwi-Grip textured non-slip deck paint, or Norglass Weatherfast gloss enamel. It looks OK, I think.
She just needs some soft furnishings, a bigger solar panel, and dinghy davits. She’s almost good to go!
Long-suffering readers of this blog will remember that I have spent a lot of time over the years working on the creek crossing at the bottom of my access road. Since the last road rebuild, a lot of wash has come down from the neighbouring farm, and has eroded both the road and the causeway. In addition, my neighbours have dammed the winter creek upstream for their sheep, which changed the character of the creek from slow seepage to a more continual flow. I needed to install some drainage pipes to protect the road surface.
One fine weekend, I arrived on site with a trailer-load of drainage pipes, and a digger from Mal’s Hire. In preparation for the delivery of several truck-loads of material from Duggan’s Quarry, my daughter had painted up a lot of helpful signs. I doubt that the quarry drivers were accustomed to such artistry, but they certainly obeyed the instructions.
The creek crossing was originally built about ten years ago using a base layer of tree trunks, then aggregate, then soil. It has worked well for most of this time, but a combination of clay filtering down into the wooden sublayer and increased water flow from the neighbouring farm’s new dams, has meant that some water runs over the top and has a tendency to wash away the surface of the road.
The winter creek fills and then seeps across the causeway
Digging away the substrate by hand would have been a thankless task, but the digger made it easy.
Starting on the drainage trench
Before long, I dropped in some drainage pipes, and got instant gratification in the form of the creek diverting through the pipe and out onto my property.
I finished off with 20mm drainage aggregate, and made good with excess mud and stone. It was still pretty boggy – after all, the mud was already saturated – but I left it alone to give it a chance to dry.
Loading the trailer with 20mm drainage aggregate
Hopefully all that mud will dry off…
That night, I put up my tent and cooked myself a nice supper by the fire.
All’s well that ends well
On the following day, I had other things to do with the digger, so it wasn’t til later that I got to have a look at the creek crossing.
It was still boggy.
This was when I discovered that there was a second flow of water coming down from another new dam in the farm next door. It was running invisibly under the ferns and then draining across the creek crossing, slightly higher up the slope. I couldn’t see it before, because the whole thing was wet, but now that the bottom half had drained, it was obvious.
It was far too wet to bring in the digger, which would have just churned everything up, so a couple of us dug out a rough new ditch by hand.
It originally looked like a seep, but once we’d dug a channel, there was a significant amount of water, which we lead down to the drainage pipe that I’d put in the day before.
Surprise seepage from the new damPipe entrance, creek flow lower, dam upper
The ditch is a bit impromptu and unlined, but I didn’t really want to start landscaping on my neighbour’s side of the road, and anyway we were tired.
Four months later, everything was looking just fine.
I spent an extra day shovelling in a layer of 20mm aggregate and topped it with blue spall to keep out falling debris.
Each cabin complex on the Three Capes Track has an identical dorm setup, so every night I was sharing with the same people in a carbon-copy of the same dorm cabin. As usual, I had claimed the bunk that nobody else wanted, in the darkest corner farthest from the door, which I crawled into like a yacht’s berth. This gave me my own corner of darkness while the rest of the guys were bumbling around with their bright head torches.
I am sure that head torches are wonderfully useful for those who choose not to let their eyes become accustomed to the dark, but I find them annoying in company because humans are always moving their heads, looking around, momentarily distracted by any noise or motion, and shining their lights into the eyes of anybody they want to talk to. At least with a small pencil torch, it remains focussed on the task in hand, and doesn’t bother anyone else.
I woke as usual six hours after going to sleep, in this case at one in the morning. Rather than get up, I just lay and listened to the wind hammering past outside. The forecast was for a blustery day with 50km/h gusts, and it certainly sounded like it as the occasional flurry of rain pattered on the tin roof.
By seven, I was up and about and making Aeropress coffee. What a fine device this is; lightweight, neat, unbreakable, and capable of quickly extracting every last millilitre of caffeine from a few spoonfuls of grounds. The second-most common comment on my travel kit this week has been, “Oh I wish I’d brought my Aeropress too” (the most common comment was, “Oh I wish I’d brought wine and rum too…”)
The fourth day of the Three Capes Track is acknowledged to be ‘the hard day’. Not only does it begin with the climb to the top of Mount Fortescue, a vertical rise of just under 250 metres, but it also has the psychological stressor of a scheduled bus waiting at the end of the walk to take us back to Port Arthur. We had booked on the later of the two buses, but nevertheless, the timetable was a niggle at the back of the mind.
There was rain in the cold and blustery air. We donned our waterproofs and set off. The showery weather matched well with the ecology of this side of the mountain, which tended to drippy rainforest and ferns and moss.
A nice pellet fire before we goReady for the mountainUp the steps to Mt FortescueStill climbing
The climb wasn’t as bad as advertised, although there were a lot of steps and it got a bit tiring. However, there were many mosses and ferns to look at, and when we finally got to the top, good although misty views back to yesterday’s Cape Pillar.
Mossy trees on Mount FortescueLooking back to Cape Pillar, from Mount Fortescue
The rain forest environment was quite different from the Banksia and She-Oak ecology that we had experienced on Cape Pillar. There were no Spring flowers here in the gloom, but instead an abundance of ferns and mosses.
Tasmanian Soft Tree FernTree fern overheadShiny Filmy-FernKangaroo Fern
We followed the path across the top of Mount Fortescue, and then steps leading down the other side. Abruptly, we emerged from the rain forest into young stands of Sassafras trees
Down the other sideInto the Sassafras
From here, we quickly dropped to a cliff-side path with the more familiar impenetrable jungle of bush plants, scattered with Spring flowers.
Looking back toward Mount FortescuePouched Coral-FernOyster Bay PineCaterpillar Acacia (I think)No idea what this is
The rain had died off, but now the wind picked up. It got pretty blustery out on the exposed rocky outcrops.
Windswept view back to yesterday’s Cape Pillar
Most of the Three Capes Track is private, in the sense that Parks & Wildlife only allow ticketed groups of 50 trekkers at a time, one group per cabin. The only faces that we have seen for the past three days have been familiar from our time on the trail and in the communal areas of the cabins.
The ranger at Retakunna had explicitly warned us that, near the end of Day Four, the Three Capes Track joins the public track to Cape Hauy. He mentioned that many people like to leave their packs at the junction and pick them up on their return, but pointed out that we should be mindful that – if left – they wouldn’t be as secure as we had gotten used to, because there would be other people about. In fact, when we reached the junction and encountered our first group of day-walkers, it was quite a shock to see the first face “not from our village”.
Most people left their packs anyway, wrapped in plastic to confound the currawongs, which apparently are prone to figure out zips and buckles in their quest for food. I carried mine anyway, for the same reasons as yesterday.
Bags in the bush
The wind was still gusting, but the weather was warm. The track to Cape Hauy is beautifully constructed of local stone, mainly in the form of steps. It was very pretty, but daunting to find that, whenever you turned a corner, there was more track stretching away to the horizon.
The endless steps to Cape Hauy
We followed the path until it wound its way to the summit of Cape Hauy. Buffeted by the wind, we stood and admired the dolerite stacks, the views, and some passing whales. Since Cape Hauy is a public area, there is a little guard rail around the top, something that has been deliberately omitted from the controlled parts of the Three Capes Track. Leaning on the rail, facing the mass known as the Candlestick, you can look down on the Totem Pole, popular with climbers.
The Candlestick on Cape HauyThe Totem PoleEnjoying the wind on top of Cape Hauy
The ascent of Cape Hauy really marks the end of the Three Capes Track experience. From here, it is but a gentle return to sea level at Fortescue Bay.
It had been a pleasant experience. Hardly a trek, more of a gently curated four-day amble through the bush. Parks & Wildlife have struck a careful line between tourist attraction and introductory hiking experience, with plenty of interesting tales without dumbing anything down. The paths and boardwalks are a necessary evil which insulate you and hold you aloof from the nature all around, but this is to some extent offset by the deliberate lack of signs, fences and guard rails away from the trail, which would otherwise detract from the wide sweeping vistas. The feeling of being part of a small nomadic village was a pleasant surprise, and enhanced the notion of being away from the stresses of civilisation.
Journey’s End, at Fortescue Bay
Even though we’d booked ourselves onto the late bus, we made it back to the Bay in time to catch the earlier one, but unfortunately that vehicle had been run off the road by a logging truck. Nobody was hurt, but the bus was now bogged in the roadside verge and couldn’t be moved. Pennicott Adventures did a great job of prioritising the walkers who needed to catch onward services, and used spare buses to ferry us all back to Port Arthur, tired but in good spirits.
I slept well on the second night of the Three Capes Track. I woke naturally at one in the morning, feeling refreshed, and went out for a little walk. Brush-tailed possums stared at me as I pottered about in their night-time territory. An incredibly bright star shone through the cloud layer. I wondered what it was, but it didn’t feel right to get out my phone and launch the star map, so I simply accepted its beauty and walked on.
Eventually I returned to bed, woke at dawn to light rain, and used the ingenious camp shower that I had noticed yesterday. I met Elizabeth in the kitchen and we brewed an Aeropress coffee, followed by fresh fried eggs over reconstituted Mexican beans.
One of the popular features of the third day of the Three Capes Track is that, because it is a there-and-back trip, you can store your pack in a dedicated hut and walk without it. I thought about it for a while, but in the end decided that I was perfectly happy with my pack, which was only a little over 20kg and had everything in it that I needed. I had carefully chosen its contents and I knew how to get to them instantly, so it seemed silly to try to strip it down any more. Just to show willing, I parked my sleeping bag and spare water bottle in the hut, and took everything else.
Day Three takes you out to on the narrow peninsular leading to Cape Pillar, tending to impenetrable Banksia bush on squishy mud. Reg and Tim, the locally famous bush-bashers who had spent several years breaking this trail, had found it very hard going. The ubiquitous boardwalk made it all rather easy for us.
Hurricane Heath, with views to Cape Pillar
The route is necessarily linear and windswept, and probably a bit miserable when the weather comes in, but today it was bright if overcast, and perfect for walking.
Once the path reached the Southern coastline of the Cape, it began to get rather spectacular, tending to dolomite columns and crumbling stacks.
Tasman Island hove into view, complete with lighthouse. There are harrowing stories about the difficulties of getting families and supplies up the sheer cliffs in the basket of a flying fox, before the light was automated.
Tasman Island
Almost at the end of the path, there is a short side-climb up onto The Blade, with marvellous views all around.
Steps up The BladeCape Pillar, from The BladeElizabeth on The Blade, with Tasman Island behindReinhard very pleased to have arrived at The BladeLooking back the way we have come
And now, the final short stretch to the end of the Cape Pillar Track and the Southernmost point of the Three Capes Track. But just because we were walking through dense Banksia on the thin end of a crumbling rocky peninsula, didn’t mean that there weren’t any more flowers.
Bushman’s Bootlace and Golden BushpeaGolden BushpeaMountain Pinkberry
But all good things come to an end, and our path ended here, on the cliffs above Cape Pillar.
Dolorite stacks at Cape PillarClaim Your Moment
We ate lunch on one of the stacks overlooking the sea (rice and fish again, it seems to work well), and headed back the way we had come, re-climbing The Blade on the way back (because why not?)
Day 3 was to give us one last surprise. The gentle boardwalk that we remembered lolloping effortlessly down this morning, turned out to be a long, long slope back up to Hurricane Heath, inflexibly hard stretches of boardwalk punctuated by little steps. My hip began to complain loudly for the first time today, and I sneaked some extra pain killers about half way up.
Passing Munro cabin, where we had awoken that morning, we picked up our stuff from the luggage hut, and continued on our way to Retakunna cabin, where the amenities were every bit as delightful as at Surveyors and Munro.
Relaxing at Retakunna Cabin
It got a bit cold later on, but we lit the pellet fire to warm the kitchen, then sat and drank coffee laced with rum as the rain came in over the scrubby mountain gums outside.
At the first hut of the Three Capes Track, I had a comfortable night’s rest and woke before dawn. I quietly left the cabin and limped out along the wooden boardwalk to the toilet block, which features beautifully clean dry toilets, the waste dropping into Apollo-shaped pods which are taken away by helicopter.
There was a warm desert wind blowing from the North. My hip was sore from an earlier injury but the painkillers were kicking in, so I did some gentle stretches in the pre-dawn light, and then made my way up to the helipad, which is a simple square of clean gravel at the edge of the compound, to watch the sunrise.
As the first rays of orange moved across the sky, a handful of other people slowly drifted out to stand quietly and widely separated on the pad. Each in our separate bubble of contemplation, we quietly watched the dawn of our first day on the trail. As the sun finally lifted clear of the horizon, the wind changed and brought with it a flurry of rain. Exchanging small private smiles, we sauntered slowly back to the cabins. Time for breakfast.
Elizabeth and I both like to enjoy our first meal of the day, so we had packed half a dozen fresh eggs each as a little luxury. Mine were in their cardboard carton, and one had broken, but it remained salvageable. We scrambled four eggs in ghee with cracked rice in one of the kitchen pans, served with fresh coffee from my Aeropress. Not bad at all.
We washed up, composted the shells, and packed everything else away. The weather outside had turned cool and blustery. We hoisted our packs, and set off.
The second day starts with the ascent of a double peak (Arthurs Peak / Crescent Mountain) connected by a low saddle. I was curious to see how my duff leg was going to cope. It’s only a 200m climb and the path is manicured into stone steps, but I was still a little puffed at the top of the first one. The painkillers and back brace were great, but presumably the tendon was still taking its toll inside.
To take my mind off that, Spring flowers were blooming everywhere, especially the Erect Guineaflower and the local subspecies of Hairy Boronia which is endemic to this peninsula.
Across the saddle to Crescent Mountain, the climb rewarded us with lovely views across the aptly named Crescent Bay, and beyond to Cape Raoul. It is a curiosity of the “Three Capes” Track that it actually follows the perimeter of just two capes, Pillar and Hauy. The third, Raoul, is only ever glimpsed in the distance.
Looking across Crescent Bay toward Cape Raoul
We stopped to admire the view, and then began the climb back down, following a beautifully constructed staircase of local stone.
The road ahead, along Cape PillarHiking down from Crescent Mountain
From the twin peaks, we descended into a flower-laden valley, where yellow-tailed cockatoos feasted on the ubiquitous banksias. The boardwalk made it easy for us, but the first walkers to break trail here spent several years forcing their way through impenetrable Banksia and She-Oak. Much of the work was done by a colourful couple called Reg and Tim, who named many of the features along the way, including ‘Where-the-freaking-hell-are-we Ridge’, which gave this basin its current name, Ellarwey Valley.
Much of the Three Capes Track is now protected by wooden walkways, and these do a great job of keeping everybody to the path and preventing erosion bogs, with the bonus of lifting you a little above the landscape so that you can see over the top of the scrub, but they are tediously hard and flat underfoot.
Boardwalk into Ellarwey Valley
Today, the valley was beautiful and the Spring flowers delightful, but it was very exposed, and easy to imagine that it would be a harsh trudge if the weather was coming from the Southern Ocean.
At the far end of the basin, we ascended Tornado Ridge where a short side-path led to a series of delightful benches overlooking Tornado Bay. Here we paused and put together a hearty lunch of pre-cooked rice and tinned fish.
Tornado Bay
Back on the main path, we followed the path alongside the plunging cliffs. A squall came in across Tornado Bay which had us scurrying for our waterproofs, but it swiftly passed by to one side.
The flora varied between wet and dry sclerophyll, but was still sprinkled with Spring blooms. The ground underfoot would have been boggy without the boardwalk. However, the wire-covered hard wooden surface had taken its toll on my boots, and I had to do a swift repair job. Thank goodness for cloth tape.
Arriving at the Munro cabin, we found that it was all pleasantly familiar. Several beautifully appointed fire-resistant buildings holding a variety of kitchens and dormitories. The marked difference was the availability of a hot shower located in the bush. Fill a bucket with hot water from a nearby gas boiler, pour the bucket into the shower bag, hoist it to the sky, and stand beneath! Lovely.
A nice hot shower in the bush
Where Surveyors has a deck for admiring sunsets over Cape Raoul, Munro has a viewing platform, complete with telescope, out over the whale migration route. Humpback whales hung out below for much of the afternoon and then, as dusk fell, a pod of dolphins came inshore to feed in the surf. Wedge-tailed eagles soared overhead.
Tonight’s dinner was reconstituted camp fare, but palatable enough: “Roast lamb and vegetables and mash” followed by rolls of sour cherry paste, with a glass of hot rum tea.
Dinner is served!
We should have carried more wine, really. The official recommendation was to carry three litres each of water per day, but I had barely touched mine, there would have been room for an extra litre of red instead. One of the other walkers had packed the silvered bag from the inside of a wine box, and had a little party sitting up on the helicopter pad with legs dangling toward the ocean, watching the whales.
I have always wanted to walk the Three Capes Track, a four-day hike around the Tasman Peninsula in Tasmania, but it is very popular and tickets are restricted and I never seemed to find the time to sort it out. I was delighted, then, to hear from my good friend Elizabeth that she was flying in the next month to do the trek, and that one of her party had cancelled. I instantly snaffled the spare ticket.
One week before the walk, I was cutting firewood up in my forest when I twisted awkwardly and hurt my leg. For a couple of days it was middling sore, and then it got so bad that I couldn’t sit or lie down, let alone walk. I went for remedial massage at my favourite Chinese doctor, and she did her best but shook her head and told me that I had torn one of the tendons in my hip. She gave me some lovely pain-relief patches which stopped the pain but didn’t help me to walk, and recommended that I buy a back-brace.
Our tickets were for Monday, and it was now Thursday. Off-the-shelf medication was having no effect, although the back-brace allowed me to stand unaided. I had ransacked my medicine cabinets for spare opiates, but none of them touched the incapacitating pain, so I begged my GP to give him something that would allow me to walk. He equipped me with Meloxicam for inflammation and Pregabalin for neuropathic pain. The published side effects were a motley selection, among them “unable to think”, “make bad decisions”, and – my favourite – “hold incorrect beliefs in the face of evidence”. Hiking in the wilderness for four days, what could possible go wrong?
Pregabalin needs a bit of tuning to each individual, so I upped the dose until I could make it through the day. My brain certainly felt a bit soupy, and I had trouble with simple arithmetic. My family told me that I was responding slowly but seemed happier than usual.
By Saturday, I could reliably walk a few tens of metres, so in the evening I strapped on an empty backpack over my back-brace and experimentally walked up and down the street. It was only moderately painful, so I jumped over a small creek. I didn’t fall or cry out. I had 48 kilometres to do next week. I recorded in my diary, “Only two more sleeps. I can do this!”
On Sunday, Elizabeth came to stay, and on Monday we drove over to the Port Arthur Heritage Centre to check in for the walk. Officially we had also purchased tickets for the Heritage Site itself, but there wasn’t really time to do anything about it, so we grabbed a bite to eat instead and joined the other twenty-odd hikers on the sea dock.
Tasmania Parks and Wildlife have joined forces with Pennicott Wilderness Journeys to provide a boat service across the bay to the Tasman Peninsula. I’ve taken Pennicott Wilderness boats several times, and they are always good. My favourite is the Bruny Island cruise, but even though the Three Capes boat is nominally a ferry service, this one didn’t disappoint either.
Looking back on Port Arthur Heritage Centre
The actual route across the bay is variable and weather-dependent (or, to be more accurate, swell-dependent, due to the big rollers that typically come in from the Southern Ocean). On our trip, the sea was uncharacteristically smooth, and so we enjoyed a jaunt to see colonies of cormorants and long-nosed fur seals, before arriving at the shelving beach of Denman’s Cove.
Long-nosed fur seals in Port Arthur Bay
The Three Capes Track begins with a sandy wade to shore from the landing-craft style ramp at the bow of the ferry.
The track began between two large rocks at the edge of the beach, with a wooden sculpture. Almost immediately, we found ourselves sharing the path with a small but determined echidna, which wobble alongside us completely unperturbed until distracted by a nice rotten log full of ants.
Sharing the path with an echidnaBlack Peppermint gum in flower
There were spring flowers everywhere, and we dawdled a bit to admire them, and a selection of views across the water to Port Arthur as the path slowly climbed up toward the cluster of cabins known as ‘Surveyors’.
Purple Love Creeper in flower
There were two tempting beaches along the way, not only Denman’s Cove but also Surveyor’s Cove. We knew that we would not be back down at sea level for several days, and it would have been fun to stay and frolic awhile. The water was warm, the sun was strong, and there was very little wind, but the idea of getting to our first stop, the Surveyors Cabin, was equally appealing.
We really hadn’t known what to expect, since the word ‘cabin’ can cover a multitude of sins, but these were spectacular. Spotlessly clean with well-organised bunks, well-equipped camp kitchens, and plenty of space outside to sprawl and admire the sun setting behind the spires of Cape Raoul.
The main social cabin at Surveyors
Each cabin is overseen by an on-site warden, who stays in a cabin of their own on the edge of the site. It sounds like an ideal job; they pack in all their supplies, stay for a few days greeting walking parties and cleaning up after them, hike out for a long weekend, then pack in to the next cabin in the cycle.
One of the dorm blocks at Surveyors
The ticketing system ensures that there are never more than 48 walkers in one place at one time, which sounds like a lot of people, but in fact it all felt spacious and uncrowded, and it was always possible to find space to put a kettle on or to find somewhere comfortable to sit.
One corner of one of the two kitchens
Since the first day was so short and we didn’t have to worry too much about spoilage, Elizabeth and I had elected to bring a one-off meal of steak and wine, and so dined that night in some style. Since we were packing all our food in and rubbish out, the rest of our inventory was freeze-dried to save weight. We ate and chatted, washed up, put the organics in a compost bin, and carefully rolled up the rest of the waste into freezer bags.
There was a well-stocked library and a supply of games, but as dusk fell, most of us drifted off to bed.
My bunk room was calm, dark, and comfortable. There were larger and smaller rooms, and the beds had been allocated according to the demographic of the group. I was sharing with a single man and a father and son; Elizabeth with the ladies and children in the group that she had booked with.
Each bunk was equipped with a foam sleeping pad, and we had all been advised to bring a sleeping bag and ear plugs (as defence against snorers), and to roll up some spare clothes as a pillow.
My dorm room at Surveyors
Tomorrow we would be heading into the thick bush of Cape Pillar. But for now, some rest.
While backing the yacht out of her berth the other weekend, the engine overheated. It had already done this once recently, and on that occasion had filled the bilge with oil. I had since carefully (and expensively) replaced all of the metal oil pipes in case of invisible pinholes, and since then the engine had been behaving itself, so it was disconcerting to hear the alarm shrieking again. This time, before we killed the motor, I peeked over the stern to check the exhaust, and sure enough it was running dry. There was something amiss with the raw water cooling pump.
With the engine cover removed, I could see that the cover to the pump’s impeller housing was now streaked with green, which it hadn’t been before. Clearly it was now leaking sea water, but it is well known on the Yanmar 1GM10 that a leaky pump cover can drip subtly and almost invisibly onto one of the oil lines, causing it to rust.
Salty corrosion on the pump coverSalty corrosion on the hose ends
Perhaps this was the ultimate cause of my assumed pinhole leak? Perhaps, but a slight water drip didn’t explain my current problem. I removed the cover, expecting to find the impeller broken up into chunks, but it was still in place and in reasonably good shape. Curious.
I unfastened the clamp holding the flexible sea water inlet pipe and pulled it off the pump, forgetting that I had not first closed the through-hull. There was a violent spray of sea water which only stopped after I reached behind the engine and smacked the stopcock lever with a rubber mallet. Shaking the water out of my hair and rolling my eyes at my carelessness, I returned to the task at hand.
With the hoses disconnected, it was time to remove the pump, but this was easier said than done. Perhaps due to long-term microscopic leakage, but certainly at least in part due to long-term neglect, all three of the pump’s mounting bolts were rusty and rounded. There was nothing for a spanner to grip.
I was contemplating the traditional solutions (welding a rod to the rusty bolt head, chiselling a groove to provide purchase for an impact driver), when on the internet I discovered “bolt extractor sockets”. What a marvellous invention. They’re like a regular socket, but instead of a hex shape inside, they contain angled blades. The idea is that you hammer them onto the rounded nut or bolt so that they cut their way on and hold tight, at which point you simply undo them with a regular socket handle.
“Bolt Extractor Sockets” with internal blades instead of hexagonals
I bought a set at Repco. The kit looked solid, but the concept sounded far too easy to be true. I was wrong; the first bolt came off like a dream. After a little fiddling, so did the second one.
There is an immutable rule of mechanics, that – regardless of where you choose to start or what you are working on – it is always the final fastener that causes the most trouble. The third pump bolt was no different. I hammered home the extractor socket just fine, but the third bolt sits partially obscured by the crankshaft pulley, and my socket wrench is just a little too fat to fit between the pulley and the bolt head.
I really really didn’t want to remove the crankshaft pulley. In that direction lies madness. Instead, I went to Nubco and purchased a beautiful little socket wrench with a low profile and short handle, built especially for those awkward tight corners. Back on the boat, it slipped perfectly under the pulley, and in a jiffy out came the water pump.
Mini socket wrenchThe pump removed
I could clearly see the moving parts inside, and frankly it didn’t look too bad. I needed to deal with the leak, but the rest looked OK. Still, there was a problem with the pump, so I went ahead and disassembled it. Most of the guts came out easily, but I had to pry and chisel the oil and water seals, and they would never work again. Nevertheless, they had looked fine before I mangled them.
Deconstructed Yanmar 1GM10 raw water pump
I asked the lovely people at Spectrum Engineering for Yanmar’s full rebuild kit. They didn’t have one, but they carefully examined my disassembled parts, gave me back the ones that they judged unharmed, and replaced the bearings and seals from their shelves. The lady asked if I wanted a gasket for the impeller cover. I said, “what gasket?” because my pump hadn’t had one. No wonder it was leaking.
After scrubbing the old parts clean with toilet gel, vinegar, and bicarb, the rebuild was pretty simple, apart from a rookie mistake when I was drifting in the new bearing seal with the back of a socket but unaccountably got it wedged at a slight angle. Back to Spectrum to get another replacement, and then the job was done.
Yanmar 1GM10 raw water pump, cleaned up and ready for reassembly
I’d decided to replace the seawater hoses that feed the pump, because they had seemed a bit crispy to the touch when I pulled them off. My local Repco supplied a Z-hose which I could cut into lengths including the tricky moulded curves.
Back at the boat, I laid down a puppy-training pad under the engine (marvellous for soaking up spillage, and much cheaper than posh chandlery pads) and pulled off the old seawater hoses. The stopcock was of course still closed, but residual water spilled out as I got to work replacing them, using new stainless hose clips.
Once both pump and pipes were installed, I folded up the saturated puppy-training pad, dropped it in the bin, started the bilge pump to clear the overspill, and watched the shells tumble along in the lowest bilge. Shells?
I stopped the bilge pump, and had a closer look. There was a handful of tiny mussel shells rattling around, which must have been ejected from the inlet hose when I accidentally flushed it over my head.
What the heck were shells doing in the intake hose? I remembered reaching behind the engine and whacking the stopcock lever with the mallet. There had been plenty of room to swing the hammer. I got out the Dolphin torch and peered over the engine block and into the gloom under the cockpit sole. I could clearly see the inlet hose, leading directly from the stopcock to the pump inlet; no filter, no basket, just raw seawater and whatever happened to be floating in it.
I can only imagine that the shells have been tumbling inside the hose, occasionally falling across the intake and blocking it, falling temporarily free when the engine and pump stops, ready to pop up and block the hose by random chance when the pump re-starts. I don’t want to imagine how many other shells have been crushed to fragments by the impeller and sent to circulate through the engine.
Tiny mussel shell in the palm of my handNice new raw-water strainer
I bought and fitted a strainer, fired up the engine, and sat happily on the dock watching the salt water being pumped back into the sea.
Before we bought her, our pocket cruiser Cheval de Mer had been in the same berth for some 20 years, through two previous live-aboard owners. For most of that time, she has sat with her bow facing into the dock on six permanently spliced mooring lines, which had been specifically created to hold her in position with easy access to a ladder up onto the dock along the starboard side.
We have no protective toe rails on Cheval de Mer, and the mooring lines had been rubbing in the same places for so long, that they had chafed right through the gel coat on the gunwale to the glass fibres beneath. I’ve sealed the worn holes with West System resin, and preventing further damage is on the to-do list.
Poly rope slowly sawing through the fibreglass
I had been checking the dockside fittings now and again, and had already doubled-up on two of the lines because they were looking a bit old. Then one winter’s night there was a wind event recorded as 120km/h, so I dropped by the marina next morning to check that all was well. There’s a short mooring line that is used to keep her close to the ladder, but the land-side connection isn’t really visible as it is hidden under the dock. That morning I found the mooring line floating free, with the rope eye and metal thimble worn completely through.
Mooring line thimble worn right through
Clearly, I was overdue to replace all the lines, but the reason that I hadn’t done it properly yet was that I didn’t want to just replace them ‘as is’. My preference is to be able to pop out for a single-handed sail now and again, and so far I haven’t done that on Cheval de Mer because of the difficulty of reversing out of the tight corner in which she is berthed, an action that really needs two people, one to steer and the other to fend-off. I wanted to make up new lines which would allow us to berth her stern-to, giving me the opportunity to simply motor out of the berth whenever I wanted to. In case you’re wondering, berthing in reverse will be much simpler than departing in reverse, due to the configuration of the pontoons and available hand-holds.
We waited for our chance when the wind was low and the tide was slack, so that we could turn her around in her berth while hastily fabricating temporary lines. I had an idea in my head that we would push her out and turn her around by hand, but Bronwyn pooh-poohed that plan and said that she’d simply motor out to sea, turn around, and come back in. Since somebody needed to be on the foredeck to fend off, and somebody else needed to be on shore to work the lines, we borrowed the services of our friend Peter, and thank goodness that we did.
We arrived as planned on a wind-free afternoon at the slack of high tide and started the motor, an old but serviceable Yanmar single-cylinder which thudded reassuringly as Bronwyn backed Cheval de Mer out of her berth. All went well until she was out in the channel and making that tricky first turn, and then the overheating alarm came on. Last time that happened, we ended up with a bilge full of oil, so Bronwyn hastily killed the engine and we completed the manoeuvre by hand, using lines, ironically as I’d originally planned. Luckily there were three adults and a child to help with the fending-off.
We got her around without too much fuss, and then pulled her gently into the berth. As the stern swim platform came gently level with the end of the berth, Bronwyn somehow fell off it and banged both thighs on the concrete dock. It hurt a lot, and resulted in significant and colourful bruising.
While Bronwyn sat quietly and thought nice thoughts, the rest of us juggled the available lines into suitable lengths, and it wasn’t long before we had her nicely positioned. In fact, with the stern swim platform facing the end dock, there’s little need to use the midships ladder at all, you can just step on and off the swim platform whatever the tide. It’s a bit of a mystery why the live-aboard owners chose to keep her bow-to in the first place.
Back at home, I got out a large roll of poly rope, and taught myself to splice an eye. It always seems so complicated when you read about it, but in practice it turned out to be pretty simple to make a slightly amateurish but strong eye in the end of the rope.
As always, practice makes perfect, and over a few weeks I made a full set, complete with new stainless-steel shackles and thimbles for the landward side.
Fancy new stainless fittingsFancy new splice
I tied the boat-end in a temporary bowline, so that I had some flexibility in choosing a good final length in all tides and weathers without committing yet to a splice at both ends. Meanwhile, I need to figure out what’s wrong with the raw water cooling pump…
Every time I drive over the bridge to approach our new house in Kingston, Tasmania, my eye is drawn to a wedge-shaped pillar of rock sticking up over the horizon. The map shows it as “Cathedral Rock”, part of Mount Wellington National Park, but to me it was a red flag crying “Climb me! Climb me!”
Cathedral Rock, in Mount Wellington National Park, Tasmania
This is the story of the day that I chose to climb up Cathedral Rock. To be clear, it’s not actually a vertical climb, as there is a track. The peak is 880 metres above sea level, and the track starts 600 metres lower than that.
My walk began at the North West Bay River, which is wide and shallow and mainly boulders. There are two starting points, and I tried both of them. There is access up the obvious private road from the car park, but it was more fun to climb down into the trickling river and jump from rock to rock up the river bed. After about half a kilometre, the sides of the ravine dropped to river level, allowing me to rejoin the official path, which was anyway always visible on the left bank.
North West Bay RiverHeading upstream
The Cathedral Rock track at this point is narrow, and easy to see in the sunshine. I thought that it might be a bit hard to follow in darkness or in rain, but wherever there was a change of direction, there was a metal pole with a small fluorescent orange triangle to mark the way.
Despite the fact that it was still following the river, the path very soon began to climb steeply upward between the tree ferns.
The start of the trailDicksonia antarctica tree fernsStarting to go upHelpful orange markers
I was already starting to feel a little out of breath when one of the orange triangles directed me to turn ninety degrees and walk directly away from the river. The path steepened noticeably, up what appeared to be a flash gully.
After only about half an hour on the trail, the path widened, but the slope was continuous and relentless and I was starting to pant heavily. As I trudged onward, sweat poured down my bowed head and dripped off the end of my nose.
I heard voices behind, and two merrily chatting young couples breezed past as if I was standing still. Cursing under my breath, I wondered if this was the first time in all my life of climbing tall things, that anybody has passed me on the trail. Am I getting old?
Youngsters!Still going up
I plodded on, through stands of razor-sharp cutting grass. Growing up overseas, I still find this plant fascinating, grass that can hurt you. We have five kinds in Tasmania, and I can never resist checking it with my finger. Blood welled instantly. Yup, still sharp.
Scattered on the ground were the shredded leaves of Silver Wattle which had fallen from overhead. It was late in the year, but when the wattle is in flower, it sends sap to the soft outer leaf shoots to attract Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos. As the birds tear into the stems to feast on the sweet sugary liquid, their wings get dusted with wattle pollen, which they then transfer to the flowers of other trees.
Ghania cutting grassSevered Silver Wattle leaves
The path kept on climbing. I remarked to myself that, of all the tall things that I have climbed all over the world in all kinds of weather conditions, this little track in the relative cool of the Tasmania Autumn, was up there with the hardest of them.
I really needed a break, but I have a rule about resting on hills. Never rest at the bottom or middle of a hill, only ever rest at the top or on a flat. The idea is to stop at an achievement, and to start on flat ground.
I was dying for a rest, but there was no let-up. The path just angled steeply up, zig-zagging as it went. I was at the point of cursing my own stupid rules, when I rounded a bend and the path became briefly level for about ten blessed metres. Well, almost level. Good enough. I slumped down against a comfortable tree, drank half a litre of water, and closed my eyes for a moment.
Heading up and on, the trail narrowed and, finally, became less steep. Now it was more like walking up a hill, rather than pumping every step with eyes fixed on the end of your boots.
Then, about an hour after starting out, I arrived at the base of the final scramble to the summit. The guides for this walk make no mention of the killer ascent thus far, but wax lyrical about the dangers of the final 400 metres, giving it black diamonds and even a warning sign. I was interested to see just how bad this next part could be! As far as I could see, the track just disappeared up a rocky watershed. What would I find next?
Despite the warnings, the final stretch was just a simple scramble, zig-zagging up a rocky incline with plenty of hand- and foot-holds, nothing at all compared to the hard slog of the endless track below.
The summit was a collection of rocky outcrops, firmly gripped by small stands of Black She-Oak and Needle Bush.
Black She-Oak Allocasuarina littoralisNeedle Bush Hakea lissosperma
The views were spectacular, all the way south down the Huon Valley, and East toward Bruny Island. I could also look back and see the road outside my house, where I first looked up at this rock and wondered if it was climbable.
I made it!Looking east across the d’Entrecasteaux. My house is about dead centre.Looking south to the Huon Valley. My forest is on the horizon.
It was nice to enjoy the open vistas to the South East, but it was the terrain to the North West that was interesting for future expeditions. Cathedral Rock sits on the cusp of a bowl that surrounds the upper reaches of the North West Bay River. From this altitude, I could see that the river bed up here is similar to the terrain at the bottom, mostly dry with flat rocks. I wondered if it would be possible to follow the river bed all the way up here into the bowl, and then climb out of the far end. The map showed that the river intersects with the Pipeline Track which would take me from Mt Wellington National Park and down into the city.
North West Bay River far belowFollow the ridge… must be a way throughLooking up to the ridge at the head of the river valley
I also looked around to see if there was a track along the ridge top, because in theory I should be able to follow the edge of the bowl around to Wellington Falls, and before long I stumbled on a thin trail that led over the blade of exposed rock and on to the next outcrop.
The path to Wellington Falls climbs to the right. Mt Montague to the left.
I chose not to follow any further on this day. I would need to start a lot earlier to get all the way round, and in any case my car was down at the bottom of the Cathedral Rock track and I had no way of retrieving it if I walked down to Hobart. There is, however, plenty of food for thought for my next trip.
I found a peaceful flat rock to sit on, contemplated the view, and ate some lunch. Then, having sated both mind and body, I began the scramble back down to the track.
As before, the rocky scramble was the easiest part. The long hike back down the steep trail looked simple, but again the relentless slope inflicted a slow muscle burn that didn’t let up until I reached the river.
It was a sunny Sunday morning with light brisk winds, a perfect day for a family sail after weeks of incessant rain. We climbed aboard, cast off, and motored out of our berth.
Immediately an alarm sounded from the panel in the cockpit. I heard it from the bow where I was keeping lookout, but I had only just replaced the depth sounder and had not calibrated it, so I assumed that it was responding to the shallow bottom under the keel. At any rate, squeezing out between rows of expensive boats on a blustery day is not the time to be focussing on electronic problems.
The alarm cut in and out as we navigated around the pontoons, and as we passed out into deep water through the arms of the breakwater I waited for the it to stop. It didn’t, and I saw Bronwyn duck forward from the helm to look more closely at the panel, and she shouted, “it says Low Press”.
Oh dear.
I stuck my head down the hatch and found that our nice clean white bilges were awash with engine oil.
Despite having lost all its oil, the one-cylinder donk was still plugging away, so we used it to get to a nearby mooring buoy. A gust caught us and we missed, and had to go round again, praying that the engine would keep on going. It did, we tied up, and killed the motor.
Now what?
We were stuck out in the Derwent River, on a mooring of unknown provenance. It looked big and well-kept, but we’d never seen anybody use it before.
We had the dinghy on board, although it temporarily lacked either a drainage bung or rowlocks. Still, it was easily enough to get the family back to the marina with diligent use of kayak paddles. We tied up the dinghy in our berth, and went home.
On Monday, we arranged for the yacht club to give us a tow to the yard, so that we could get her out of the water and have a look. It wasn’t really necessary to get her up on land, but she was overdue for an antifoul anyway, and because we bought her quickly for cash, we’d never seen her bottom, so it seemed like a reasonable opportunity to kill several birds with one stone.
That doesn’t look rightOn tow back to the marinaOut she comesNeeds a bit of work
As soon as we were up on the cradle, I pumped the oil out of the bilge and cleaned up the mess. The bilge pump – which had never worked very efficiently – was saturated in oil so I took it home for a clean. The unused piping for the water tanks (I’d removed three large tanks when we set her up for sailing rather than live-aboard) was similarly contaminated, so they went too.
The engine was pristine and clean. There was no sign of any leaks, no trails of oil, nothing. The engine sat on its blocks, and the oil sat beneath, with no indication of how it got out.
The oil filter felt rough to touch underneath, and I wondered if it had developed a pinhole. It was very, very tightly fitted, and there was evidence (in the form of crinkles on the underside) that somebody had cranked it on with a strap wrench. I had to puncture it to get it off, so destroyed any real evidence of pinhole leakage. There were also two metal oil pipes that dipped down into the bilges, where they had likely sat in rainwater for some time while the boat was unattended before we bought it, and these pipes showed a crusting of rust. I dismantled it all and ordered replacement parts.
In the meantime, I got busy with the hull. Once I’d power-washed and chipped off all the shellfish, the fibreglass was down to a previous layer of paint, and the steel keel was practically back to metal. There was a chunk missing from the rudder, where an exposed internal screw head was now visible. I applied two-pack resin where appropriate, and two-pack underwater undercoat wherever I thought I needed it.
There was a hole hereComplete undercoat for the keel
I would have preferred to rub the whole keel down and apply a smooth finish to the anti-foul, but time was short, the cradle was needed for racers rubbing down for the start of the season, and I did also have to work at my day job. A couple of top coats applied with a roller would have to suffice, on this occasion. She looked OK though.
While she was out of the water, I replaced the sacrificial anodes. The keel anodes were ready for replacement, but the one on the prop shaft was in relatively pristine condition, most likely because it hadn’t been fitted properly and only sat loosely on the shaft. To be fair, the previous owner had warned me that he had replaced it in the water and he wasn’t certain that he had tightened it enough, so I was glad to see any anode at all. I had a working theory that if the shaft anode wasn’t functioning fully, enough current might have leaked to burn a pinhole in the thinnest mild steel in the engine, which would be the oil filter.
These anodes have been working wellTightly fitted around the shaft, this time
The new set of (very expensive) oil pipes arrived from Yanmar. When the dealer got them out of the box, my first response was, “Gosh, they’re so shiny!”
He gave me a knowing look and said “Aaaah, you’ll have the old ones, then.” Some years back, Yanmar changed the design from steel to copper because of corrosion issues. Not quite a smoking gun, but a useful pointer that I might be on the right track.
Old and new pipes for a Yanmar 1GM10
I fitted the pipes, and then briefly fired up the engine. It started, didn’t knock, and the oil stayed in. I only let it run for about 15 seconds because there was no seawater coolant in the intakes. The proof would be when we put her back in the water and warmed the engine up, but at least there weren’t fountains of oil everywhere.
Pausing only to give the bilges a final clean, and then pessimistically lining them with puppy pads, we pushed her back into the sea.
Far cheaper than marine cleanersBack into the water she goes
We tied her up to the jetty, and fired up the engine. We stared fixedly at the bilges. Neither oil nor water appeared.
We waited, and listened to the rhythmic pop-pop-pop of the single cylinder. There was no oil in the bilges.
We put her into gear and strained the engine against the mooring ropes. There was no oil in the bilges.
We sat around until she was good and warm, and until the waiting rubberneckers had lost interest and got back to work, and then we quietly backed off the pontoon and opened her up. She had far more power than we were used to, and her bow pointed eagerly out into the river. She ran like silk.
Our new boat leaked when it rained. It wasn’t subtle; water poured in around the badly sealed acrylic windows, and through the screw holes, and through the wooden framing.
Not only is it raining inside, but you can see the mould along the wall beneath.
Given the sheer volume of rain water that we were pumping out of the bilges on every visit, it was clear that this was Item 1 on the agenda.
For the last decade, Cheval de Mer had been sitting in her berth, with the starboard side facing into the prevailing weather. The port side wasn’t too bad, but to starboard the paint had flaked off, and parts of the forty-year-old marine-ply superstructure had degraded to such an extent that they were water-permeable.
Rain damage on the starboard fore-quarterDefinitely in need of some love and attention
My first task was to undo the dozens and dozens of dome-nuts that held the windows on. This was tricky without an assistant, and I didn’t have a mole-grip to hand. I rigged up a spanner hanging from a line on the outside, which provided just enough resistance to undo the screw from the inside. Then return outside to reset the spanner, then back inside. Repeat… it took a while.
The old acrylic windows to starboard then popped out easily in a flurry of weathered wood-flakes.
The starboard window frame revealed
The port-side windows were fixed with sterner stuff. They had been glued in with a strong sealant, and the only way to get them out was to shatter them with a blunt implement. Eventually I extracted all the shards from the frame, only to find that the sealant itself was still firmly bonded to the paint all down the port side, completely immune to scraping. I got it off by applying a heat-gun, which didn’t affect the sealant but which bubbled up the paint underneath so that I could get the whole mess off with a scraper.
The port side is not so damaged, but has its own problems
Even though the wood was sodden in places, once covered in a tarpaulin it dried out without warping, although there were significant cracks and dints. Woodwork is not my favourite activity, so I cast around for an easier way to repair the damage. It was then that I discovered the delights of the amazing West System 105 epoxy resin.
This stuff is incredible. You mix it up and slather it onto wood (or fibreglass), and it soaks its way inside the layers, chasing away any water, and then sets to a hard but slightly flexible finish. I spent several days happily painting it onto the exposed wood, and watching it vanish completely inside, before finally it had seeped in everywhere it wanted to go and the final coat stayed on the surface, looking like a thick varnish.
Starboard: West System 105Port: Heat-gun and Knead-It
You know how this goes. Sand, fill, sand, fill, sand, fill…
Once I’d done the major work with West System 105, I filled small imperfections with Knead-It, a two-part filler that comes in a handy tube which means that you can just tear off exactly the amount that you need. Eventually there were so many different colours and textures that I couldn’t work out by eye what was flat and what wasn’t, so it was time to add some paint.
I used Norglass Shipshape two-pack primer, which sticks to pretty much everything that my boat is made of. On my first go, I made the mistake of brushing it straight after mixing, when it was still runny and very hard to work with, but I learned to patiently wait the crucial first ten minutes for it to go off. It went on pretty well after that.
Once it was all the same colour, my eye was no longer distracted by all the different textures, and I could properly see the lumps and bumps that needed sanding and filling.
That starboard fore-quarter again, looking very colourful, but nearly done
A second coat of primer, a final sand and minor filling, and then a top-coat of two-pack Norglass Norcote. For a short while, at least one part of the boat looked like a million dollars.
Shiny!
I waited a couple of hours for it to dry, but the weather was against me. The temperature was hovering around ten degrees, which is the minimum for curing, and the surface stayed resolutely tacky. Rain was forecast and I had to pick up my daughter from school, so I covered the boat in a tarp.
That night, the wind blew the tarp in so that it stuck to the paint, and I had to peel the whole thing off. Then I had to sand off most of my hard-won polished finish, and deal with some slumping that had occurred in the cold of the night. But at least the surface was now relatively flat and white, and I could move on to the next phase.
Using butcher paper taped to the dock, I made up templates of the new windows that I wanted to fit. They were significantly larger than the originals, because I wanted to completely cover the areas that had been weakened by screw-holes.
Templates for the new windowsCheval de Mer waits patiently
Following local advice, I took the templates to Eagle Plastics in Hobart, who gave me a warm welcome and made me some lovely new acrylic windows, 5mm thick with a bevelled edge and a smoky tint.
Scrolling through sailing forums, it soon became clear that the only choice for adhesive was 3M Very High Bond (VHB) tape, which was readily available on the internet from Embossing and Tape Supplies (ETS). This double-sided tape is incredibly easy to use and forms a powerful bond with both the acrylic window and the painted boat.
For the first window, I did make a mistake, in that I didn’t quite butt up the black tape to completely hide the underlying white paint. I had thought that the tint and the shadow would hide the joins, but I was wrong.
3M VHB tape applied (with visible joints, sorry)You can see the joints around the edges of the window
In retrospect, I should have used a little black paint either on the window frame or around the inside edges of the window, but such is the power of VHB that you only get the one chance: Once the window was in, I wasn’t going to get it out again without a large hammer.
I did better with the rest of the windows, though. You live and learn.
Port-side forward window, without visible joints
And finally, to make the whole thing waterproof, I needed to run beading around the outside edges.
Now, according to the forums, there is one and one only solution, and that is to use Cow Dorning’s CowSil 795. In my innocence I had assumed that I would just go and buy some when I needed it, but this American product is not widely available in Tasmania, and I wasn’t going to wait to have it shipped from the US.
I contacted the local Fibreglass Shop who advised that their marine customers have always had good results with an Australian product, FixTech FS200, and moreover they had it waiting for me in stock.
I got out the 3M Scotch blue (in my opinion the only worthwhile masking tape), and carefully taped both the acrylic window and the surrounding painted woodwork.
All masked up with Scotch Blue
Like any silicone product, it was quite messy and needed care, but I found that it went on easily enough as long as I didn’t apply it too thickly. The back of a bamboo teaspoon gave a nice finish.
I removed the tape straight away, which gave me the chance to fix up any over-thick portions with my trusty wooden spoon (wetted with soapy water) before it started to cure. No matter what you do, silicone gets everywhere, but I found that dropped spots were easily removed with Goof Off, which also served to clean my spoon and fingers between applications.
I used to play in the surf when I was younger, usually in a kayak, sometimes on wind-surfers and occasionally on long-boards, always in the freezing deep and stormy Atlantic off the coast of Wales. We never had any surf lessons but had a lot of fun.
More recently, in the warmer waters of Australia, and especially now that our daughter is older, we have spent some time on boogie-boards.
Berrima and Bronwyn enjoy a bit of a boogie at Lilli Pilli NSW
I have also started going out on my inflatable stand-up paddle-board, but while I am fine in lagoons and in flat waters, as soon as I hit any surf, I fall off.
Stand Up Paddle-board at North Durras NSW
Some time ago, we booked surf lessons with Broulee Surf School on the New South Wales coast, but what with COVID-19 and interrupted travel plans, we never got to take them. Roll on to this week, and we were staying at our favourite holiday house in Lilli Pilli, just up the road from Broulee, and so finally we were able to take them up.
We arrived in the morning to a good rolling swell of late-breaking waves. Recent storms had rearranged the bottom to provide an interesting selection of rips and hollows. Three of us met Robert, our instructor, for a couple of hours of personal lessons.
Ready to rock (hopefully), at Broulee Surf School
Robert was very relaxed and confident, but must have wondered what he’d let himself in for with three middle-aged suburbanite newbies. Our first exercise was to lie on our boards on the sand, and lift into a push-up and then downward dog… and repeat. In retrospect, I wonder how many people fail that first test?
Since I was in the water, and didn’t feel like breaking out the Go-Pro, I don’t have any photos of us, but I do have pictures of Berrima doing the same course on a different day.
Berrima demonstrates the technique
Once we’d mastered the art of correctly placing our feet, it was time to get into the water.
Once again, Robert instilled us with confidence, holding the board as we lay prone, and then gently pushing us onto smaller waves so that we could pop up and practice the standing manoeuvre.
As we got more confident, he pushed us onto bigger and bigger waves. Sometimes we wiped out, but the first time that I pumped the board from side to side to steer all the way to the beach, I was so stoked. A huge grin split my face. I was surfing!
Berrima demonstrates how it should be done
Of course, Robert was doing all the set-up and positioning me perfectly on each wave. When I tried catching my own, it didn’t go nearly so well! But the buzz was amazing. Even with the relatively small waves, it was very tiring to fight back out to where Robert bobbed beyond the break, but every time I struggled straight back out, knowing already that I wanted the next run to be better.
Each time he set me up for a wave, Robert just offered me one quiet piece of advice before letting me go. He didn’t need to do more than that, because it quickly became clear as soon as I was moving whether or not I’d made a mistake, even (as I quickly found out) a recoverable one. Whether it was a complete wipe-out or (whoop! whoop!) a great run all the way to shore, a minute later I was swimming back out shaking my head, determined to do better on the next run.
We were driving from Hobart in Tasmania to Lilli Pilli in New South Wales for a beach holiday, but rather than do the whole thing in one boring drive, we decided to pitch camp a couple of times, and visit the Colquhoun Mountain Bike Trail in Victoria along the way.
On our previous mountain bike adventure we had rented bikes on site, but this was supposed to be a budget trip, so we decided to bring our own bikes with us, particularly as Bronwyn had just bought a perilously expensive e-bike.
This entailed the purchase of a hitch-mounted bike rack that could take the weight of the e-bike. After some research we found that there was only really one make and model available to us in Hobart at short notice, the Yakima Hold-Up, so we went with that one.
Can we see the car? Sort of.
When folded, the rack occludes the car’s number plate, and when loaded with bikes, it partially occludes the number plate and also some of the lights. I was concerned about the legality of driving around like this, but after attempting to order a bike rack number-plate from Service Tasmania (sorry, not available for up to six weeks) and an accessory light-bar (sorry, not available at any cost), we took local advice (“just go, nobody cares”) and headed for the ferry terminal.
Since it was a public holiday weekend, we passed a number of police breathalyser and speed checks and so on and indeed discovered that nobody seemed to care.
The Spirit of Tasmania ferry arrived in Melbourne after a calm overnight crossing of the Bass Strait, and as soon as we disembarked, we breakfasted on the beach close by the terminal.
Breakfast done, we headed East through Gippsland, stopping on the way for a gentle cycle around a lake, then moving on to the Colquhoun Mountain Bike Park which really blew us away. It’s a free track inside the State Forest, consisting of a figure-of-eight black diamond track a little over 15km long, amusingly called the Scalectric Loop. Given our amateur status, we decided to tackle just the bottom ring of the 8 on this occasion, although we left open the idea of completing the top ring if we felt up to it.
The ride began on the Start Line Track, which was comprised of gentle rolling turns through beautiful forest before devolving into the Lollipop Track. This second part is hilarious. It follows the line of a muddy creek down hill, sweeping down to cross the creek before turning back to cross it again… and again… and again…
Each crossing had muddy water at the bottom, or a steep muddy descent, or a steep muddy climb out the other side, or some combination of all three. And it crossed, and crossed, and crossed back and forth. I have no idea how many times we splashed through the creek. Bronwyn was OK on her e-bike, and little Berrima was fine with her unlimited low-to-the-ground seven-year-old energy, but my 20-year old Giant hybrid bike with city tyres was in a permanent slide, and at one point I lost focus for a fraction of a second and crashed somewhat spectacularly, thankfully missing most of the trees alongside the muddy descent, but banging my knee pretty hard.
After many, many creek crossings and perhaps 6 kilometres we were starting to feel a bit tired, even though by now the Lollipop Track had turned into the less demanding Log Track. We were quite relieved to find a signposted ‘B-line’ which skipped the last few crossings and allowed us to quit the trail and ride back to the car park, covered in mud and very satisfied.
Muddy bottomsThat’s my knee
We’re certainly keen to see what lies beyond, in the top half of the figure-eight, but will need to return with adequate food and water and a whole day to do it.
For the moment, though: Back to the car, back to the tent, then next morning we were on the road again and heading toward our next camp site.
Our new house is within easy striking distance of a handful of “gravity” downhill mountain bike trails. Our daughter Berrima is nearly seven, and we reckoned that she was strong and confident enough on a bicycle for us to all try this new sport as a family.
Finding ourselves with a spare week due to a pandemic-cancelled holiday, we loaded the car with camping gear and set off for the two-hour trip from Hobart to Maydena, billed as “the largest gravity park in the Southern hemisphere”.
We stopped at the Mount Field campground which is convenient to Maydena, inexpensive and very pleasant. It is situated on the banks of the Tyenna River in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. After a comfortable night, we struck camp and headed for Maydena.
Maydena Mountain Bike Park
The town of Maydena, population 200, really only contains the Bike Park and a small cafe. We drove right into the park, rented some lightweight Trek bikes with fat tyres and front suspension, and rolled up to the trail head. This was really a dirt bus stop where you could choose either a minibus with a trailer which took serious riders 820m vertically to the top of the mountain, or a Canam quad with five tow-bar hangers which took beginner and intermediate riders up the steep trail to the top of the ‘green’ runs. We chose the quad. Berrima’s bike was too small for the hangers, but fitted neatly into the luggage tray on the back of the Canam.
As we bounced up the fire trail, the driver helpfully pointed out some landmarks, such as the point where the championship run jumps completely over the access trail. After only five or ten minutes, he left us standing in the middle of a shady rain-forest, pointing us in the direction of a thin track disappearing into the shadows.
The path sloped suspiciously upward, but our guide had warned us that it was only for the first dozen metres or so, and after that it was all gravity, so we shrugged and set off.
He was not wrong. The trail began to descend steeply, and before long we were flying round steeply sloping berms as we zig-zagged wildly down through the forest. The bikes were reliable, the surface smooth granite, the sun was shining, the forest was beautiful.
After some time we dropped out of the tree-line into an area of fox-gloves in full flower, butterflies flitting above as we rocketed down the side of mountain. It was exhilarating for all three of us, but especially Berrima who delighted in hitting the berms at full speed.
Once at the bottom, it was time to catch the Canam back to the top and do it all again.
When it was time for lunch, we briefly considered the onsite canteen – just crisps and sandwiches really – and then stepped outside of the gates to the only other business in Maydena, the Fika Time cafe / petrol station, which advertised great coffee and gluten-free food. Sadly, it was not to be. The ‘small black’ coffee when it came was enormous and bitter, and we waited and waited for our simple three serves of eggs. Eventually, two plates arrived, but one of them was wrong and had to be replaced. When the replacement arrived – but not the third lunch – we were starving, so we shared the two eggs between us. Eventually we asked about the third portion, which set off this whole diatribe about how they were very busy (they weren’t) and COVID and goodness knows what else. Then mysteriously they weren’t able to refund the third meal, so we took a cake in lieu, which wasn’t anywhere near the correct value, and went back to the bike-park cafe for some crisps before continuing our ride.
The Friendly Beaches and the Bay of Fires
From Maydena to the next nearest mountain bike park in St Helens is about a four-hour drive, so we broke the journey along the coastline, taking in some of the famous beaches and enjoying an impromptu steak by the side of the road.
We had booked a couple of nights at an unpowered site at the rather spectacular Tasman Holiday Park on the Bay of Fires in St Helens. It is spectacular not so much for the park itself (although it is a very well appointed caravan park), but for the tremendous Parkside Bar and Kitchen, where we enjoyed some wonderful meals, a great wine list, and impeccable service.
St Helens Mountain Bike Park
While it is theoretically possible to rent mountain bikes from Gravity Isle at the St Helens park itself, their website was being uncooperative, so we had arranged a day’s hire with Vertigo in town, who offered a shuttle up to the trail head as part of the package.
There is a further shuttle that takes you higher to the more advanced runs, but the way that the St Helens green runs are arranged is that they leave from and return to the same trail head. Because the green trails go up and down but start and finish at the same altitude, they involve a lot more pedalling than the downhill runs at Maydena. Thus although the runs are shorter, they are a lot more tiring.
As well as pedalling through pretty forests, the designers had also made the trails interesting, with rocks interspersed with mud, berms, tree-trunks, exposed roots, and the occasional little stump jump.
Half way through the day, we bought lunch at the converted shipping container that served as a cafe at the trailhead. Following our culinary experience at Maydena, we were a little hesitant, and indeed weren’t unduly shocked when we were presented with microwaved burgers and oven chips, with the meat still frozen in the middle.
Everything else about this new sport seems to be high-end; the land areas are huge, access is difficult, staffing levels are high, and the bikes and equipment are eye-wateringly expensive to buy. But in the realms of food preparation, at two out of three of the top gravity venues in Tasmania, we found ourselves underwhelmed by the food. Don’t mountain-bikers eat?
Luckily we had packed some chocolate bars, so we wolfed them down and drank some water and got back on the trails. By the time we’d tried all the green trails several times, we were tired and ready to stop. The exit run is called ‘Downtown’ and is a beautiful ride down the mountain, through the forests to sea level, with fast descents and switch-back berms. It was a lot of fun in itself, and finished with a gentle ride along the St Helens foreshore.
Back at the Parkside Bar in St Helens, over very welcome gourmet food and drinks, we mused that we could get used to this as a family adventure, and are looking forward to the next one.
We have just purchased a pocket cruiser, registered as a 1978 Snook 26. Since there is no record of Michael Snook ever designing a 26-foot version of his famous racing boat, we were curious about her history. Luckily for us, a previous owner had left on board a potted history of the yacht.
She was originally launched as a standard Snook 22 racing yacht, purchased by a Steve Lovell, whose nickname was ‘Shovel’. He raced her as ‘Shovel’ out of Bellerive in southern Tasmania.
A year later, he hauled her out and cut her in half with a chainsaw. Aided and abetted by Michael Snook himself, he spent three weeks inserting a four-foot pre-prepared centre section, increasing the total length to 26 feet (a change from 6.7 to 8 metres). To balance the boat, they moved the keel aft, and increased the draft from 1.3 to 1.7 metres. Arguably just for fun, they also increased the height of the mast to a 9 metre luff, and extended the boom out to 3 metres.
In this new format, Shovel raced very successfully, and – by virtue of the extended cockpit (which was known locally as ‘the beer garden’) – became a popular venue for post-race drinks and, by all accounts, some pretty disreputable parties.
At some point in the nineteen-eighties, Steve sold Shovel and moved to the mainland. The next known report is from a subsequent owner, Dennis, who found her in a dilapidated state in Devonport in Northern Tasmania. Dennis helped the then owners to rebalance the boat – now known as ‘Kermit’ – as a cruiser, and later bought her from them and sailed her back to Hobart. He reported that, even detuned, she was still very fast, with a propensity for surfing on the swell that had to be continually damped by means of trailing drogues.
Now berthed at the marina, Dennis and Fiona fitted her out as a live-aboard cruising boat. To increase the living space, they lifted the coach roof to give 6 feet of headroom while extending the cabin back into the ‘beer garden’ to return it to a more reasonably sized cockpit. They added a larger rudder, a pushpit, an inboard Yanmar engine, and had the interior fitted out with bunks, drawers, sinks, table, chairs and a head.
Looking aftLooking forward
They wanted to rename her, too, and were keen to retain some reference to the Snook’s long and interesting history. After some thought, ‘Shovel’ became ‘Cheval’, and then by obvious inference, ‘Cheval de Mer’.
Dennis and Fiona lived aboard for some 13 years, and I infer from the charts that I found in a stern locker, that they travelled to the mainland and then up the NSW coast at least as far as Port Stephens.
In around 2004 she was back in Hobart, and was acquired by Tom as a permanent live-aboard. He didn’t sail her much, but made some changes more in keeping with her new function as a stationary home. About five years later, Tom’s work took him to the US, where he remained for two years. Cheval de Mer slowly aged in the marina, starboard side facing into the weather, where the paint abraded away from the coach house and she began to leak.
Mould under the mattress in the fore-peakRain water in the fore-peak bilges
On his return, Tom found himself in changed circumstances and living on land, and he just wanted to pass the yacht on to somebody who would appreciate her. And that is where we came in.
Despite spending nearly a decade largely stationary, her hull seemed sound, the moving parts were all still moving, and the only issues seemed to be with the ply of the cabin top. In the middle of a pandemic and with the marina’s hard-standing already full of racing yachts getting tuned for the season, taking her out of the water for an inspection was a non-starter, so we took a deep breath and bought her warts and all without either a test sail or a professional survey.
As soon as we took possession, we emptied her out, and took her out on the water. She performed beautifully in the gusty light winds of the day, with a slight tendency to lee helm as she appeared to be massively over-powered. Considering her history, that’s not at all surprising, and we’re happy that we just need to settle in and get comfortable with her.
Some years ago, we sold our live-aboard cruising yacht Elizabeth when we decided that we weren’t brave enough to continue with our world cruising plans in the company of a small baby. In the intervening years, we have often looked in a dreamy way at the yacht listings, but it was never either practical or the right time. Finally, however, the stars aligned in our favour: We found ourselves living by the coast on the island of Tasmania, next to arguably the best cruising ground in Australia, and our daughter turned six and began to show an interest in the world of sailing.
We were monitoring the sales listings for live-aboard cruising yachts around the Southern hemisphere, and looking for something a lot cheaper and older than either of our previous standard production boats Pindimara or Elizabeth. We reckoned that we were now experienced enough to tackle something a little more bespoke and unusual, and there were plenty of interesting candidates out there, many of which had been circumnavigating with families aboard for years.
We had been talking to agents in the US and New Zealand, and although there were plenty of boats for sale, we were prevented from travelling to either destination by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Then a couple of interesting yachts popped up right in our own neighbourhood, and we went to have a look. On the walk back from the marina berth of a particularly interesting steel-hulled Adams 35, we passed a lovely little blue pocket cruiser with a hand-written ‘for sale’ sign tied to the shrouds.
The owner, Tom, was aboard, and showed us around. She was a sound 26-footer that had been used for several decades as a live-aboard at the marina, but all her rigging was in place and she had a newish engine and, we were told, a full sail inventory. Tom had been stuck in the US for the last two years due to work and the pandemic, and so the little boat had sat wallowing unattended for all that time and now sported flaking paint on the coach house and significant rain-water in the bilges. Nevertheless, she appeared to be fundamentally sound, had a recent insurance survey, and was very very cheap as the owner had moved ashore and didn’t need her as a home any more.
As a coastal pocket cruiser, she wasn’t at all the kind of boat that we’d been looking for, but she felt good aboard and the price was very appealing. We slept on the idea, and then realised that this might be exactly the kind of yacht that we needed. Because our 6-year old daughter had just started school, we were unlikely to need an ocean-capable cruising yacht in the near future, and knew from experience that such vessels can be horribly expensive to keep in trim if only sailed at the weekend rather than cruising aboard. We have regular jobs and a couple of building projects on the go, and wouldn’t be sailing on a daily basis. Furthermore, at only 26 feet and steered with a tiller, she might be just the boat to teach an enthusiastic little girl how to sail.
We had thought that whatever boat we finally purchased, we would keep her on our own mooring near to our bush property to the south of the island. However, Tom had already established that the marina would be happy for us to take over the lease on the existing berth, which was only minutes from our newly built house.
We handed over the cash, and are now proud owners of an elderly but cute Snook 26, named Cheval de Mer.
From our house in Kingston, Tasmania we could see snow up on Mt Wellington, so we thought we’d go up and have a closer look. There is a road that leads from Hobart city centre up to the Pinnacle, but it’s sometimes closed to traffic in inclement weather, so we booked a ticket on the Mt Wellington Explorer bus which always has access through the snow gates.
Snow on Mount Wellington, with wattle trees blooming below
The bus has the advantage of being a hop-on hop-off so you can take advantage of the many trails that lead up and down and around the mountain, and still always get home by flagging down the bus at one of the stops. We hadn’t realised that we would be getting an entertaining guide in the form of the driver, but we did, a wide-ranging history of settlements on and around the mountain.
Up at the top, at 1271 metres, we had snow to play in, and marvellous views of the surrounding islands and bays.
The last of the winter snowKingston, our house off to the rightHobart city, viewed from the Kunanyi Pinnacle
It was frankly freezing in the wintry wind. The temperature at the top of Mt Wellington is usually several degrees colder than Hobart at sea level, and the reason that Hobart is such a comfortable place to live, is that the mountain takes the brunt of all the Antarctic weather.
The bus waits at the top for about half an hour on each trip. We’d spoken to the driver about which walks might be good today, and it was his opinion that the tracks from the Pinnacle were all treacherously icy today, so he recommended dropping us at The Chalet so that we could do the 4km Organ Pipes Track down to The Springs. He also offered to radio the next bus so that they knew to expect us.
The Chalet was an interesting place, a stone hut clearly meant to provide shelter from inclement weather. It had a barbecue outside for sunny days, and a large fireplace and a stack of firewood for those who might be cold and wet.
Inside The Chalet on Mt Wellington
The Springs is downhill from The Chalet, but the path confusingly sets off upward and back towards The Pinnacle. However, it soon sorts itself out and gently follows the contours down towards the base of the Organ Pipes, the most obvious feature of the mountain when viewed from afar.
First, though, it crosses an enormous boulder field, remnants of the great “Glenorchy landslide” of 1872, Tasmania’s most devastating recorded landslip which destroyed a fair few properties on its way to the sea, thankfully with no loss of life. If the same thing happened today, the consequences on North Hobart would be disastrous.
These days, the boulder fields are well bedded in and are popular with climbers.
The boulder field looking down Glenorchy, North HobartCrossing the landslide on the Organ Pipes Track
The original Organ Pipes track was built, along with much of the mountain’s infrastructure, in the early 1930s as a way to provide work for the huge numbers of unemployed following the Great Depression (the unemployment rate in Tasmania was 27% in 1931). The work was back-breaking but stood the test of time, with the tracks only being reworked in 2017, itself a mammoth task taking two years.
The new path is constructed largely from painstakingly laid natural stones. and is in itself quite beautiful.
After a while, the Organ Pipes themselves came into view on the right hand side, a formation of massive dolerite pipes. Several marked trails led in that direction, bearing the warning, “suitable only for climbers”.
The Organ Pipes of kunanyi/Mt Wellington
The track then descends into mountain woodlands, with birds flitting about and, on our visit, flowers breaking out to herald the Spring. The purity of the air is demonstrated by the festoons of lichens hanging from the tree branches and clinging to the rocks.
Rhizocarpon geographicum Map lichenCladonia pleurota Red-fruited pixie cup
As we descended out of dry sclerophyll and into wet heath forest, we encountered some interesting shrubs endemic to Tasmania, including Richea dracophylla which was just starting to bud.
Shortly after this, the track was crossed by a noticeable scar caused by the passage of an enormous rock, 50 tonnes of dolerite that parted company with the Organ Pipes in 2014 and came to rest on the downhill side of the track. Looking uphill, the boulder’s path is still vivid, all the way to the top.
50 tonnes of doleriteLooking up the scar track
Down at The Springs, with its cafeteria and car park, we found the bus waiting for us at the bus stop, which took us down to the city for a spot of lunch.
Wellington Park, which at 30km across is one of the largest reserved areas in Tasmania (outside the incredible World Heritage Area), is criss-crossed with interesting trails like this one, and we will be back to do some more.
It all started out so simply. Since we had been forced to put our plans for an off-grid house in the forest on the back burner, and had quickly built a different house on an urban block nearby, we were left with 14 acres of woodland which would provide us with an endless supply of firewood and the odd camping weekend, and… what else?
I could grow vegetables. And perhaps honey. Maybe ducks.
But let’s start with vegetables.
I decided that my preference would be to work in 10m x 5m plots. I find that area easy to handle with manual tools and, let’s face it, the dimensions make the math easy. Having several identically-sized autonomous blocks, rather than a rambling smallholding, also means that if disaster (irrigation failure, possum attack) visits one block then I haven’t lost everything.
The land slopes at around 8-10 degrees, so I needed to choose my sites carefully if I was to avoid repeatedly staggering up and down from the tool shed. Given that our access road leads only to our putative building site, and that the site itself is still largely covered in freshly felled trees, my options were somewhat limited. In the end I chose a slightly undersized area close to the tool shed, near to a line of native cherry and sedge which appear to define an underground seep.
The soil
I unlimbered the trusty mattock, and set to work.
With the area cleared of Common Heath, ferns and debris, I set up a 1.8m fence to keep out the wallabies and possums, and dug over to about 10cm. The soil is sandy clay, and pretty easy to manage.
The soil may be easy to work, but it is very poor quality. After some manoeuvring, a helpful fork-lift driver at Horticultural and Landscape Supplies north of Hobart managed to drop a cube-and-a-half bale of SeaGreens kelp compost onto my trailer. I somewhat gingerly towed it to Lymington, and got it up the track.
It took a little while to shovel it out and dig it in, but the plot started to look pretty good.
It was the height of Summer, and the ground was bone-dry. No matter how good my compost, no seeds were going to sprout in these conditions. It was time to install some irrigation.
The irrigation tank
I reckoned that a 2000 litre rainwater tank was probably the biggest I could handle by myself, and should be equal to the needs of my vegetable patch (but read on!).
There are many suppliers of rainwater tanks in Australia, most of whom operate on a just-in-time build-and-deliver business model, which didn’t suit me because access to the property is still problematic, particularly for delivery trucks. However, I happened to be out at Global Poly investigating pumps and cartage when they mentioned that they almost always keep some spare 2000s on the forecourt. I put one on the trailer and took it home.
The builders at our new house in Kingston had finished work, and had left behind a pile of surplus blue-stone from their installation of our household rainwater tanks. Berrima and I shovelled about a tonne into a bulk bag on the trailer, towed it to the forest, and spent a happy afternoon crafting a tank stand.
Now I needed a way to fill up the tank. In the future, I have grand plans to fill all my irrigation tanks from the roof run-off of an oversized shed, but that project is still just a twinkle in my eye. In the meantime, I needed to sort out cartage. There are a number of local water cartage firms who will bring a tanker to your property, but again I was concerned about access for heavy commercial vehicles, so I decided to create my own cartage system.
Water cartage
Originally I looked around for a second-hand Intermediate Bulk Container (IBC). These metal-bound plastic tanks are designed to be handled by a fork-lift and are used all over the world to deliver all kinds of liquid products. They fit neatly onto a trailer or in the back of a ute. It’s usually possible to pick up a food-grade IBC at a reasonable cost, but with COVID playing havoc with the logistics, this was not a good time to try to find one in Tasmania.
Once again, Global Poly came to my rescue. They sell compact ‘Fire Cubes’, designed to be used in conjunction with a generator and a pump in fire-fighting from the back of a ute. At 900 litres, a full tank would exceed the carrying capacity of my trailer, so it would take three partial loads to completely fill up my irrigation tank, which seemed acceptable.
Have tank, will travel
I already had a spare generator that I’d bought for the convenience of the tradesmen working on our Kingston house, and a simple Chinese pump only set me back a hundred dollars or so from my friends at Global Poly, so I was good to go. I pumped water into the cube from my house rainwater tanks, drove to the property, and pumped it back out. And repeat.
Pumping rainwater from the trailer into the irrigation tank
Drip Irrigation
I had previously set up small household drip and spray systems running through timers under mains pressure, but I had no real idea how to set up a gravity-fed system on this scale. My gut feel was that, unless I wanted to mess around with tall tank stands, I would need an electric pump to run the system, but I was open to the suggestion of letting it flow out under gravity. There’s a great deal of conflicting and often quite complex advice on the internet, and I wasn’t able to make a firm decision. I did notice that Hobart company Hollander Imports received a lot of local praise. They don’t have a proper web presence, only a Facebook page, so I drove into Hobart and ambled into their office, hoping for some advice.
The gentleman behind the desk listened carefully as I described the size of the tank, the size of the plot, and the slope of the land, and then pronounced the site ideal for a gravity feed system. He loaded me up with coils of piping, constant-pressure drip line, and handfuls of taps, joins and clips. He reckoned that the constant-pressure line would compensate for the change in pressure as the tank emptied, and would provide an even supply of water. He also recommended that I didn’t bother with all the fancy delivery-and-collector patterns published on the internet, but just to run both my plants and my drip lines downhill from a horizontal feed pipe.
Constant feed drip line (brown), irrigation piping (black) and a bag full of parts
The plot is 40 minutes from my house, so I needed a way of automatically turning it on and off as I didn’t want it dripping 24 hours a day (I had nowhere enough water for that!). Hollander Imports sold me a battery-powered mechanical timer, which controlled a simple flow gate.
I took all of it up to the land and, leaving the timer aside for the moment, connected the plumbing components together in their approximate final configuration. I manually opened the tap on the irrigation tank, and it all worked perfectly.
Approximate set-up for testing
I unplugged the piping from the tank valve, and inserted the timer into the line. It toggled on and off correctly according to its program, but even when “on”, it drastically reduced the flow to a rather pathetic dribble. This needed some more investigation.
The secret is in the timing
There was clearly something not quite right with my choice of timer. Eventually, deep in some technical specifications that I found online, I discovered that the physical valve in the unit requires a minimum head pressure in order to fully open. I scribbled some numbers on the back of an envelope, and clearly the gravity system wasn’t ever going to deliver enough of a head; unless I wanted to raise my 2000 litre tank several metres above the plot, this particular unit required mains pressure to ensure that the valve opened fully.
I did some scouting around, and found a timer that – according not only to the wording on the box, but also to the detailed technical specifications – was designed specifically for gravity-feed drip-lines, which as a bonus allowed the electronic operation of up to four separate gates. I bought one, with a single gate, and set it up.
Timer with integrated valveTimer with separate gate valve
Unfortunately, this new valve didn’t perform much better than the first one. Despite its advertised capabilities, it too needed a minimum head pressure if the valve was to fully open.
I went back to my original gut feel; I would need a pumped system.
Oh boy, the internet is full of advice about irrigation pumps.
Eventually, though, I found some bloggers who had set up similar small systems, and the general consensus was that you could get good results by using an inexpensive pump from an ornamental garden fountain. These pumps have the double advantage that they operate on a pressure that is low enough not to overload the drip fittings, and they are cheap to replace if they go wrong.
Of course, these pumps need electricity. I got out a couple of solar panels and a battery box which I use to run my Engel fridge while four-wheel-driving and camping. I set this up in my shed, and bought a simple mechanical timer to control the pump.
I turned it on, and the water flowed gently out of the drip feeder. I set it up to run for half an hour, morning and night, calculating that this would use 1000 litres a week, or a fortnight for the full tank. Contented, I drove home.
Where has all my water gone?
A couple of days later, I returned. The soil had clearly been watered, but the tank was empty. That was nearly a thousand litres in two days. Puzzled, I refilled the tank, re-did the math (same answer), and turned down the flow on the pump.
Despite this glitch, the system appeared to be working in the sense that it was wetting the ground, and time was ticking on and I didn’t want to miss the Autumn planting season. It wasn’t perfect, but I needed to plant some seeds.
Tasmanian soil is fairly consistent across the State, and has a mineral profile that lacks certain essential ingredients for vegetable gardening. I had found an organic fertiliser recipe in the excellent book ‘Tasmanian Food Gardening’ by Steve Solomon, and had for some time been tracking down the ingredients from local suppliers.
I mixed up enough for ten square metres, sprinkled it around, and planted the seeds of some winter vegetables. Apart from the niggle of the water usage, everything seemed to be going smoothly.
A few days later I returned, and the tank was once again empty. I had other things to take care of, but the seeds were sprouting and we were in the middle of a drought, so for the next few weeks I was taking every spare moment to drive back and forth, towing thousands of litres of water and pumping them into the ravening maw of my irrigation system.
The seeds are sprouting, under the bird wire
At last, after several weeks of this craziness, I was able to put aside a whole day to sit quietly without the distractions of work, of house-building, of firewood, or of small children, and to turn the system on and off and to observe it carefully.
Firstly, the mechanical timer was not keeping time at all. During the past fortnight I had noticed that it would be running anything from one to twelve hours behind (or possibly ahead, who knew?). I had it set to switch the pump on for 30 minutes, twice a day, but if the timer wasn’t reliable, how long was it really pumping for?
I took the timer out of the system, and, sitting quietly in the sunshine, began switching the pump on and off manually. Because it’s a low-pressure drip system, it isn’t immediately obvious from the business end whether it’s on or off. Once the pump stops, the pipes spend an appreciable time slowly draining, and you have to watch the drip nodes very closely to see if any water is coming out, especially as – without pump pressure – only the nodes on the underside, hidden against the soil, are working.
Time and patience eventually won out, and I proved to my satisfaction that, once the pump switched off, the pipe continued to siphon slowly throughout the day, quietly draining the tank until it was empty. There was a satisfying magical moment when I turned the pump off and stabbed an air-hole at the highest point of the hose. The system aspirated loudly, and the flow stopped.
When the pump is on, it now spurts a little fountain out of the cut hose, but the water returns to the tank, the pump and drip line compensate for the pressure loss, and the fountain makes a pleasant tinkling sound that tells me when the irrigation is on.
Remember the problem with the mechanical timer? I replaced it with a digital timer, which keeps perfect time. Later, I tried the mechanical timer at home, on mains power, and it ran perfectly; there must be something about running it on the inverter of the battery box that confuses it.
Catching the rain for irrigation
One day, we’ll build a shed with a large roof which will capture tens of thousands of litres, which will solve all our water supply problems. Right now, though, we have other priorities, but I was not unaware of the craziness of towing thousands of litres across country with a big V8 several times a week.
Our builders in Kingston had ordered a batch of incorrectly coloured roofing panels, which were sitting in the garden of our house, awaiting disposal. I put them in the trailer, added a stack of cheap construction timber and some guttering, and built myself a rain-catcher. It won’t really collect a lot of rain in the dry season, but – bearing in mind that the irrigation system is agnostic to the weather, and pumps rain or shine – it keeps the tank topped up in the wet.
Yes, it would be possible to add a rain sensor. It’s on my ‘nice to have’ list.
From our temporary accommodation in Birchs Bay Tasmania, we look out every day across the D’Entrecasteaux Channel to the shores of neighbouring Bruny Island. The ferry operates from Kettering, a few minutes up the road, so it would have been rude not to go and explore.
The island is 50km long and made up of North and South Bruny Islands which are separated by a narrow isthmus, known as The Neck. The North is largely given over to sheep farming, while the South is mostly National Park that is inaccessible to traffic. The easiest way to explore is by boat, and the best way to do this is through Pennicott Wilderness Journeys.
We caught the Pennicott bus from Kettering, which took us across on the ferry and then through North Bruny Island, across The Neck (stopping to look at the views and penguin rookery), and then boarded one of their iconic yellow RIBs at their base (and seafood restaurant) in Adventure Bay.
Almost as soon as we had left the dock, we were surrounded by bottlenose dolphins.
A Pennicott Wilderness Journeys yellow RIB (and a dolphin)Hello, bottlenoseIt’s impossible not to smile at cavorting cetaceans
The dolphins loved the powerful wake of the triple 250hp outboards, and our skipper Mick ran doughnuts so that they could play in the waves. As with whales, dolphins have this remarkable ability to make humans laugh and smile when we see them exuberantly playing in the wild. It was a great start to what was going to be a wonderful cruise.
Leaving the dolphins behind, we began to explore the towering columns of Jurassic dolerite that form South Bruny Island’s Fluted Cape. The flat-bottomed boat could get up close and personal with the rock formations and caves, and had more than enough power to get in an out against the swell.
The Bruny StackExploring a caveLooking up at the towering dolerite cliffsA Tolkienesque skyline
The cliffs are stupendous, among the tallest dolerite columns in the world. They are perforated by numerous sea caves, one of which is largely underwater and forms a spectacular blow-hole as wet air is pumped out by the swell pushing in. The skipper amused the crowd by poking the boat’s bow into the top of the cave as it spat salty spray all over us.
Nearby was an island colony of black-faced shags, who seemed completely unperturbed by our presence. They’re fairly common on islets off Southern Australia, building their nests from seaweed and driftwood.
Rounding the Cape, we found ourselves out in the Southern Ocean. The skipper opened the throttle, the three 250 horsepower Yamahas on the stern kicked in, and we blew past the aptly named Bridge Island, heading south.
We were motoring toward a group of four dolerite islands known collectively as The Friars, home to a male colony of rare Australian Fur Seals. They live here in a somewhat cantankerous group, travelling to the Bass Strait to meet up with females in October, each one potentially servicing up to 50 females before returning home, presumably exhausted and ready to rest for another year.
A few of the thousands of male Australian Fur Seals in The FriarsThere’s a fair bit of testosterone aboutYoung males looking rather cute
Around the corner is a colony of animals formerly known as New Zealand Fur Seals, more recently termed Long Nosed Fur Seals. They are closely related to the Australian, but form separate colonies.
A great site for a colony of male Long Nosed Fur Seals (on the stack to the right)
On a beach all by itself, we were lucky to see an Elephant Seal. A few years ago, an 800kg female of this species rampaged through the camp site at Adventure Bay, damaging a caravan and demolishing fences and picnic tables. She was eventually lured away by a fish on a piece of string. The one that we saw was pretty placid, though.
Elephant Seal at the Friars
Turning back toward South Bruny Island, my breath was taken away by the beauty of the landscape. The sea and the sky matched in shades of vivid blue, and across the towering dolerite peaks of Fluted Cape, the highlands of mainland Tasmania loomed in the distance.
We’re living at the bottom of the world, and we love it!
If, Gentle Surfer, you have been following our blog from the beginning, then you will be wondering what happened to our off-grid house in the forest.
Once the COVID-19 pandemic shut down all the State borders, it played merry hell with our logistics and we had to temporarily abandon our plans. I had paid off the landscaping and road-building contractors without ever seeing how far they had got with their work. This was my first opportunity in almost a year to see what the site looks like today.
My first priority was the state of the new road into our property. I had arranged, over the phone, for dozens of tonnes of rock to be spread up the lower reaches of the road after it had been levelled, but had no real idea how far the contractors had got or what it was going to look like.
In the event, too much loose rock had been laid over the load that had previously been compacted, making it hard going even for our rented 4WD, and the top part of the road had no aggregate at all, and was starting to grow ferns.
Evidently I’ve got a bit of work to do on the road, over the Summer!
Lower slopes good……upper slopes bad
My second priority was to see just how much levelling had been achieved on the actual building site. The contractor had been working on a cut in which we were to build our 6×12 metre shed-cum-solar-farm, and all I knew was that he had made some progress and then had had to stop when the track motor burned out on his digger, for which he was unable to source spare parts due to lockdown in China.
Now that we’ve shifted our primary residence to our other project, we don’t need so many solar panels in the forest and thus such a big shed, but I wanted to know how much levelling had already been done and whether we could build a smaller structure there. At the very least, perhaps we’d have somewhere flat to camp when we visit…
In the event, Dan had done most of the digging-out and about a third of the levelling. It’s not ideal, but is a good start to work with once we finally get down there.
Probably big enough to put a tent on
As for the building site itself, well, it’s still liberally scattered with the timber that I felled on my last visit, now nicely overgrown with ferns. My immediate plan is to clear the timber, split it into firewood, build a solar irrigation system, and plant vegetables.
One day, we’ll still build a house here
Once the current house build project has finished and we’ve settled in to our new home, the forest will be waiting just down the road. We certainly haven’t given up on that project and have already started thinking ahead and making plans.
As they used to say in the newspaper trade, watch this space!
Our new house in Kingston is almost finished, but – because of pandemic restrictions to cross-border travel – we had still seen neither the house nor the land that it sits on. The whole project had thus far been conducted entirely over the internet.
The border between ACT and TAS opened in mid-November, and Link Airways laid on an unusual direct service from Canberra to Hobart, so we took the opportunity to fly down and – for the first time – see our project in the flesh.
There was a short delay at Canberra Airport when the ground crew realised that the HF aerial had snapped from the top of the fuselage and was wrapped around the tail fin (you can just about see it at the top of the photo below), but in the end we boarded anyway. I chatted briefly to the captain on the way up the stairs, and he quipped “We don’t use HF anyway”.
Spot the missing antennaMasks to be worn aboard
Although the builders had been good at posting progress photos on the internet, we’d never seen any of it for real, so it was with some trepidation that we approached the building site for the first time.
We were relieved to find that it all looked exactly as we expected.
The bathroom tiling is looking goodThe butler’s pantry is coming alongThe main living area, viewed from the kitchenThe kitchen cabinets almost installedInside the fireplaceBerrima in the master bedroom, watching the carpenters start work on the back deck
This visit also gave us a welcome opportunity to look at the surrounding area. The last time we’d seen pictures of the plot was from our bush-fire assessment, when there was nothing there but empty grass. Today, what a different picture!
The fledgling streets are crammed with tradesmen’s vehicles, skips, back-hoes, pile of earth, stacks of temporary fencing. The houses are springing up like mushrooms along the edge of the creek, which has been planted with native shrubs in plastic tubes.
Our house (unpainted, centre), nestled between our new next-door neighbours
The neighbouring buildings are quite close, so we are glad that we are in a quiet cul-de-sac to the front, with creek and shrubbery to the rear. It will be interesting to meet our new neighbours; from the state of their buildings, it looks like we’ll all be taking up residence together, early in the New Year.
With the foundation posts installed last week, the builders have been working swiftly at the factory to finish the interior of the house. They only had a week to finish up before moving the house 200 km overnight across Tasmania from Westbury, near Launceston, to its final resting place in Kingston, near Hobart.
Yesterday, the tilers finished up the bathrooms, installed the vanities and hooked up the plumbing.
The main bathroom is looking pretty good!
Meanwhile, the cabinet makers assembled the joinery and plumbing in the kitchen and pantry.
The green cabinets are in the pantry, you can see the blue kitchen cabinets around the corner.
The two wings of the house were then separated and lifted onto two low-loaders, which trundled through the night, through the centre of Hobart in the small wee hours, until they reached our plot in Kingston in the early morning.
The living wing arrives, protected from the elements by wooden blanksThe service wing arrives, not quite as wide but very long!
Now it was just a matter of lifting the two wings onto the pre-prepared pilings…
24 Rodway Court has landed!
You can see from the photo that the front of the house isn’t fully clad. This is because there will be a connecting garage in front, but since that will be on a slab, and needs a driveway and crosswalk, it couldn’t be manufactured off site. We believe that this will be built next.
The water and sewage are already in place, and today we spoke to the electrical company about our new account. After that we just need to install the solar heating, the wood stove, the wooden flooring, the raised decks and stairs…
In the Australian building industry, there is a key milestone where a project is deemed to be “Substantially Commenced”. This phrase occurs throughout the legal, contractual, and financial documentation, as well as in both Federal and local government policies. The term is, however, not explicitly defined, neither as a legal term nor in any building code.
In most jurisdictions, in the context of private housing, it is deemed to be the date at which the foundations have been laid. For most projects, which are built in situ from the ground up, it is the first time that the builder breaks ground and does something physical. In our case, because the house is being built off-site, the building was in fact almost complete before it had been “Substantially Commenced”.
The living wing, with all of the edges now square-set (Oct 24)
The under-floor heating is in, now for the tiles in the bathroom (Oct 28)
Our “Substantially Commenced” date was Wednesday 28th October. On that day, our concrete piers had to have been installed on the land, otherwise we’d miss a load of contractual and financial milestones and generate a whole heap of extra paperwork and expense.
By Wednesday of the week before, we still didn’t have our Permit to Build. On Thursday, the entire planning department took a day off. On Friday, the planning department were back at work, but the only person authorised to sign our Permit to Build, had gone on holiday. On Monday, despite continual prodding by our builders, we heard no more from the department. On Tuesday, our builders sent a work crew for a site check, and discovered that the builders of the properties on either side of us have been using our property as a work site and dumping ground.
Get off my land! This hard-core and mixer belong to other builders.
One of the clauses in our contract with the builder was that the site must be completely empty before they start work. We contacted the builders on either side, who both admitted liability, and promised to move their stuff immediately.
Late on Tuesday afternoon, only hours before the deadline, we received our Permit to Build.
On Wednesday, the work crew arrived on the property to put in the foundations, and found that (of course), neither of the neighbouring builders had done anything about their junk on our land. Thankfully, one of the crew took it upon themselves to push everything over the boundaries.
Because our project is a post-and-pier construction, which does not involve any excavation or poured concrete, the actual work of building the foundations went very quickly indeed.
A lot more than just the house is resting on these little posts!
Our foundations are now officially down, and we are Substantially Commenced!
It’s been a month since we received our Planning Permit from Kingborough Council, but sadly this didn’t give us the right to actually do anything. Possession of a Planning Permit merely confers upon us the right to apply for a Permit To Build. Until we receive that second document, we can’t even break ground on our land.
Time is ticking on, and Council is still sitting on our Permit to Build. Without that document, we not only can’t build, but we can’t get a loan. The bank are patiently sitting on our loan application, but we’ve already had to ‘refresh’ our loan paperwork once already, when the bank statements and so on that we’d provided went out of date. It is frustrating because we’re still making substantial payments to Get Things Done, and our cash reserves are dwindling. In addition, part of our contracted agreement is that the foundations must be “substantially completed” by early November, and it’s now late October and we can’t get them started.
If we’d been building in the traditional manner, on concrete foundations at our property, we’d now be up the proverbial creek, with no way of getting the build done in time. We are, after all, moving to Tasmania in December.
Luckily, the house is being built off-site as two separate wings in TasBuilt‘s factory, and we had enough cash to get them started with the framing and windows, so they forged right ahead and started building. The framing was done in a couple of days.
Framing for the front of the house, showing both wings (Sep 28)
Framing for the cathedral ceiling of the living wing (Sep 28)
A view through all the bedrooms and bathrooms of the service wing (Sep 28)
Despite the fact that we can’t pay the builders any more money until our loan goes through, their factory has its own timetable and they were keen to continue; a week later they’d installed the windows, electrics, and made a start on the insulation.
Electrics in the living wing (Oct 10)
External wall insulation to the front of the house (Oct 10)
Internal wall insulation in one of the bedrooms (Oct 10)
A week later, they’d made a start on the roof and cladding, and made good progress on the dry-walling.
Dry-walling in the living wing. It looks nice and bright! (Oct 17)
Cladding and roof detail on the back of the service wing (Oct 17)
Ensuite and walk-in wardrobe from the master bedroom
Now that the builders have started, it seems that nothing can stop them. The house is due to be completed and moved to our property (on two low-loaders in the middle of the night) in a fortnight’s time. Before it arrives, the foundation posts need to be in place. These are scheduled to go in next Wednesday… and we’re still waiting for the Permit to Build.
Now that our plans had been submitted to the council, all we needed to do was open some champagne, sit back and wait for the build to start, right? Mmmmm no. Not at all. The builder introduced us to the Decor Sheet, a couple of dozen pages in which we needed to itemise in excruciating detail every inch of the exterior and interior of the house.
This was mind-bending stuff. We’d never before realised just how complex a system a house is. Every design decision influences other aspects of the design in ways that are hard to predict until you have gone down the path, and then wound back to try another route. Almost every evening, for months, we fired up the laptop and launched the current version of the Decor Sheet and talked our way through it, again and again, Googling our way through the unfamiliar terms. Did we want square set apertures, droppers, finials? And if so, why?
The first part of the Decor Sheet deals with the outside of the house; building materials, colours and so on. As time went on and we made firm decisions, we signed off first new version A, then version B of the original plans. We then realised that some of the decisions that we’d made about the exterior affected the interior, leading to version C, which raised questions about the roof, which led to version D, and so on.
The “exterior” part of the Decor Sheet needed to be signed off far ahead of the “interior” part, and although it was a bit stressful, we did manage to get it done. The next step was to deal with the “interior” pages, and at about this time, the wheels seemed to come off the builder’s bus. They were supposed to be helping us through the design process, but suddenly they weren’t responding to emails or answering calls. The only response we could get was that they were “very busy”, but that we still needed to complete the Decor Sheet by a specific date, otherwise we would “lose our place in the queue”.
The Colourist
We have no idea how to choose a colour scheme for a house, or how to design a kitchen or bathroom. I mean, why should we? Like anybody else, we know what we like, but how on earth were we suddenly supposed to become interior (or indeed exterior) designers? The builder had originally promised expert guidance, but that guidance was clearly not forthcoming.
For around a hundred dollars, we engaged a “Colourist” through the local paint shop. She was amazing! We had originally intended to talk to her about interior walls, but she got the bit between her teeth and revamped the exterior as well, with full and frank advice about the whys and wherefores of her decisions. We left the shop with an armful of colour chips and, for the first time, a warm fuzzy feeling that we were getting on top of things.
The Kitchen Designer
That warm fuzzy feeling persisted until we started on the kitchen. We already had a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the builder’s joiner, whose response to any request for advice about cabinet making was “We can build anything!”, which was hardly helpful. She had a particular penchant for making drawers and cupboards in unusual widths “to make them fit”, without any thought of how we might use them in real life.
With no practical advise forthcoming from that direction, we downloaded the kitchen design tool from Ikea and messed around with it. It’s a great tool, but we still didn’t feel that we were qualified to make our own decisions, so we made an appointment with an Ikea consultant. He came round to the house and at first was unwilling to provide actual advice beyond recommending products that fitted our specifications, but Bronwyn convinced him to think a bit more laterally and a few hours later, the two of them had thrashed out a rather nice design for both the kitchen and the pantry.
All of the cupboards and drawers were carefully designed to match standard-sized Ikea kitchen products, so that we would have no trouble finding inserts and trays for them. We did want the kitchen to be installed by the builder in their factory, rather than after-market by Ikea or anybody else, so we sent the finished design to the builder, who gave it to the joiner, who copied the basic design into his plan, but stretched all the cupboards out “to make them fit”…
We soon sorted out the joiner’s little game, and got the kitchen cabinet plans changed back to the way we’d designed them. However, the whole experience got us thinking about the limitations of having built-in wardrobes and cabinets. After all, if we wanted a wardrobe, we could get a free-standing one, and if we wanted to change the function of the room in the future, we could just move that wardrobe somewhere else. If everything was built-in, which was the builder’s default option, then we would lose that future flexibility.
OK then, we removed all the built-in wardrobes from the Decor Sheet.
Bathroom Design
For similar reasons, we decided to “Ikea-ise” the bathroom. We’d already decided on the floor and wall tiles, so now this meant also choosing our own bath, vanity units, sinks, taps, and other paraphernalia for each of the two bathrooms.
Some of the items were available from the builder’s own suppliers, so we let them deal with that. Others, such as some fancy tap ware, we purchased ourselves, and will freight directly to the factory. When it came to the bathroom furniture, Ikea Melbourne will deliver to Tasmania via the ferry, but we didn’t want the goods to arrive either too early (and lie around in the factory, potentially getting wet or damaged) or too late (thus delaying the build), so we rented a storage facility close to the factory and had them delivered there.
When the builder is ready to receive them, we’ll hire a local driver to pick the boxes up from storage and take them to the factory.
The Electrical Plan
There’s a part of the Decor Sheet that says “create an electrical plan”. Eh what? So not only are we required to be colourists and furniture designers, now we need to be electricians, too? Apparently.
We knew this was coming, and for months I had been trying to get a template from the builder, so that we had at least a vague idea of what kind of documentation we were supposed to provide. Eventually, after even more bugging and prodding, we received a snippet of somebody else’s Electrical Plan, and found that it was simply a plan view of the house, with all the lights, sockets, switches, data, and specialist power supplies marked.
Sure, we can do that! The power and data plans were reasonably easy; maximum power and data everywhere, to cater for every possible change of use for a room. No worries.
But when we turned to the lighting plan, we ended up once more going down the Google rabbit hole. How many downlights should we have per square metre? What’s the best way to arrange lights in a bathroom? And then, once I’d started drawing in the switches, I realised that you could easily get into a situation where you couldn’t comfortably turn the lights out on your way to bed, or turn them on if you entered through the back door at night, or what if you came out of the office at night and wanted something from the kitchen…?
It was mind-boggling, but I believe that I thought of everything.
Variations
As each change is made to the Decor Sheet, it affects the original quoted build price, which was based around a set of standard inclusions. These changes are supposed to be recorded in a document called a Variation; when we remove items from the plan, the price goes down, and when we add new ones, it goes up. At least, that is the theory, but the builder had stopped talking to us and we had no firm idea of where we stood financially. We knew that some of the early changes that we’d made, such as the Velux skylights, and moving the driveway from one side of the plot to the other, were large-ticket items, but we had still received no quote for them. Without knowing how much the build was going to cost, we were running into problems with financial planning.
It wasn’t just the money; we were trying to make important decisions, many of which required interaction with the builder, and it was as if they had just written us off. One night, after poring over the plans and figures and Decor Sheet once again, I got fed up with the whole thing, and emailed the builder to inform them that we were not moving forward with the build or paying them any more money until all of our outstanding questions were answered.
Early the next morning, the somewhat nervous and apologetic builder arranged a Zoom meeting, and shortly after that all the remaining issues had been addressed, including a properly itemised Variation. We spent a couple more evenings going through the dreaded Decor Sheet, checking it line by line, and then we signed it.
We’ve been forced by the pandemic to put our plans for the forest on the back-burner, and instead to build a completely different house on a completely different plot. We now find ourselves under pressure to get the house finished so that we have somewhere to quarantine when/if we are allowed to relocate to Tasmania at the end of the year. At the time of writing, it isn’t clear how we’ll transit intervening Victoria, which is in a declared State of Disaster…
Putting those worries aside, we do need to crack on with our design. There is a tight deadline if we are to submit the plans in time for the builders to start ordering windows and other materiel, in time to get the prefabricated sections delivered to the site by the end of September. To this end, we have been having daily discussions with the builder and with various suppliers (fireplace, flooring, decking, solar heating) to try to get everybody on the same page before we submit the plans to Council.
Since everything is connected to everything else, we also needed to decide on the flooring and the tiles and various finishes up front, so that we have a good understanding of how they all work together; it would be disappointing, for instance, to find on the day that the top of the floor tiles (7mm thick) don’t line up with the top of the wooden flooring (14mm + underlay) and indeed the hearth of the fireplace. This entailed numerous trips to the tile shop, bathroom shop, kitchen shop…
Site Surveys
We had engaged a geotechnical engineer (Ian Newell at EAW Geo Services) to perform a soil survey even before our plot purchase was confirmed. We didn’t want any surprises about our foundation requirements, and thankfully we were graded H1 with stiff clay, which won’t give us any problems with a pier foundation.
Even though this is an urban block and not a bush block, we were also required by Tasmanian regulations to determine our Bush Fire Attack Level. We engaged another surveyor (Rebecca Green and Associates) who determined that we were “low risk”, something that we already knew but which needed to be backed up by a certificate as part of our planning application.
Bear in mind that, because of the current ban on interstate travel, we have never actually seen the block that we bought on the internet. One good thing about the Bush Fire Rating is that the surveyor must provide photographs of the surrounding vegetation in their report. Now we have access to current photographs! This gave us our first good view of the neighbouring blocks. We are a little surprised to find that nobody else had started building yet. Are we going to be the first?
The bottom view is our block.
Up on stilts
The plans were converging on a solution that fulfilled our requirements, but which didn’t blow our budget too badly. We were aware from Google Earth that there was a slight slope to the land, but since our house would be built on posts rather than on concrete foundations, we weren’t too bothered about it. Our previous plans for the property in Lymington had to deal with a much steeper slope, where we anticipated a deck standing over 3m above the terrain. For the Kingston house, we figured that there would be a drop of less than a metre from the lounge sliding doors to the garden, but we’d sort out some kind of step or low platform after the house was built. The engineers had made a similar assumption, roughing-in a few wooden steps on the design to make the doors accessible, but otherwise leaving them alone. When the rest of the design was largely complete, TasBuilt Homes sent a surveyor with a Dumpy to get accurate readings, and confirmed a fall of about a metre across the whole 30m length of the site.
At about the same time, we were having interesting discussions about the slope of the garage roof. There is a local ordinance that the house and garage have to be roofed with the same material, but the style of Colorbond that we preferred for the house roof requires at least a 5 degree slope for drainage. The garage had a 3 degree slope, and if we increased that to 5, and extended the roof over the front door as a porch as we intended, it would interfere with the opposite eave.
Our choices were either to cut the garage into the ground (which would result in a garage floor below ground level with all the associated drainage issues, and would necessitate a more in-depth geotechnical survey), or to lift the entire house by about 30cm. That was pretty much a no-brainer, but when the architect plugged the new figures into their drawings, they found that the rear of the building would be well over a metre off the ground, and – under current Tasmanian legislation – we would need some enormous balustraded stairways to conform to health and safety regulations. Our slim and minimalist design suddenly sprouted all kinds of ugly appurtenances which pretty much wiped out the entire garden.
Oh no! Where did all those stairs come from?
In order to get rid of the stairs on our planning application, we needed to bring in the deck design a bit earlier than we had anticipated. After all, it’s just a budget, hey?
Thankfully, Bronwyn had already been talking to a local deck builder, and he was able to quickly come through with some specifications for the planning application. Our main deck, which was originally going to be a low platform along the side of the house (so low that it didn’t need planning permission), was now up on significant stilts, which meant that we’d also need a privacy screen. We also created a small back deck for our bedroom, so that we’ll be able to drink tea as the sun comes up.
OK, this should work.
It was time to lay down our first serious payment, tens of thousands of dollars, to the builders. They are now submitting the plans to the Council.
Our off-grid house-build in Tasmania has come to a complete standstill, following the builder’s surprise cancellation of the project, and the closure of State borders during the covid-19 pandemic. Dan’s digger – which has been chugging away all this time, clearing and levelling the site – burnt out a track motor, and importing spare parts has become problematic. We can’t get to the site to complete the clearance ourselves or to oversee any decisions due to quarantine regulations, and anyway the importation of building materials for the house, not to mention electronics for the solar array, has become all but impossible.
Our daughter starts school in Tasmania in 2021, and the contract in our current AirBnB in Canberra expires before Christmas 2020. We really need to sort out a Plan B.
We did some Zoom tours of houses for sale down in Kingston, which is on the outskirts of Hobart and close to the school, but noticed when the property agent panned around the neighbourhood that there were still some empty plots available. That got us thinking.
We had already formed a good working relationship with TasBuilt Homes, who had designed us a nice house which they were going to build in their factory and then bring in pieces to assemble on the land. Unfortunately, their surveyor decided that the approach road was too steep for their low-loaders to negotiate, and we moved on to other plans.
What if we bought a simple urban plot with access to town electricity and gas, and got TasBuilt Homes to put their house there instead? That would tide us over for a few years and enable us to get settled in Tasmania before once more addressing the off-grid build.
And so it came to pass that, three days ago, we became the proud owners of Lot 319 on the Spring Farm Road project in Kingston, Tasmania.
Can you see what it is, yet?
While the conveyancing was going through, we spent several weeks drafting the design of the house that we’ll put on it. This weekend, we’re signing a contract with TasBuilt Homes to start working on the full design.
An artist’s impression. The colours are wrong, but the shape is right.
It probably won’t be finished in time for Christmas, but we do still own our wonderful forest, inside which is an area that has now been at least partially levelled. To that end, we have purchased a new tent in which we can live (and, if necessary, quarantine) until the Kingston build is complete.
Having exhausted the possibilities of round houses and prefabricated houses, it was back to the drawing board once again. We had been trying to make the project easier for ourselves by getting major parts prefabricated and delivered, because we were working interstate and would not have daily oversight of the construction. One obvious solution was to move to Tasmania and personally supervise the build, but we had temporarily lucrative work in faraway Canberra which we still needed if we were to complete the project. Perhaps it was time to stop trying to make things easy, and get somebody to build a bespoke house for us on site?
We initially approached Davies Construction, who were happy to build something that resembled our previous designs, and provided some reasonable-looking cost estimates. We were feeling quietly confident when they backed out at the last minute, saying that they had just completed a build across the river in Franklin, and found that the travel distance of their sub-contractors was too onerous. I suspect that in reality our project was too small to be of interest to them.
Then we started discussions with the amazing David Kapel, a build manager in Launceston. David was excited by our project from the beginning, and took all of my carefully assembled quotes and estimates and agreed that he could meet almost all of them himself. He would handle our entire build, including all sub-contractors, from breaking the ground to the final finish, including electrical and plumbing work, for a reasonable price.
The way that he was able to achieve this was because the main structure of the house would be made from baulks of cedar, imported already cut and shaped to the owner’s specification by the Scandinavian company YZY Kit Homes. YZY had an agent close to our house in Canberra, who was happy to show us around some demonstration houses.
YZY Kit Home “Madeira”.
Being made of thick timber, these houses are sturdy with excellent thermal insulation, and the parts are easily transported. We were shown a house like the one above, broken down into components and ready to be packed into a standard shipping container which would easily fit down our road.
YZY Kit Home structural members ready for transportation.
Nothing was too much trouble for David, and he even agreed to a fixed-price contract because he was interested in having a show home in the south of Tasmania. We met him on site and discussed access, and we discussed turning circles and trees that needed to be removed, and the levelling of a space on which a 40-foot shipping container could safely be offloaded using a side-crane.
Over the months, we worked out interior decoration, decking materials, and different methods of achieving (and in fact exceeding) our required Bush Fire Rating.
Based on the YZY Madeira, our final plan.
We moved forward with grading our access road, and I got busy with the chainsaw to clear the building site. We put our property in Montevideo up for sale to free up some cash, and got down to the final fiddling details of the placement of light switches and power sockets. We were onto a winner.
Then disaster struck. Due to a family emergency, David had to pull out of the project and shut down his construction company. We were devastated.
YZY were still happy to supply the kit, but did not have any other licensed builders in Tasmania. Still in shock, shattered and not a little depressed, we drew a line under the whole idea of house-building, and went to look at yachts instead.
It took a little while to work it out of our system, and we looked at a lot of yachts. In the end, though, we couldn’t really find what we wanted for the amount of spare cash in our pockets, so we returned home to sulk.
Then we heard once more from David; his son, whom we had already met, was interested in taking up the reins of the family business. We slowly restarted our negotiations, and were just in the process of pricing up a second design option, when COVID-19 became a worldwide pandemic. Transport prices from Scandinavia went through the roof, as all the world’s empty shipping containers ended up rusting in China awaiting cargoes that never arrived. The Australian dollar went into free fall, and the supply chains of imported building materials broke down. Tasmania closed its borders to non-essential visitors.
We hope and trust that we will all get through this, but until the crisis is over, that’s the end of our story.
Back in 2012, we asked Matthew, a friend and neighbour who had access to useful machinery, if he would help us with bulldozing a road into our property. We asked him to make it as subtle as possible, just a winding bush-track through the forest to give us initial access, without materially changing the look and feel of the site. Matthew made us just what we wanted, a dirt track just perfect for humping camping gear in and out of the forest.
The entrance to the track from Klynes Road into the property, freshly built in 2012.
I had an idea in the back of my mind that some day we’d need to widen it to give access to construction machinery and to serve as our official Rural Fire Service access road, but for now this would do us just fine.
Since the “official” council road, Klynes Road, was merely a dotted line on a map rather than an actual graded thoroughfare, we also got Matthew to clear a line along its path up as far as our track entrance, adding a turning circle for delivery trucks, for when the time finally came to build something. Nobody else uses that end of Klynes Road, as it doesn’t go anywhere, so we felt that nobody would mind.
Then we went travelling abroad for a number of years, and returned with a small child. This re-focussed our minds on the building project, which had heretofore been a nebulous plan that we would think about somewhere in the future.
The first step was to evaluate what had happened to our property in the intervening six years. Was the access track still open? Was the cleared building site still accessible? We hopped on a flight to Hobart and rented a small car with a child seat.
We had no idea what we might find, or even if we’d be able to find the track. Nature can reclaim a lot of land in six years! This video records our arrival.
Track entrance in 2018
Top of the track, near the cleared site, in 2018
The track was still there, overgrown with ferns in places, and obstructed by fallen branches and the occasional tree. We cleared it all away, but found that the compacted mud of the track bed had eroded in places to reveal a lumpy surface of loose sand, projecting tree roots and slippery stumps, and there was no chance of getting our two-wheel-drive rental vehicle up there. We did come across a flat hard-standing that had been built by a gate to our nearest neighbours’ property (the farm on the other side of Klynes Road), a gate which hadn’t even been there six years ago. Now that we’d extended Klynes Road as far as our boundary, there was no reason why our neighbours shouldn’t make use of it, and they clearly had. It made a useful place to park the car, while we unloaded.
This is as far as we can get in this vehicle! Looking down Klynes Road from the track entrance.
Our storage shed, now six years old, was still standing on firm foundations, with all of our camping gear refreshingly un-nibbled by the local wildlife. After moving out the bulkiest items, we used the shed as a rain shelter for cooking and eating. Berrima, age 3, instantly fell in love with the forest, and with the whole idea of bush camping.
I had been worried that we would need to have the building site itself cleared again, but in fact it looked much the same as we’d left it six years earlier. I had deliberately left the tall trees standing while clearing away the scrub and litter, and I guess that’s the advantage of dry sclerophyll forest; all of nature’s action is far up in the tree canopy, and nothing much happens on the ground. There was just some Common Heath, a pretty but slightly prickly flowering native, and some bracken under the sheltering native cherry trees.
The house site, looking North, 2018.
Having established that everything was fine with our forest, we went back to work. A year went by, while we worked on contracts far away in Queensland and in the Australian Capital Territory. In the evenings, though, we planned and plotted ways to fund and build our final home.
Doing our research and due diligence, I became aware that the Rural Fire Service regulations had changed. When we’d put in our original access track, the requirement had been a maximum slope of 1 in 4; now the legislation had been upgraded to no steeper than 1 in 5.5 and at least 4 metres wide. Before we would be permitted to live in any planned house, we needed to build a new road.
I commissioned a surveyor to provide us with a contour survey of the site and track. This confirmed that not only the track but also the final rise of Klynes Road was too steep, and the surveyor went back to research the slopes further downhill. Once this was done, I plugged his figures into a GIS program, and then spent several months trying to combine the often contradictory information from this and our previous surveys, mud-map sketches, and paper documentation, to form a coherent picture of our site.
2010 mud map
2019 site plan
Poring over the numbers, I mapped out a potential contour route for an access road that would meet fire regulations, would be strong and wide enough to take heavy construction vehicles, and yet wouldn’t spoil the feeling of arriving at a remote bush block. In the 2019 site plan to the right above, you can see the wide green road skirting the Easterly limit of the contour lines.
The map is, of course, not the territory. For all I knew, there might be stands of important trees that I would not want to see felled, or other surprises that could only be determined on the ground. Since I was still working far away in Canberra, I also needed to find somebody with the necessary equipment and experience to get the job done in my absence. I boarded a flight to Hobart.
As luck would have it, it was pouring with rain that weekend, although this had brought the Common Heath into bloom across the entire 14 acres, which was quite beautiful.
Flowers of the Common Heath, pretty much the only plant that has reclaimed the cleared land.
I had intended to camp on the land, but instead elected to stay in a local B&B that had the advantage of heating and the internet. My rental car, a tiny hatchback, was obviously never going to make it up our track, but I figured that I would load it up with surveying equipment, stop short on the final drop of Klynes Road down to our creek, and hump in my gear on foot. I was quite surprised to discover that our neighbours had, in the act of putting in a boundary fence, extended Klynes Road right past our property and up over the next hill.
Our Klynes road terminus, 2018
Klynes road goes ever on… 2019
I had a rare old time stomping around in the mud, translating my mapped intentions onto the ground, and finding that yes indeed there was a slightly better route through the timber, one which avoided felling some of the older trees. I spray-painted and marked the route, while wondering who I was going to find to do the actual work.
Let’s put a road through here…
Back-tracking to our border with Klynes Road to check my figures against my boundary markers, I came across a large yellow digger parked on the fence-line of the farm on the other side.
Aha! I thought, and rang the neighbour whose fence this was, and before very long was in contact with the Dan, the Cat’s owner, who agreed that it made perfect sense for him to work on my project once he’d finished the fence-line, since his machinery was already on site.
Soon enough, the road-building project was under way. Perhaps ironically, the very first thing that Dan did was to widen and re-open the old track, so that he could get his digger up to the site. Now we are the proud owners of not one, but two roads.
Initial clearance of the bottom of the new road
Clearing the way for the top of the new road
Things quietened down a bit until after Christmas, when Berrima and I arrived at the end of a road trip to escape the 2019 bush fires. We had a good laugh “going on an expedition” (looking for and re-marking our boundary markers), setting up a tyre swing, and doing some bush artwork.
An Expedition to the South West Pole.
I also took the opportunity to finally clear the trees from the building site.
The building site, looking North, early 2020.
With actual physical labour and a changing skyline, it finally felt that I was achieving something. The site became brighter and sunnier, and the final shape of the view over the d’Entrecasteaux became more obvious. As well as Dan the digger, David the builder and Rodney the quarryman also visited, and we were able to point at things and make real decisions; it felt like we were making actual progress.
There is a bend at the bottom of the new road that is slightly too steep to drive up if the mud is wet. Even the Land Cruiser couldn’t get up in the rain.
The Cruiser goes up.. and then slides back down.
…but our resident artist made us a house number
Between Dan and Rodney and I, we formulated a plan. Dan would do some more levelling to straighten out the bend as much as possible, and then Rodney would drop a 1.5 tonnes of 60-100mm aggregate next to the creek. Dan would level it, and then Rodney would drop a second load. Once this had been bedded in up to the top of the bend, Rodney reckoned that the gravel trucks could negotiate the bend by themselves, and lay the rest of the 13 tonne loads themselves using the tipper and dragged chains.
Today, the first load went down, and the creek crossing looks marvellous.
The first load of aggregate at the creek crossing, looking North down Klynes Road.
The smoke from this year’s early and severe bush fire season had been closing in on Canberra for the past month. Official figures showed that breathing the air was equivalent to smoking several packs of cigarettes every day, with the city regularly topping the index of “world’s most polluted cities”. The ongoing bush fires, which were showing no sides of abating, where being fanned by high winds and extreme temperatures.
A fine view of Lake Burley Griffin and the Brindabella Range though the Canberra smoke haze
Smoke masks were either unavailable or in limited supply, and in any case didn’t come in non-adult sizes, so it was definitely time to get the children out. Some families headed to the coast, others to Melbourne in the south. We’d already escaped to Vanuatu for a week, but were now back in town and conditions were getting worse. We decided to go and camp on our property in Southern Tasmania.
Bronwyn needed to stay in town to work, but Berrima and I were free to go. It would be an interesting experiment, because at four and a half years old, Berrima had finally given up a nightly slurp of mother’s milk, and we thought that she was ready for an extended trip with Papa alone. We loaded up the Land Cruiser with camping gear, and hit the road.
On previous family road trips, Berrima had needed constant attention and frequent breaks at roadside playgrounds. This time, she entertained herself by chatting about the scenery, embroidering, drawing, and using road signs to teach herself to read. It was all quite charming.
To make it more fun, we stopped every 1.5 hours or so, selecting highway exits at random and driving around to see if there was a playground or something else of interest. It turned every 3 hour segment into an enjoyable 5 hour exploration.
Stopping for hot chocolate and curry at the Dog and Tuckerbox in Gundagai, we stepped out into 40 degrees of heat, passing trucks trailing rooster-tails of choking dust. We’d taken as wide a circuit as we could around the Snowy Mountain fires, but there was still a heavy smoke haze, with temporary signs along the Hume Highway warned of impending closures, and local fire signs set to Extreme.
One of our rest stops was in the typical rural town of Juglong, which had the advantage of a playground, but with the temperature still up in the forties, even Berrima couldn’t face playing in it for long. There was however a cute memorial sculpture to a policeman who was shot by a bush ranger (ie highwayman) in the late 1800s.
The Seargeant Parry Memorial at Juglong NSW
We weren’t out of the smoke yet, though, by far. The plume from the bush fires burning all down the East coast and across Kosciuzco had reached South America and New Zealand, so our little detour inland to Yass and down the Hume Highway didn’t make a great deal of difference to the air quality. Passing Tarcutta, my eyes were streaming so badly that I could barely see to drive. Goodness only knows what it was like for the folks out defending their properties.
On our first night, we set up on the banks of Lake Hume. Usually we bush-camp, but most if not all of the national parks were closed because of the fire danger, so we ended up at the Great Aussie Holiday Park in Bowna. This did have the advantage of a children’s water park and a very welcome pool, but the disadvantage of being far from any grocery shops. It was late in the day, so we we braved the cafe.
It took the chef 40 minutes to cook a steak and nachos, during which time Berrima and I covered an increasingly eclectic range of conversational topics as we tried to ward off hungry crankiness, one of which was trying to guess why the table had so many cut marks in the surface. I could only hypothesise that somebody had cut pizza on it, which didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Then, when our food finally came, it arrived with metal cutlery but no crockery, just a soggy paper bag which decayed instantly, so that cutting into the steak swiftly revealed… the table surface. Hopefully it was fairly clean.
Not exactly gourmet cuisine
Back at the car, we’d set up the awning to provide maximum shielding from the dozens of overly bright lights that seem to be de rigueur at every Australian camp site, and to take advantage of the wind coming off the lake.
This latter seemed like a good idea at the time, but the wind soon built up into 40kph gusts bringing with them searing convection-oven heat from the Kosciusco bush fires.
As the night drew on, a Southerly change brought a welcome freezing gale, followed by a thunderstorm and rain. We were awoken by an ecstatic dawn chorus, and the sight of clear blue skies for the first time in weeks.
Shuddering at the thought of breakfast at the cafe, we hit the road and continued South until we found a decent coffee shop in a sleepy roadside town.
As we crossed the border from New South Wales into Victoria, we drove out of the smoke from the out-of-control bush fires in Kosciuzco, and into the smoke from the out-of-control bush fires in Gippsland. We weren’t that surprised, as we had been hearing from friends who had escaped with their children to Melbourne, that the smoke there was little better than in Canberra.
Because we had a ferry to catch, we could only fit in a couple of stops along the way, but they did include the site of Ned Kelly’s last stand in Glenrowan (but no playground), and shark and chips in Benalla (ditto).
Without too much more ado, we arrived in Melbourne (not too smoky, as it transpired) and were efficiently embarked upon the Spirit of Tasmania II. We were early enough to enjoy an uncrowded dinner in the excellent restaurant, which is set up to showcase the best of Tasmanian produce, and then stood on deck to wave goodbye to the mainland before retiring to our cabin for the night.
The Spirit of Tasmania II leaves Melbourne
The swell in the Bass Strait was a relatively reasonable 3-4 metres which rocked us gently to sleep.
Early in the morning, we were decanted into Devonport under clear smoke-free blue skies, and headed to Launceston for a well-deserved breakfast. The chair-lift at Cateract Gorge beckoned, followed by a dip in the pool, and then of course a straight five hours at the playground.
We’re leaving Vanuatu, we’re all packed, and we’ve pre-arranged for our driver Marius to pick us up from the dock. We weren’t staying on Vanuatu’s central island of Efate, site of the international airport, but on the neighbouring island of Erakor. At the end of our lovely holiday there, we took our leave of the staff and boarded the little outboard tinny to take us back across the lagoon.
There are no cars at the jetty
Oddly, Marius wasn’t waiting at the dock, and he wasn’t responding to text messages. Ten, fifteen minutes passed by, and still no Marius. Our time margin to the airport, originally quite relaxed for the short journey, was now looking a bit slim.
One of the resort employees pointed out a bus driver lounging on the dock, an islander who had rather comically bleached a ring of beard- and head-hair in a complete circle around his face. He agreed to take us to the airport (a Vanuatu bus is not unlike a taxi, except that anybody can hail it in transit and the route changes to suit). Just as we were loaded on, a boatload of Japanese tourists arrived at the dock from their lunch on Erakor, eager to return to their cruise ship. Our driver wandered down to the dock to see if they needed a lift, assuring us that it would only take a minute, but immediately became involved in a long and animated discussion as the minutes ticked by and we got later and later for our check-in. It looked like the tourists were only asking for directions, but it was at least another five minutes before they set off walking in the indicated direction and our driver returned to our bus.
He didn’t make it far before they hailed him once more and he was embroiled in another arm-waving discussion, until finally they all climbed on board and, with a screech of tyres, we set off in a now fully loaded bus.
“We’re late for our flight!” we pointed out. “Their stop is on the way”, he soothed.
Of course, the cruise terminal was on the other side of the bay, and the clock ticked on as he decanted the Japanese ladies onto their gangplank, then burned rubber back up the road to the airport.
We had originally intended to stop for cash to pay him, but now we were so late that the driver agreed to wait while we used the ATM at the airport instead.
Leaving Bronwyn and Berrima to unload the luggage, I ran inside to find the ATMs. There were two of them. I put my card into the ANZ machine and it slowly began to ask it’s innumerable questions. What language, Bislama, French or English? Will you need a receipt? And then that stupid question that makes no sense at all, Which account do you want? The one attached to the card, you stupid machine. Eventually it got around to asking how much money I needed, and then rejected 2500 (the taxi fare) because it didn’t have 500 notes. Good grief. 3000. Whirr whirr connecting connecting… rejected.
The tannoy started announcing, “Will Berrima Reading please report to the check-in desk?” Pretty impressive, her first tannoy announcement and only four years old.
I moved to the second machine, a local one which ground even more slowly though the same questions, before it too smugly announced… card rejected. Back to the first machine, with a different card. “Last and final call for Berrima Reading, Bronwyn Reading…” Whirr… connecting… connecting… please take your cash!
I sprinted back to the taxi, pushed the notes into the window, abandoned my 500 change and ran for the check-in desk.
Thankfully there was nobody else in the queue, and after pointing frantically up at the increasingly urgent tannoy speakers, we swiftly received our boarding cards, but then there was an intricate Vanuatu exit card to fill in for each of us… then customs… and then finally into the crowded departure lounge.
There was only room for two planes on the tarmac. A much-delayed Auckland flight was announced, many people cheered, and the hall emptied. The few remaining travellers peered uncertainly at each other and at the sweating late arrivals; the plane was clearly going to be half empty. It was going to be an easy flight home.
Stepping onto the Erakor Island jetty from the little outboard-powered ferry which we’d boarded on the main administrative island of Efate, we were greeted by a smiling islander in traditional dress blowing a conch shell. A somewhat cheesy start, perhaps, but our minimal luggage was whisked away to our cabin and only minutes later our four-year-old was swept up by a group of giggling children, and without further ado, they all vanished down the beach to catch starfish.
Within minutes of arrival, Berrima is presented with a large starfish
Bronwyn looked at each other over the fruity drinks that had materialised in our hands, squinted out across the blue of the reef lagoon, and relaxed.
Erakor Island is less than a kilometre long and shaped like a lamb cutlet. It is unpopulated apart from the managers of the perhaps 30 cabins dotted around the perimeter, one of which was to be our home for the week.
Our cabin on Erakor island
The island is surrounded by a shallow lagoon packed with living coral. There is a large rack of kayaks and paddle-boards available for use, as well as an ample supply of snorkelling gear in all sizes, and almost every day we paddled out to see what was happening on the reef. Berrima took to snorkelling right away, and spent ages just gently paddling to and fro over the coral heads, watching the fish.
Kayaks and boards in the lagoon
The reason that we were on Vanuatu at all is down to the 2019 Australian bush fires. We had intended to have a quiet Christmas at our apartment in Canberra, but the city was smothered in thick choking smoke, so we caught the next plane out. Most of the guests in Vanuatu seemed to be Australian, and many of those that we met were unable to get home for Christmas because their home flights to Sydney were cancelled due to the bush fires. Most of them didn’t seem too distressed by their dilemma, and in any case, Santa noticed our predicament, and came to Erakor.
Santa arrives by canoe, with presents safely wrapped in plastic garbage sacks
Apart from the resort buildings on Erakor Island, there are a few interesting historical artefacts. In one corner is a typical Samoan family grave, with a plaque stating that the first Samoan missionaries are there interred. There is also a ruined mission building from a later, British minister, and an adjoining open-air chapel (still in use for the occasional wedding). Next to the chapel are a couple of gravestones.
Three small children and the missionary’s wife are buried here
Three successive children had died before their 2nd year, followed five years later by their mother, but there was no grave for the missionary himself. We asked a local, and he shook his head and said that the children all died of malaria; it was prevalent then, although it has now been eradicated from Vanuatu following an extensive vaccination program by the Aussies and the Kiwis. “But what about the Reverend Mackenzie? Why doesn’t he have a gravestone?” I asked. Our Melanesian interlocutor chuckled broadly, “He was eaten”.
Next to the resort’s rack of modern plastic kayaks, sat a traditional dug-out outrigger canoe. I’ve always wanted to try one, and we’d seen a number of others in daily use around the lagoon, so I asked if I could borrow it. There was a certain amount of humming and hawing, and it emerged that while it was technically possible, we had to wait for the slack of the tide in case we had trouble controlling it, and they also needed to round up at least three husky gardeners to lift it down off the beach. I tentatively hefted one end of the hull, and couldn’t even lift it, so we settled down to wait.
Realising that we weren’t about to give up, a group of strong men hefted the craft down to the water, and Bronwyn and I climbed aboard to give it a spin around the lagoon.
For something that was so unwieldy on land, it was light enough in the water, and we paddled out to where Berrima was snorkelling and then up and down the reef, until we realised that quite a lot of water was seeping in through the trunk and we headed back to the shore.
Only two large men were available to lift it out of the water, and they fumbled it and smashed the outrigger. I suspect that none of the staff were too distressed that the vessel was now out of commission.
Our driver, Marius, quickly and simply explained how to get about on Éfaté, the central and capital island of Vanuatu. Any vehicle whose number plate starts with a T is a taxi. Any vehicle, however small, whose number plate starts with a B is a bus. Buses can be flagged down anywhere and will take you wherever you want to go, subject only to the interim destinations of anybody else who gets on.
Through our hotel on Erakor Island, we had engaged Marius and his bus as part of a half-day package of tourist attractions, but he ended up driving us around all day once he discovered that we preferred slow travel to ticking tourist boxes.
Rarru Rentapao
One stop was the Rarru waterfall on the Rentapao River, a small and rather pretty cascade of limestone falls deep inside cool rain forest. The highlight is the deep plunge pool at the top, with a series of platforms and rope swings from which you can dive or plummet into the fresh water below.
The Rarru cascade in Rentapao River, Éfaté, Vanuatu. Note the jumping platform at top left.
Spotting our four-year-old, the staff watched us carefully at first, then relaxed as she hurled herself off the highest platform, plunged to the bottom of the rock pool, and surfaced laughing.
Incoming minx
Rarru Rentapao River
Marius knew the standard itinerary of the cruise ship operations, and since there was a ship in port, he had carefully arranged the timing so that we had the place to ourselves. We dawdled, we swam, we chatted to the staff, we leapt from platforms and plummeted from swinging ropes.
Under the Rarru Rentapao cascade.
At one point, Bronwyn realised that her carved wooden wrist-band, a much-loved memento from Ngong Ping, was no longer on her wrist. Although the water was clear, we were looking for a carved dark brown wooden bracelet on a river-bed strewn with dark brown wood and leaves. Noticing our preoccupation, the staff rapidly came to our aid and had a fine time diving around and checking the numerous underwater nooks and crevices. We didn’t find it, but had a great time looking, and we were treated to a seriously expert display of underwater swimming.
Turtle Sanctuary
Marius had recommended that we leave the turtle sanctuary til later, but we were hungry and it boasted a lunch barbecue. This site was more of a full-on tourist experience, with a bustling queue for the barbecue buffet and guests milling around feeding fruit to the hawksbill turtles in the lagoon.
It was all a bit crowded, but Marius gently suggested that we let the current gaggle of cruise ship tourists finish the rapidly depleting bucket of paw-paw, and let them disperse back to their coach, after which a new bucket of fruit would come out just for us. We amused ourselves by watching the turtles from a distance, and looking at the hatchlings in a couple of large stone tanks. Most of the turtles at the sanctuary are hatched on site from eggs dug up from the beach in order to improve their survival rate, and then released back into the wild when adult.
Hawksbill hatchlings
When it had all quieted down a little and the promised bucket of paw-paw had arrived, we had a nice quiet time feeding the hawksbills and scrubbing the algae off their backs with sand. They were very gentle and calm, not at all like the green turtle that chomped out a piece of my thumb in Samoa.
After a while, one of the guides gave Berrima a hunk of fruit, took her by the hand, and led her out into lagoon. Before long, they had located ‘Big Mama’, allegedly over 100 years old, and larger and considerably heavier than our daughter. The two oldest turtles have been with the sanctuary for some year, because however often they are released, they just keep coming back and are now a permanent feature.
After a token amount of paw-paw bribery, Big Mama consented to allow Berrima to ride around the lagoon on her shell.
Riding hawksbill turtles at the Turtle Sanctuary on Efate, Vanuatu
After the excitement of being towed, Marius suggested that we move up to a private-looking fale at the top of the hill, which had views over the reef, a hammock for the site’s owner, and – amazingly – a child’s metal slide which had been uprooted and cemented into the sea wall.
The slide was a little sluggish at first, but then the owner of the sanctuary came down from the fale and started throwing buckets of water to speed it up. Good fun.
Blue Lagoon
The Blue Lagoon is a great attraction for visitors and locals alike. It’s a sandy-bottomed gully that grades from fresh to salt water along its length, making for an interesting snorkel through many kinds of fish. Up on the surface, there are a myriad jumping platforms and swinging ropes; the locals were pulling off some amazing stunts, spinning off the ropes into perfectly executed dives, while we tourists had to make do with Tarzan yells and ungainly splashes.
The Blue Lagoon, Éfaté, Vanuatu
I snorkelled far up the channel, floating seed-pods rattling on my mask until I reached the sea, revelling in the calm and peace as the reef fish went about their quiet business, ignoring the antics of the lumbering primates above. It was a great end to the day, and a good round-up of the main active attractions of the island of Éfaté.
After considering some lovely (but ultimately impractical and over-expensive) round house options, we have realised that we need to pay less attention to the fluffy design tasks, and more attention to supply chain logistics and to the post-lock-up finishing and decorating. To this end, we decided to investigate a prefabricated house.
We started out looking at “tiny houses”, which are a bit of a fad at the moment. Technically a caravan in that they possess a wheeled chassis and are thus immune to building regulations, they are not meant to be towed around on a regular basis and are commonly installed as a granny flat in a suburban garden. A tiny house can be a marvel of interior design, and we found that we were familiar with many of the principles because it is similar to that found in yachts, where space is also at a premium.
A typical Tiny House, the Hauslein Sojourner
Although tiny houses are very interesting, and a good way to create some extra living space in a confined area, they are relatively expensive per square metre because of the necessity to cram everything into a small footprint, and anyway we have plenty of space to spread out and no need to unnecessarily limit ourselves.
There are other styles of prefabricated house, that can give you a larger footprint. Around Australia, there are a number of businesses which will build a house for you in their factory, all the way to completely decorated with all utilities and appliances installed. The house is then cut into pre-defined segments and delivered to the site on a low-loader for re-assembly. The advantage is that the builder has complete control over all aspects of the build using their own staff, and can thus deliver significant economies of scale as well as an agreed price and timeline.
We chose to move forward with TasBuilt Homes after visiting their rather amazing factory in Launceston.
Tasbuilt Homes factory, containing a house in progress.
The way it works is that you take one of their standard designs, and then move around the internal walls and fittings until you have the result that you want. The guys at TasBuilt were very friendly and obliging, and we had an excellent set of discussions with them, specifying all the finishes and adding a North-facing deck. Since the price was all-in, there were going to be no surprises, and we were pretty happy with the plan.
All was going swimmingly well, until TasBuilt sent their surveyor down to look at our access road, which was then under construction. They approved of the road that we were building across our property, but were less happy about access down Klynes Road itself. TasBuilt’s surveyor judged that it was too narrow and too steep to negotiate with a 6 metre wide trailer.
Klynes Road survey notes
Although this is officially a council road, we are not averse to running a bulldozer down it or cutting back some trees if we need to, because we are the last property on the road and it doesn’t go anywhere else. However, there were places where we would have had to double the width, which would entail substantial earthworks and the loss of some beautiful well-established trees, so we regretfully decided to return once again to the drawing board.
We had long been interested in the idea of building a yurt or round house in the woods, even travelling to Mongolia to stay in an original felt-walled ger.
Our ger on the Mongolian steppe.
These gers are designed to be stripped down, packed up and moved at regular intervals, stemming from the traditional nomadic lifestyle on the Steppes. With the breakdown of the USSR and their enforced “westernisation” of Mongolians, there is a resurgence in their use, particularly noticeable today in construction sites as the workers move from site to site.
Gers in use by construction workers in Ulaanbaatar.
There is quite a movement around the world to take the same easy-to-erect construction concept but with the view to building a more permanent structure. Some companies used modern fabrics, others made the walls from wood. In all cases, the result is a polygonal structure with a large open space inside.
Australian Roundhouses
We looked at a few different companies, several in the US where this sort of thing has been going on for some years, but eventually settled on Australian Roundhouses (formerly Goulburn Yurtworks) just outside of Canberra.
A design from Australian Roundhouses.
The team were enthusiastic about prefabricating the structural elements in New South Wales and driving them to Tasmania on a low-loader to erect them for us. We had an entertaining time discussing various options and layouts; the polygonal plan provides a fantastic airy openness inside, but does present problems when most of our modern furniture is designed to fit inside a square box. Still, everything seemed to be going pretty well with an 8-metre central round house surrounded by a ring of “annexes” to give extra space. The central roof cupola would provide natural light, and the full-height windows and raised exterior deck would give us unrivalled views across the d’Entrecasteaux Channel.
We edged ever closer to an agreement, and the builders got ever more excited about their upcoming Tasmanian “holiday”. Then we realised that we might have a problem with the 49 foundation posts on which the structure would stand. They would add appreciably to the weight of the trailer which needed to cross to Tasmania on the ferry, so I agreed to look into sourcing them locally. Since the site is sloping, with a drop of a few inches to the South and about 3 metres to the North, a half to a third of the posts would need to be longer than the standard length in which such poles usually come. The longer ones, up to perhaps 4 or 5 metres, would all be “special order” and priced accordingly…
And then we started factoring in all the extras that we would need once the main structure had been constructed. Dry-walling, plumbing, electrical, waste, all would have to be added after the builders had gone home. Even the rough estimates started to blow our budget. We needed to reconsider.
Neat House
Perhaps we could get away with a smaller round house for our living area, and combine it with a more traditional structure for the services? We looked into a company called Neat House who prefabricate buildings in Tasmania using local materials.
This would use fewer long foundation posts underneath the yurt, but now we would be dealing with house components from two separate suppliers, plus additional labour to glass-in the connecting corridor between them. It was all starting to get a bit complicated, so we went back to the drawing board.
We had chosen a build site in the middle of our forest, and had at least made a start on putting in an access road and clearing some space. But what next? What kind of house did we want to live in, and who could we get to build it? Would it make sense to do it myself as an Owner Builder?
We knew that whatever we built, it would be off the grid and self-sufficient. Even though such structures are increasingly common in Tasmania, it seemed to us that it would be sufficiently non-standard that we wouldn’t find something off the shelf, and perhaps we would be best off managing the project ourselves. To this end, I began investigating the requirements to attain my “Owner Builder” qualifications, which would give me the legal ability to build my own house in Tasmania.
It turned out that there were two components to this; the “White Card” which is an industry standard health-and-safety qualification that is essential for working on any building site in Australia, and the “Owner Builder Certificate”, which is a specific course to prepare you for the job in hand.
White Card
An Australian White Card is a pre-requisite for any construction activity, and the terms and conditions vary between Australian States. Whichever card you get, though, it is valid in all other Australian States… and some States don’t allow online training… and you don’t need to reside in a State to apply for their card… and the Western Australia card is available online and differs from some others in that it does not have an expiry date. I couldn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t get the open-ended WA card, so I registered with EOT online training and got one.
The course was inexpensive and interesting, with a face-to-face component which involved videoing yourself giving answers to some of the longer questions which are reviewed by the trainers. There was also a slightly bizarre requirement to film yourself correctly wearing your Personal Protection Equipment, so I took the opportunity to kit my daughter out as well.
Bunnings also sell PPE for small people.
Owner-Builder
The Owner-Builder qualification is a bit more involved, but is also available inexpensively online. I took my course with ABE, and began a fascinating journey into the intricacies of controlling a building project. One theme that continued throughout the various modules was to think carefully about whether you were up for it; are you capable of managing your time, managing people, managing a budget? Is your family prepared to support you throughout the inevitable stress? Are you really prepared to give up so much of your time?
It really is a very good course, and at the end I felt a little nervous but at least mentally prepared for the challenges to come.
We rented a driver to take us from Ubud to Seminyak, which was supposedly more of a beach resort kind of place. The drive took us through Kerobokan, a kind of overcrowded crossroads for the neighbouring cities, and then down into the snails-pace gridlock of cars and scooters that is Seminyak.
Our residence for the next few days is a couple of rooms off a walled courtyard tucked down a secluded alleyway off the main street. The bedrooms reeked of moth-balls, which was not surprising when we discovered that both en-suite bathroom floors were liberally scattered with the toxic chemical. We swept them out into a bin and blew a fan through to get rid of the head-thumping fumes, and then realised that the door of the bedroom that we had intended to give to Berrima opened out directly onto the sunken pool (and I mean directly, a single step would have you in the water), so we had to scratch the idea of a quiet night in a bed of our own.
The pool is only a step away from the bedroom
The pool itself is a bit of a curiosity. It would make an excellent and relaxing koi pond, perhaps the centrepiece of a miniature Balinese garden, but instead it is supposed to be a swimming pool a little over two metres long and far less than that across. It was at first hard to fathom who it might be intended for (apart from precocious 3-year olds), but on the other hand the house’s interior decoration of whisky adverts and old spirits bottles might suggest the life-style of the usual clientele.
The ‘full kitchen’, rather charmingly situated outdoors, consists of the tiniest microwave ever made, a stove top and a couple of battered pans, but certainly enough to make coffee in the morning, so we’re all set there.
We headed up the lane to see the delights of Seminyak, passing between the friendly tat salesman and the shyly smiling young girl with the withered arm who was peddling vodka-bottles full of moped fuel at the entrance to the alley.
Wherever you go, fuel is sold in vodka bottles
Perhaps I was jaded by the Bali-Belly that I picked up in Ubud, but I found nothing at all to like about downtown Seminyak. It was just a row of tourist shops selling the same tat that they were selling in Ubud, and presumably for higher prices, because we had already driven past all the artisanal streets in Ubud where the stuff seems to be made.
Feeling distinctly out of sorts, I had a lie down in the apartment, and my magical wife arranged for a scooter-borne Balinese masseuse to arrive on the doorstep. This is one tourist attraction that Bali does really well, and I felt much more cheerful afterward.
On the next morning, we were up with the neighbour’s rooster, hence off to an early breakfast at a local eatery for a really quite lovely meal. The food is noticeably better in Seminyak than in Ubud. Over Balinese coffee, we planned a walking route down the high street, across to the famous Seminyak beach, along the strand to 66 Beach, returning back to the high street from the other end of town.
Trying to locate the beach access track, we found ourselves in a hotel bar with no obvious route down to the sand. We initially sat at a sort of circular sun lounger, but were told that there was a minimum 1 million rupiah cover charge. This seemed over the top for a cup of coffee, so we moved to a smaller, less pretentious table. We waited for somebody to come and serve us but to no avail, so we got up and left and, having secured directions from one of the many security guards, found our way onto the sand.
This is supposed to be one of the main attractions of the town, and we had picked our second stay in Bali to give Berrima some beach time. However, when we arrived, the tide was in and both the surf and the “do not swim” flags were up.
The thin strip of gritty volcanic sand was packed with bar tables, sun loungers, umbrellas, and litter. Walking along the small strip of tide-wracked rubbish, the occasional wave washed up over our feet and then attempted to rip us out to sea into the crashing breakers.
All dressed up with no place to play
It really wasn’t very pleasant at all, and we were glad to find an alley between stacks of beer coolers which led back into town.
As travellers go, we can be pretty stubborn in our pursuit of the ‘real world’. Finally, though, we had to accept the obvious; that the whole island of Bali is given over to a particular kind of spend-by-day, party-by-night tourism, and that the tourist industry is the centre of the culture.
Admitting defeat, we spent our final day at the Waterbom fun park, riding the flumes. The experience was surprisingly inexpensive and very enjoyable for all. The queues were short, the rides fun for adults and children alike, the staff delightful, and the food excellent.
At the end of the day, tired and happy, we were attempting to negotiate a return fare with a taxi driver in the street outside. We had reached an impasse where our highest offer had been rebuffed, when a passer-by suddenly leaned in and said that he would take us for that price. He turned out to be a Waterbom employee on his way home, and in short order we found ourselves cocooned in his tricked-up hot-hatch with lurid orange leather trim and violet highlights.
After a quick change of clothes, we went straight to the acclaimed tourist restaurant Jackson Lily’s for an incomparable steak dinner, easily the most enjoyable eating experience of the whole trip. If you can’t beat them, join them.
Although we enjoyed our cottage hotel in Ubud, with its idyllic setting and friendly staff, we were quite disappointed with the restaurant. Whatever we ordered, it was overcooked and flavourless, and after a while I realised that there was a correlation between eating at the restaurant and feeling ill for the rest of the day or night.
It wasn’t just the hotel restaurant; in general, we found the food in Ubud to be insipid and uninspired, which was curious considering that tourism is their only industry.
Suckling Pig
One of the local delicacies is suckling pig, which involves slow-roasting an unweaned piglet over a wood fire, a dish that we were really looking forward to. In the days before we became disenchanted with our hotel restaurant, we gave them the required 24 hours notice for preparation, and hurried back in the evening to enjoy the experience.
Unfortunately, it was very disappointing. We surmise that the 24 hour preparation time was for the chef to defrost the pre-cooked pig meat and then boil it to within an inch of its life. It was almost inedible, and came with a kind of warm floppy coleslaw. We didn’t even have the heart to insist that Berrima try it, as she pushed it around her plate and ate bread, rice and fruit instead.
Balinese Coffee
One of the other gustatory attractions of Bali is supposed to be its coffee; after all, it’s grown locally and ‘Civet cat poop’ is a big tourist draw. It was curious, then, that initially we struggled to get a decent cup. Eventually we came to realise that you can order ‘Balinese Coffee’ anywhere, even though it is rarely on the menu, which is made by simply pouring boiling water over very finely ground beans to produce a fine, strong-tasting brew. We were even happier when we found that the baristas at the local speciality coffee house The Black Eye, which does not offer Balinese Coffee on their menu, were more than happy to mill some of their espresso beans to the correct grind so that we could have a morning cup from the comfort of our four-poster bed.
Crispy Duck
One morning, after a couple of cups of Balinese Coffee over which we watched the staff collecting flowers for the hotel’s shrines, we got our driver to drop us off in downtown Ubud to see if we could find something decent to eat. He dropped us off at a place that he recommended, but it was really just an expat burger and pizza joint. After a short walk we found a more traditional restaurant, the Warung d’Ubud, that promised Balinese crispy duck and a variety of local soups.
And finally, something to write home about
It was all rather good, with a lovely selection of delicate flavours and some excellent crispy duck. In fact, we were so replete after lunch that we decided to draw a line under any further tourist activities, and spent the rest of the day lazing at the pool.
Curry at the Indus
After a cocktail at the hotel, we headed across the road to the pretty Indus Restaurant, where we ate an acceptable but bland meal of mixed curry dishes overlooking the rain-forest of Tjampuhan ridge, a steep ravine that leads down toward central Ubud. We suffered a bit from the ants and flies that swarmed over, under and on the table, and were somewhat surprised when the bill was about the same as for an equivalent meal in Australia. It’s supposed to be the second best restaurant in Ubud, but we didn’t go back.
Gluten-Free Schnitzels
One afternoon we found an unlicensed taxi-driver sitting in the street outside the hotel, who cheerfully accepted our offer of 50k rupiahs (about $5) to take us wherever we wanted to go. Our destination was the Gluten Free Kitchen, formerly known as the ‘House of Schnitzel’ and thus a perhaps unique blend of grain-free cuisine and Austrian (and Australian!) fast food.
When we got there, we found that there was no power to the street, so we could only pick items on the menu that were made without electricity. This became a bit of a game, but after a while we established that there was no coffee or smoothies, no pan-fried items such as meat and burgers, nor any boiled food such as vegetables. In fact the only appliance that was running was the gas-fired deep-fryer, so we had what turned out to be a rather nice lunch of pork and chicken schnitzels, accompanied by empanadas and onion rings.
Empanadas, onion rings and schnitzelView from the Gluten Free Kitchen
Canting Bali Cooking Class
A few years ago, we’d greatly enjoyed a local cooking class in Penang, so we’d booked what we hoped would be a similarly enjoyable and illuminating Balinese cooking lesson.
A small group of us met up at the local market, where we were introduced to the raw ingredients that we were going to use. Then we moved to a paddy which was almost ready for harvest for a discussion about the life and times of rice workers, then on to the school where we joined up with about 30 people to prepare a feast.
The rice is almost ready to harvest
We had a fine time pounding spices, extracting coconut oil, and chopping (and chopping. and chopping) vegetables and roots, initially preparing a basic sauce and then expanding it into a number of different dishes.
We ground up tuna and barbecued it on skewers over coconut-shell charcoal, curried tempeh with vegetables, put together a soup of chicken and enormous oyster mushrooms, and steamed fish inside packets of banana-leaf. The resulting meal was very pleasant, and we were certainly all ready for it after a morning of preparation.
Salad
About half way through the holiday, my guts turned to water and I spent a considerable amount of time napping between doses of pills while the girls went swimming. At length, feeling a little better, I reckoned I could face dinner if it was going to be simple fare, and we planned to go into Ubud to find something special. However, we’d waited too late in the day and our little treasure grumpily insisted that she wanted to eat in the awful hotel restaurant, largely I suspect because she enjoyed feeding the fish in the Balinese garden.
Enjoying the Balinese garden at the hotel
But if I just chose a salad, how bad could it be? The headline ‘green salad’ was off today (which should have rung alarm bells!), so I ordered the ‘grilled vegetable salad’ instead.
There are no other words; it was truly disgusting. As far as I could tell, the chef had taken a jar of pickled vegetables, poured it into a saucepan, and boiled it until soggy. I gave up and went to bed, and suffered the most horrible symptoms and fevers, over which I shall draw a respectful veil.
Still weak the next morning, I had a bit of a lie-in, and then we all trundled out of the door and a few buildings down the road to the Elephant Restaurant where I nearly cried with pleasure over a perfect green salad, with a root juice on the side, on a peaceful veranda overlooking the Tjampuhan ridge.
Afterward we sat over perfect Balinese coffee, watching squirrels climbing inside the tree-top mango fruit and nibbling out the soft centres, and wished that we had discovered this gem a little sooner.
The idea of an Elephant Sanctuary on Bali is a bit odd on the face of it, because they have no elephants there. However, you can do pretty much anything you like if you are a foreigner with money, so a local businessman set about “rescuing” work elephants from Sumatra and setting them to work pleasing the tourists in Ubud. We went to visit them at the Mason Elephant Park.
The elephants – over fifty of them – seemed happy enough with the deal, and some of them were breeding with the ornery old bull that they kept chained up in a corner of the large and very pleasant grounds.
Mason’s doesn’t seem a bad place for an elephant to retire to
Bronwyn and I have ridden and swum with elephants before (most notably in India), but this was a first for our little daughter so we purchased the “wash, feed and ride” option.
We gave our elephant a good hose-down and scrub, which she endured stoically until I found a nice bit to brush behind her ears.
A bit wet behind the earsPose with the tourists
At the feeding station, you can purchase baskets of cut fruit for a line-up of ever-interested animals. The large ones were a bit daunting for children, so Berrima got to feed a baby elephant.
Time for a snack
Then it was time to saddle up for a ride. Bronwyn and Berrima went on one elephant, and I went on a much larger one. Ensconced on a hard wooden howdah only thinly disguised by blankets, we ambled slowly around the extensive grounds, pausing to look (at eye level!) at coconuts and jack fruit hanging from the trees.
The ride of an elephant is not jarring but there is a fair amount of side-to-side sway. Occasionally both mahouts would stop for a photo opportunity, posing each animal in the obligatory tourist pose that we have seen the world over, with the trunk curled and raised.
Smile for the camera!Amphibious vehicle
At the end of the ride, we found ourselves by the rather thick green waters of the bathing pool. We have swum with elephants before, and knew to some extent what to expect, so we had declined that particular package. However, we stopped to watch a number of brave souls get submerged on top of their elephant. It was very noticeable how the mahouts tried very hard not to get fully immersed in the water, from which full-time staff were continuously fishing large floating turds.
We landed at Denpasar airport with the intention of spending a few days in Ubud on the Indonesian island of Bali. After an easy and friendly Customs clearance, we emerged into the main building, an interesting construction of what appear to be modern glass-and-metal tubes running through the decoratively carved red stone gates and walls of an old temple, although in fact the entire structure was recently built as a whole, due to a local bylaw that states that all buildings must have at least some elements of traditional architecture.
Fusion architecture at Denpasar airport
Our driver arrived and loaded us into his car. The capital city around the airport is scattered with extremely impressive and flamboyant sculptures of heroic scenes from Hindu mythology, sometimes the size of buildings. The traffic reminded us of downtown Kuala Lumpur, if not India, with families of three and four on little scooters passing us on either side, the ladies often riding side-saddle.
As we reached the outskirts of Ubud, we started to see mopeds carrying entire pop-up food stalls, and in one memorable case, the pillion was steadfastly carrying at full vertical arm’s length not one, but two intact car windscreens.
Out here, there appeared to be at least one temple every few hundred metres, all intricately carved towers and gates. It wasn’t until much later that we realised that these were not temples but regular houses, because every house has at least one “home shrine”, and it is not unusual to have many more.
A home shrine (or two) in the garden
The roadside was packed with artisans, not only a bewildering number of stone-masons who seemed largely to have the same repertoire of metre-high Hindu gods, but also quarry stonemasons with enormous piles of hand-cut volcanic rock, and wood merchants with sections of hard-wood tree wider than the spread of your arms.
Passing on the family business
Our hotel comprises a number of thatched chalets scattered amongst rice paddies, coconut palms, and endless statues and flowering trees. It was very picturesque. Our chalet boasted a family-size kidney-shaped stone tub, and an enormous solid wood four-poster bed with thick cotton mosquito-netting.
Our little house at Ananda Cottages, Ubud
The staff were very friendly, very relaxed, yet very focussed on making the place look beautiful. Hinduism is the major religion here, and so there is a continual whirl of colour as small baskets of flowers and food are placed thrice daily before each of the ubiquitous shrines, and every day new flowers are tucked into crevices on the myriad stone statues.
Every morning, we were woken to the sound of sweeping, as the staff combed the site for fallen frangipani and other tree flowers, gathering them for use during the day.
The morning flower collection
Flowers being visited by a tropical carpenter bee, one of the largest bees in the world.
We had hired a driver for the week, Komang from Abracadabra Tours. He had planned a thorough itinerary from which we cherry-picked the more toddler-friendly options.
One day, he took us to see the volcano. This was not Mt Agung, which is famously still erupting and out-gassing, but Mt Batur which hasn’t done anything much since the sixties, although it is still classed as active. We understand that the trek to the top to see the sunrise is a popular pastime, and in the past we would have done that ourselves, but on this occasion we took the child-friendly option and planned to view the peak and the caldera from a ridge-top restaurant.
From the moment that we left Ubud, the road climbed steadily. It was a striking drive, because the flags were still flying from the recent Independence Day celebrations.
The road up from Ubud took us from the sea-level rice-paddies and banana palms, to the higher altitude orange plantations. We stopped at a roadside shack to buy some small sweet tangerines, and also a handful of hard-skinned purple fruit that we ate by sucking out the pith, not completely unlike a pomegranate in flavour. Possibly they were a kind of passion fruit, but nobody we asked seemed to know what they were called. One great hit, though, was the snake fruit, so-called because of its scaly skin, which had lovely firm white flesh reminiscent of a lychee.
We were glad that we’d stopped at the roadside vendor to enjoy the fruit, because when we got to the viewpoint (roadside entry fee applies), there was only a dodgy buffet to eat in the supposed restaurant, on wobbly chairs overlooking a cloud-shrouded peak in the far distance.
The volcano Mount Batur, from the “restaurant” lookout.
Somewhat underwhelmed both intellectually and gustatorily, we drove back down the mountain to visit another tourist destination, the Kellalalang terraced rice-paddy fields, which seemed like an odd idea because we’d been driving through and walking around terraced paddy fields for the whole day.
Nevertheless, it was one of the region’s attractions, so we drove up to the village (an inevitable roadside entry fee applied) and entered the village. It consisted of a single road lined with wall-to-wall retail outlets all selling exactly the same tat, looking down on what obviously used to be rice paddies but were now an exceedingly well-worn set of concrete steps interspersed with over-priced cafes, children selling postcards, and what seemed to be a recent craze of rope swings slung between palm trees. We handed over our ‘donation’ and clambered down the track, past more child card-sellers and photo-opportunity “rice farmers”, and then, confronted by another donation booth, clambered back up to the retail outlets.
Tegallalang Rice Terraces
We’d arranged to meet Komang at the driver’s car park a little out of town, and when we arrived we were confronted with a large government sign which warned against the locals soliciting donations, and strongly recommended not descending into the paddies as it “destroyed the unique heritage site”. It would have been nice to have known that ahead of time.
Another donation booth
One morning, we booked ‘breakfast with the orang-utans’ at Bali zoo. On our arrival, we were ushered into an outdoor area filled with trestle tables, with a couple of ropes looped overhead for a young orang-utan, and a couple of elephants leaning in over a low fence.
Breakfast with the Orang-Utan
It was quite fun. As well as the usual buffet food, there were short-order chefs sorting out omelettes and so on, and the opportunity to get up from the table and hang out with the orang-utan, elephants, parrots, and even a somewhat nervous pangolin.
Breakfast with the elephant
Later we toured the zoo itself, which tended heavily to Sumatran and Benghal Tigers, and a wide selection of gibbons. It was quite pretty and the animals seemed in good shape. One nice touch was that all the enclosures were decorated with rock-carvings and the ubiquitous pillar shrines of the rice paddies.
Breakfast with the human
One great aspect of Bali was the ready availability of seriously good massage. Wherever we went, there was always somebody who could come to your room, or drive you to their spa, and then for a handful of notes subject you to a wonderful 90 minutes of pounding and squeezing.
Another facet of the culture is that if you have a car, then you are a driver for hire. Haggling with an official taxi driver outside a water-park one day, we were interrupted by a worker at the park who was going home in his tangerine-and-purple hot-hatch, and offered to drop us off at our hotel for whatever price we cared to pay.
There was no benefit in taking a “proper” taxi anyway. On another day, it started to rain while we were in downtown Ubud. Suddenly all the previously ubiquitous kerbside taxi-touts dissolved out of sight, but we stopped a passing official cab. Once we’d agreed on a price, the driver set off firmly in the wrong direction. It turned out that not only did he not know our hotel, but he didn’t even know the road it was on (ie the main street past Ubud museum), and in any case he didn’t seem to know which way his taxi was pointing.
He had two GPS units but one wasn’t working, and he didn’t seem to be able to use the other one. Finally Bronwyn fired up her own GPS and gave him directions, but at every turn he shook his head and demurred “one way” although it clearly wasn’t, until he smiled in shocked amazement when we popped out on the main street, facing in the correct direction.
Having moved all of our gear from our previous yacht Pindimara to our new yacht Elizabeth, it was time to beef up her systems to get her ready for the long trip from England to Australia. We unpacked everything and put it all away, finding that, because of the ducting for the heating system, 39′ Elizabeth had much less storage space than 34′ Pindimara.
Where does this go, Papa?
Squeezing five batteries into the space for three
Still, we got it all in, removed the TV and sound system to make space for food and tools, upgraded the elderly batteries, and checked all the subsystems to ensure that they were fit for purpose.
Everybody’s favourite maintenance task
It might flush better after a clean
I spent a relaxed sunny afternoon threading child-friendly safety nets, and an inordinate amount of time in my shipping-container workshop, expanding the ridiculously small Euro-sized fibreglass gas cupboard to fit a standard LPG canister.
Fitting the netting. Very calm, very Zen.
Rebuilding the fibreglass to fit a standard bottle
…and sometimes, we even went sailing!
We took Elizabeth to Cowes to repair a dent where somebody had rudely rammed her in the marina, and took the opportunity to get my expanded gas cabinet properly installed, and to do the antifouling. We also discovered that the occasional alarming prop shudder that we’d experienced was down to, uh, the propeller being so fractured that is wasn’t really attached to the boat at all. It’s a mystery how it had stayed on the shaft all this time.
Somewhat unbelievable fracture in the propeller boss.Teak and fibreglass all cleaned up and ready to go.
Meanwhile, in the real world, my gardening business had reached a point where I needed to take on occasional staff in order to grow. Some tasks, such as my favourite job of fencing, really benefit from a second set of hands. Unfortunately, England was going through a backlash against the perceived threats of the “gig economy” and “zero hours contracts”, and there was all kinds of legislation coming in against what normal people would call piece-work. Since gardening is not only seasonal but weather-dependent, it makes no sense to pay an employee on days when neither of us are working, but that was the direction in which the legislation was heading.
The other option would be to take on a proper permanent employee or apprentice, but in order to make that financially viable, I would then need to buy a second van and a second set of equipment, which in turn would necessitate a bank loan. My financials supported such a plan, but then I would be looking at settling down for another few years to double my customer base and provide my staff with a stable working environment, with a view to leaving them to run the business when we finally took Elizabeth cruising to Australia… but in reality this approach was fraught with issues. Where would I find this mysteriously unemployed paragon of expertise and virtue? Once trained up, would they want to take on the responsibility, or would I need to start again with somebody else? How long, seriously, would it take to pay off the loan while simultaneously paying a full-time wage?
We also needed to consider that we were currently living in inexpensive student accommodation while Bronwyn studied Archaeology; this was not a permanent arrangement, and could we afford to rent a regular house in this area, and bring up a child, while simultaneously reducing our business income?
And then there was the health question. I had originally switched from computer work to gardening in an attempt to curb increasingly painful carpal tunnel and upper body pain caused by endless hours hunched over a desk, and in that sense, the career move had proven to be a winning combination. My nerve sheaths were no longer inflamed, my posture had greatly improved, and my core strength had increased dramatically. I felt really great.
Now as I entered my 52nd year and my third Winter as a gardener, I found myself running into new difficulties. Much of my work involved holding heavy vibrating machinery extended at waist- or shoulder-level. New nerve damage flared up all across my shoulders, neck and arms, swiftly turning to permanent chronic pain. I began eating Codeine tablets like sweets, and screaming loudly to drown out the pain as I tackled simple jobs like hedging. I started to take a rest-day in the middle of the week, but that wasn’t going to support any kind of business expansion. The pain spread, and became the permanent and debilitating misery of fibromyalgia.
And finally, although Berrima loved living on the boat and sailing, we had never been out with her in a blow, or in any situation where one or the other of us was not able to take care of her. We know a number of cruising families, and have read a lot of cruising books, but had so far not found the answer to the simple question: What do you do with a small child when the situation necessitates “all adult hands on deck”?
We sat down with some families that had done it, and pinned them down to the answer that we had always suspected, but never acknowledged to ourselves. You tie the child to the bunk below, go up on deck, and try to ignore the screaming.
Now we’ve met quite a number of kids that have grown up afloat, and without exception they have been marvellous, well-adjusted people. The benefits of cruising the world clearly far outweigh the unhappiness of being forced to wait below while your parents deal with Important Stuff that, frankly, shouldn’t happen too often on a well-run voyage. But still, we found ourselves unable to countenance it.
So there it was. Reality check. I was getting too old for physical labour, political and economic realities were getting in the way of growing our UK business, we wanted our daughter to grow up in Australia, and we found (somewhat to our surprise) that we had deep misgivings about sailing there with a child so young.
It was a big decision, but we made it. Bronwyn gave up her degree, we closed the business, sold Elizabeth, and moved to an IT contract on the other side of the world.
We were happily living on our yacht Elizabeth at our berth on the Hamble, running a local gardening business and bringing up our four-month-old daughter Berrima aboard. It was a lovely marina, and the staff were great; when Bronwyn was pregnant, they even used to get up early and sweep the snow from the pontoons. There was a nice bar at the marina, and good shops and pubs within an easy walk across the fields.
Then Bronwyn was given the opportunity to study Archaeology in Winchester, and we were offered family accommodation on campus. I could run the gardening business equally well from there, and Bronwyn could take advantage of the campus day-care and walk to lectures, so we moved off the boat and on to dry land. Elizabeth was still just down the road, though, and we still got the opportunity to sail on the Solent at weekends.
Sailing the Solent in November 2015. Berrima is 8 months old.
As the winter months drew in, gardening work tailed off and I was offered a short IT contract in the UK Midlands. I commuted up and down the country, staying in hotels in the week, and returning at weekends. Then Bronwyn also got offered a short contract at the same site. There began a complicated dance of baby-sitting, with several kind people weighing in to help us out at our hotel in Telford; thanks to Gisela, Julia, Phil and Di for all your efforts!
In the meantime, it didn’t make any financial sense to keep Elizabeth on her powered berth on the Hamble, so we moved her onto a pontoon at Shamrock Quay on the River Itchen in Southampton, where she could sit quietly while we worked in the Midlands and took time off to finish decorating our property in Uruguay.
When we returned to her in early 2016, poor Elizabeth was looking very shabby indeed. A winter sitting in the damp of the river near to some overhanging trees had encouraged a great deal of unwelcome growth on the decks.
Unwelcome algal growth from the River Itchen, in February 2016.
Thankfully, as part of my gardening business I had a powerful jet-wash, and after a couple of day’s work I got her presentable again. And then it was time to go sailing.
Sailing in the Solent in April 2016. Berrima, age 13 months, is either having a nap or plotting world domination.
The pontoon in central Southampton was inconvenient for Winchester, and we weren’t too impressed with the algal growth from the river, so we looked around for somewhere else to keep Elizabeth. Eventually we settled on Yarmouth, on the Isle of Wight, just a short ferry journey from Hythe which was accessible by train. There was also a car ferry if we needed it, and most importantly, it was wonderfully inexpensive.
We installed Elizabeth on a free-floating pontoon close to the ferry terminal, and started moving our cruising gear aboard. It was time to set her up for ocean cruising.
All this stuff, which used to be on Pindimara in Australia, needs to go on Elizabeth.On the pontoon at Yarmouth, April 2016.
While fitting out our previous boat, Pindimara, for cruising, we always had to keep in mind that we would have to sell her when we ran out of money at the end of the voyage. This restricted the modifications that we could make, and every change to her structure had to be reversible. It worked out well for us; once we’d removed all of her cruising gear, Pindimara looked pretty much like any standard weekend cruiser, albeit with rather over-specified running gear. The agent was delighted to handle a yacht in such pristine condition.
With Elizabeth, we’re not constrained to keeping her ‘standard’. She’s already over ten years old, and by the time we think about selling her – if we ever do – she’ll be old and hoary enough that nobody will expect her to look like the catalogue.
But that’s all in the future. To begin with, it’s time to get rid of all the equipment that really isn’t us, and which in our opinion is just taking up valuable space. The two previous owners have already made some thoughtful and well-executed changes, but some of them are more suitable for a marina-based caravan than for an ocean cruiser. For instance, one entire shelf was taken up with a flat screen TV and associate aerial paraphernalia, and another locker was filled with video and amplification equipment. We like music as well as the next person, but a five-speaker sound-surround takes up a lot of valuable storage space…
Too much hi-fi!
Baby in the bow cabin
We also discarded a loudly ticking brass clock which was keeping me awake, and some expensive gimballed paraffin lamps which looked great, but made us nervous as we couldn’t ever foresee a scenario where we might want to have naked flames at sea.
In idle moments, I have been sketching designs for the conversion of the forepeak into a more practical seagoing cabin with ample storage, and of the ‘sofa-like’ lounge furniture into something that can work as a sea-berth. We also need to install a proper fridge suitable for 12 volt operation in the tropics, because the standard cavernous Frigiboat is only really useful under shore power.
The standard Frigiboat fridge is a huge empty space that only really works under shore power.
We replaced a couch with an enormous but efficient Engel fridge/freezer (behind Berrima).
Out on deck, we are more than happy with the existing modifications, such as extra cleats and cars, a sunshade and a cockpit cover, an extending wooden cockpit table, and some rather neat glass doors at the top of the companionway.
Fancy table made from a school desk.
Nice companionway doors.
The gas locker, though, is set up for a single 2.72kg camping canister. Even though there’s ample space under the bulkhead, Bavaria have explicitly moulded the inside of the locker so that the more standard large bottles won’t fit, and we are forced to use the more expensive tiny camping variety. Our local chandler is of the opinion that there’s a conspiracy between the European yacht manufacturers and the gas company Calor… be that as it may, that’s one job that needs sorting.
This standard gas bottle (red) won’t fit in the gas locker, so lives precariously under the helm seat.
The gas locker is theoretically big enough, but I need to cut out the silly mouldings, like this.
The voyages of our previous boat, Pindimara, were at least partly a test to see if this was a lifestyle that we might want to embrace later in life. Regular readers of this blog will know that we found that it agreed with us rather well, and even though the practicalities of our post-cruise finances meant that we had to temporarily return to the corporate world, we began to plan ahead for our permanent retirement from the rat race.
It took a few years to arrange affairs to our satisfaction, and family matters meant that we were constrained to stay for a while in the UK. However, we finally quit our jobs in the city, and slowly segued into a different pace of life. Bronwyn started a new degree course which should enable her to find outdoor maritime work as we cruise, and I began a local gardening company which brings in just enough cash for us to eat and to pay the marina fees, while getting me fit and out into the sunshine. At the same time, our daughter Berrima was born, and for a while we dropped out of public ken, overwintering on Elizabeth and concentrating on bringing up a child and building the new business.
The commodore surveys us from the companionway
Both our daughter and our business are now nearly five months old. One is starting to show intelligent interest in the world, and the other has for the first time turned a profit. I finally took a day off to do nothing but lounge on deck and play with Berrima, and felt the muse take me to update our blog.
We have been understandably busy and haven’t really spent much time working on the boat, but on the other hand we are taking a long view. We can’t set sail for good until Bronwyn finishes her degree, and in any case we want Berrima to be old enough to be comfortable on her sea-legs. This gives us a three-year window to get everything ready, and then the plan is to spend a year or two cruising around the Mediterranean, cross over to the Caribbean, and then finally cross the pond to Australia.
Almost a year after we bought her, this month was the first time that I actually skippered Elizabeth
In the meantime, one of the downsides of living with a pre-toddler is that despite our best intentions, the interior of our yacht resembles an embarrassingly un-seamanlike cross between a caravan and a laundry. On the few occasions that visitors have prompted us to take the time to go for a sail, it took a full morning to prepare the boat for sea (i.e. to shove half the stuff into lockers, and to hide the other half ashore) and even then we were essentially sailing single-handed as Bronwyn needs all her faculties to concentrate on feeding our ever-hungry passenger. This has tested the limits of our adaptability and we have temporarily declared the boat a visitor-free zone until our new crew-member is able to cope a little more independently.
Our furniture is still in a bonded warehouse just down the street, Despite the fact that they’ve had the inventory for months, Customs keep coming up with new and interesting reasons to delay signing off the paperwork. The most recent one required a description of the precise chemical composition of the insulation foam in the freezer (how would we ever know that?), and a signed letter stating that we wanted our domestic freezer for, er, domestic use. In the meantime, we are camping in the apartment in sleeping bags with one plate, two mugs and a coffee machine.
Christmas is round the corner, and so it doesn’t look like they’re going to deliver our stuff before we leave at the end of the year. This is quite frustrating as it means that we’re going to have to fly back here in the new year, but as a Brazilian lady said to us in the hardware store the other day, the only way to deal with South America is to stay tranquillo.
We stopped worrying about it and took a two-hour bus ride to the resort town of Punta Del Este. Unfortunately an enormous storm rolled in and battered the town with 40-knot winds, so we didn’t get to spend much time on the beach, but we amused ourselves by trying out different restaurants and bars and thoroughly enjoying the experience of a room with real furniture.
Bronwyn rediscovers the wonders of bedroom furnitureUnemployed foreign gentleman of no fixed abode
“El Mano de Punta Del Este”, in a gale
Bronwyn is surprised by a cold foot bath
Eventually we dragged ourselves away and back home to Montevideo. The search continues for a carpenter to help fix our weathered windows and to install some shelves and cupboards. Carpenters are mysteriously hard to track down, and although we did finally get one to come to the house, in the end he decided that he didn’t want to do the job. Today we had a visit from a second carpenter, a friend of the electrician who helped install the air conditioning. Hopefully he’ll come back to us with a proper quote.
Plumbers are much more relaxed than carpenters. The gas and central heating specialist turned up today and moved a radiator for us, because it had originally been installed smack in the middle of the bedroom wall, right where we wanted to put the bed. While he was bleeding the radiators, he checked the whole system and also decommissioned our old electric boiler, and all for just a handful of dollars.
We were just about to catch the bus into town, and Bronwyn had popped up onto the terraza to hang a towel on the washing line. A sanitation engineer hailed her from the neighbour’s roof. It turns out that each apartment has a grease trap under the sink, and once a month somebody is supposed to come round to clean it out. I doubt that ours has been done for years, as it smells pretty bad, particularly since we’ve dismantled all the kitchen units and exposed the drain cover.
This big round lid (previously underneath the kitchen sink), hides a big smelly basin full of old grease
It didn’t take the engineer long to vacuum and deodorise our grease trap, and lift and clean all the drain covers. Since he had been engaged to stay on site all day, and since we were practically the only people home on this working weekday, he was going to have to hang out on the stairs on the off-chance that somebody else came home. Instead he went round our whole apartment, turning on taps and flushing toilets and making sure that all the drainage pipes ran smoothly, removing several years worth of hair in the process. He tut-tutted at the slow drainage in the upstairs sink, disassembled the pedestal, removed a good handful of old builder’s putty, and then reassembled it all with fresh sealant. Since he’d accidentally spilled about a teaspoon of water onto our already filthy tiles (we’re currently cleaning all our tools in there), he took it upon himself to scrub the floor, toilet, bidet and basin sparkly clean, and then repeated the process in the downstairs bathroom. Amazing.
After five years of long-term tenants, we finally got to stay in our now unfurnished apartment in Uruguay for the first time. We arrived equipped with decorating tools and building supplies, because we intend to redecorate and move in our own furniture and offer the apartment for fully-furnished short-term lets when we’re not here, giving us the opportunity to use it ourselves once a year or so. The furniture is currently snarled up in red tape at Customs, so it is lucky that we also brought camping gear.
We were pretty glad that we came prepared to do some work. Although we easily fell in love with our apartment all over again, the previous tenant had left under a bit of a cloud, and it soon emerged that our previous letting agent has utterly failed to do any proper maintenance over the preceding years. The paint is peeling from the windows, there’s no cold water supply upstairs (including to the toilet) and no hot water supply downstairs. The chimney has obviously never been swept, the shower trays are leaking, and the very expensive US$1500 painters engaged by our agent had simply splattered white paint everywhere, including over the woodwork, radiators and electrics.
The window frames desperately need attention
The stove is warped and sooty
The last tenant left us his curtains. Thanks, mate.
Might need to tidy this up a bit
In theory I suppose we could go back and argue with our previous agent, but we’d much rather just draw a line under the experience, roll our sleeves up, and get on with a renovation.
Some information has been lost during the shuffle between tenants. For instance, we were a bit puzzled about why we had been left with both a gas boiler and an electric boiler, apparently simultaneously making hot water in the same system. We brought in a gas engineer who established that the gas boiler was all that we needed, so we disconnected the electric one. A friendly plumber soon discovered that our tenant had randomly turned off and disconnected some of the pipework, which was another easy fix, and while he was there he replaced our leaky toilet cisterns.
While a couple of the light fittings have been upgraded by tenants, most of them are still the temporary single-bulb mountings put in by the original builders, so after five years it’s really time to sort that out. Shopping for lights is no hardship here. Montevideo glories in lighting shops; there are hundreds of them in our area alone, often side-by-side. It is a mystery to us how they all co-exist, but it certainly provides for a lot of choice.
Let’s paint the mezzanine. You can also see some of the original “temporary” light fittings.
A typical Montevideo light shop
There’s always time for a snack while shopping
One of our tenants had fitted some kitchen units, which were fine in themselves but had been arranged in a curious way so that it is impossible to fit standard-sized appliances. We talked through a few options, and then simply ripped the whole thing out.
There goes the kitchen. It’s restaurants from now until Christmas.
In the new year, kitchen fitters will install something a bit more impressive to our own design. One bonus of removing the old kitchen is that we ended up with two rather expensive pieces of granite, complete with double sinks and plumbing, which we are planning to install on the rooftop terraza.
These sinks will go nicely on the roof
New light fittings, much more classy
Summer is in full swing, the temperature is climbing into the thirties, so we ordered an air-conditioner. A couple of lively lads came to install it, which was a lot of work that took all day, but it works wonderfully and will be a good selling point when we rent.
We had the air-conditioning fan installed in the light-well of the building. The trouble with looking out over a shared light-well is that your lounge and bedroom look directly into your neighbours’. Many locals get around this by installing wooden panels over their windows, or keeping the curtains permanently closed (as in the photo below left), but we had thought of a sexier solution and had (not without some difficulty) imported some rolls of plastic film from England, which we used to make our windows translucent. It worked out rather well, giving us privacy while letting through the sunlight.
The air conditioning guy hanging out in the light well
Through a glass, obscurely
And finally, we have always thought that our 4.75 metre ceiling deserved a chandelier, so after a lot of entertaining window-shopping and many changes of plan, we finally had one installed. We think it looks rather nice.
We were late for the airport, thanks to an idiot pre-booked taxi driver who hadn’t bothered to research his pick-up address. However, we weren’t too concerned because we’d already checked in online and just had to drop off our luggage.
We’d deliberately flown American Airlines because their allowance is two 32kg pieces each, and we had a lot of tools and decorating equipment to take with us to Uruguay, including a roll of specialised frosting film that we intended to use on our windows. At first, the check-in ladies reckoned that we could only take a single piece each, but that misunderstanding was swiftly cleared up because Bronwyn knows her small print. Then, just as our luggage stickers were being printed, the lady said “Isn’t there a box embargo on this flight?”
We were beginning to suspect a conspiracy. The US government had already done its level best to prevent us from paying for our container shipment (see previous blog), and now they were randomly instituting a rule against our box of window film.
This “embargo” wasn’t mentioned anywhere even in the very small print of our tickets, which we had read very thoroughly because our box was only one centimetre short of the maximum length for American Airlines luggage. We encouraged the flight staff to check in more detail. Eventually it emerged that while there was indeed a “box embargo” on American Airlines flights out of our stopover destination Miami, the rule did not apply to flights into Miami. Our bemused but helpful assistant agreed to check in our box for the first leg, as long as we promised to repack the box into a bag in Miami, as apparently this would satisfy the regulations.
We had a pleasant flight, and no trouble with Miami Customs, especially as we got to bypass the enormous queues of US citizens’ waiting to use their “streamlined” automated gates. Instead we ambled up to the “foreigners” exit where a cheerful young man stamped us through without any delay. Our box was even waiting for us on the baggage carousel.
There was a dicey moment at the airport Left Luggage office when the rude attendant demanded to see our boarding card before he accepted our luggage. Who keeps their boarding card after getting on a long-haul flight? Luckily Bronwyn found hers screwed up amongst the empty food wrappers in her bag. We dropped our other three bags of tools and made our way to the Miami metro system with two small carry-on bags and a one-and-a-half metre box over my shoulder.
We found ourselves unable to decipher the metro map, but were helped by a friendly transit cop who showed us where we needed to go. He then accompanied us to the ticket machine, which didn’t accept notes larger than $20, something of a problem because all of our currency was in a paper bag full of hundreds (see previous blog). The machine supposedly accepted credit cards, but not without a numeric US ZIP code, so we couldn’t get it to accept our foreign cards. The nice guard spent a lot of time trying to find a US postal code that would work with our cards, or to get it to accept a truncated foreign post code, but in the end he reasoned that if the system was too stupid to let us buy a ticket then we might as well ride for free, and waved us through the barrier.
Much of Miami seems to be under construction
Out with the old
In with the little boxes
Miami streets from the elevated train
The box arrives in Miami
After delivering the box to our hotel room, we took a long bus ride to the waterfront and enjoyed a stroll, a paddle and a nap on Miami Beach.
Catching some rays on Miami Beach
We had pre-booked a late dinner at the excellent River Oyster Bar, reasoning that if we ate really late after lying in the sunshine we would reset our body clocks. The food and the ambience were wonderful, and we whiled away the hours over salt-encrusted bronzino, grilled mahi-mahi and excellent local wines, before returning to the hotel and sinking into a deep and satisfying sleep.
On Sunday we woke with a whole day to tackle the problem of finding a bag for our oversize box. The tourist shops only held expensive regular-sized rolling luggage, but while exploring some of the poorer Spanish-speaking quarters of the city, we eventually came across a little shop that carried simple nylon bags. The helpful lady located her largest bag, technically 50 inches, for just 20 dollars.
With that job out of the way, we returned to the River Oyster Bar for a happy-hour feast of oysters, locally caught cobia, and wine.
Lots and lots of oysters
We headed back to the hotel, and found that even though the roll would probably almost fit inside, there was no way of getting it through the mouth of the bag. We knew from our original architectural plans that our film was oversized for the windows that we were going to fit it to, so we borrowed a pair of scissors from the bemused receptionist and shortened the roll until it fit.
Finally we grabbed a taxi to the airport, had no trouble checking in our box-in-a-bag, and enjoyed a relatively comfortable red-eye flight to Montevideo.
On our arrival in Uruguay, we quickly made our way through Customs and down to the baggage hall. We found our new bag patiently circling on the carousel, and to our complete lack of surprise, noted that it was sitting amidst a plethora of cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes. “Box embargo”, indeed.
We were shipping a container full of furniture from the UK to Uruguay, without any clear idea of the import charges that would be levied at the other end. The wheels of South American bureaucracy grind but slowly, so although we had already forwarded a full inventory of our intended shipment complete with individual photos and descriptions of every item, the deadline for our own flight to Montevideo was looming and so we just had to let the container go, otherwise there would be no chance of it being there when we arrived.
Fast-forward to several weeks later, and we finally heard back from Uruguayan Customs when our container was already steaming past Brazil and just days from docking in Montevideo. At this point, of course, they could have imposed their 60% tax on whatever valuation they chose and we’d just have had to pay it, so we were pleasantly surprised when they gave us a figure which, although still in the thousands of dollars, was about 25% less than our own valuation.
We took a deep breath and set out to pay the bill. International bank transfers into Uruguay are problematic at the best of times. Uruguay’s banking laws are very strict and secrecy is paramount; for instance our simple monthly statement cannot be trusted to the postal system and must be couriered to us once a month. Since the peso, although currently well-behaved, has a slightly dicey past, most medium to large transactions are denominated in American dollars. Unfortunately Uruguay’s privacy laws offend US authorities, so getting any money through the international banking system is always interesting.
We had previously paid our Uruguayan shipping agent via Western Union, which had gone reasonably smoothly after we had supplied sufficient documentary evidence to prove that we weren’t international terrorists. Sadly, the US had changed the rules overnight, and our attempt at sending the balance of our account was refused. We were informed that we had infringed some international terrorism criterion somewhere, but were not permitted to know which one, so there was no way that we could fix it. To add insult to injury, having rejected our transfer, Western Union now get to keep our money for several weeks, presumably so that Homeland Security can wipe their bottoms with it or something.
Luckily we still have enough remaining funds to cover the bill, so we’re going to put used hundred-dollar bills in a paper bag and take them overseas in our underpants. It’s perfectly legal, but isn’t it the kind of thing that American money-laundering regulations were put in place to prevent in the first place?
Our apartment in Montevideo sits empty. We don’t mind that it isn’t generating income, but we do worry that nobody is collecting the mail, cleaning the windows, or paying the bills. To address the problem, we contacted Reynolds, one of the agents that we used when we were originally house-hunting, because we know that they manage short-term lets for tourists and business people. One thing swiftly led to another, and they agreed to take over the maintenance of the flat while we were away.
The idea now is to rent the apartment fully furnished to short-term visitors, giving us the opportunity to use it for ourselves whenever we are in Uruguay. Since the previous tenant took everything with him, the property is completely empty of fixtures, so we decided to fly over this coming December to decorate and to furnish. Bettina, our contact at Reynolds, warned us that it would cost about US$10,000 to furnish an apartment of that size, and that the workmanship was liable to be far inferior to what we were used to. Her advice was to import the furniture from abroad, and just accept the massive 60% import tax that would be levied by Uruguayan Customs. The price would end up about the same, but the fittings would be far superior.
This set us thinking. During a lifetime of travelling, we have acquired a lot of stuff. Flitting as we do from job to job and city to city, we are always moving into new houses. Unfortunately there is rarely time to move the existing furniture from our previous residence to our new one, because usually at the end of a contract we throw our locally acquired junk into some local storage and go travelling. When news of a new contract comes in, we’re usually far away from our furniture and in order to make an immediate start, we have to set up a new place from scratch. We are pretty good now at completely furnishing a new property within a day or so of arrival.
Moving house again. I can’t even remember where this was.
We had thus accumulated a succession of storage units, each containing a full household’s worth of stuff. In addition, when we sold our yacht Pindimara, we filled yet another storage unit with five years’ worth of liveaboard and cruising gear.
Yet another darn storage unit
Stacking the stuff. Which city was this again?
Over the past couple of years, we have been slowly consolidating all our stored items into a facility in Canberra, Australia. Once we were pretty sure that we had everything in one place, we had the whole lot shipped here to the UK, where we happen to be working.
When the container arrived last month, we had no real idea what was in it. Certainly there would be a number of tables and chairs, some washing machines, a handful of fridges and freezers, and boxes and boxes of books. That much we knew. But there was another 10 cubic metres of mystery, stuff that we’d forgotten about, stuff that we thought we’d destroyed, stuff that we thought we’d lost, even some boxes that had been travelling around unopened for over fifteen years. It was time to have a shakedown.
We were renting a three-bedroom cottage in South Wales, and spent a lot of time shuttling van-loads of boxes back and forth between our large lounge and our storage unit. Whenever we had some spare time, we would open a box or two and itemise its contents. Some of the boxes were beautifully packed but contained nothing of any use. Others were a jumble of really expensive and useful stuff obviously thrown in at the last minute. We assembled a collection of over a dozen travel adaptors, innumerable bottles of skin and suntan lotion, and piles of crockery and cutlery.
We’ve probably got any power question covered
We were glad to discover that the few remaining bottles of wine from our wedding (gifts from our friends) arrived intact, along with a surprise half-empty bottle of rare whisky and, mysteriously, tucked here and there amongst towels and sheets, a handful of small bottles of cider. Since these latter have no value at all, we could only assume that we couldn’t bear throwing them out at the time and had quietly tucked them away for later, not realising that they would not be unpacked again for years.
Slowly we separated our stash into three piles, representing the three forks of our future plans. One huge pile contained all the stuff that we needed to move onto our new yacht, Elizabeth. One small pile contained sentimental stuff that we couldn’t bear to part with, and which one day would find its way all the way back to Australia and into our building project in Tasmania. And finally, a much larger pile comprised of furniture and fittings which we wanted to ship to our apartment in Uruguay.
On the face of it, it may seem insane to ship several apartments’ worth of furniture from Australia to Britain, and then to ship a large proportion of it on to South America. However, if you factor in the savings of closing all those storage spaces and the time and flights that would have been necessary to sort things out ourselves, and also the fact that we already own all this stuff and so don’t need to purchase it again, it was much easier to pay somebody to load everything into a shipping container and then deal with it here. It’s also surprisingly difficult to freight things directly from eastern Australia to Uruguay, because most of the shipping is travelling in the opposite direction.
There is a great deal of paperwork involved in importing goods into Uruguay. Just for starters, every individual item needs to be photographed and valued, and that valuation must be agreed by Uruguayan Customs, who will then levy 60% import duty against it. Because we envisage that any problems will occur at the Montevideo end, we chose to arrange the freight using a Uruguayan shipping agent, rather than a UK one. This has the advantage that they know how the import duty system works, but the disadvantage that the UK packers and movers are contracting for a foreign company, and calmly inflate their prices to suit.
In order to minimise our costs, we chose to pack our goods ourselves. Generally this just meant unpacking everything, photographing it, and then shoving it back into boxes (and after our clear-out we had plenty of boxes!), but for a few of the larger items, we had to construct crates from rough timber. Luckily there happened to be a power outlet in our storage, presumably for the cleaners, so we’d sneak in at night with a power saw, and then try to sweep up all the sawdust before anybody noticed.
Boxes… boxes… endless boxes…
Bronwyn helps crate up a sofa
After a good many sweaty nights in the storage, and quite a bit of rethinking and repackaging, we were all finished and ready for the removal men. The next day, the storage facility was hit by lightning, which didn’t damage our goods but took out the freight elevator, leaving us with the prospect of carrying twenty square metres of gear down a small metal staircase. By the time the truck arrived, we had established that the hydraulics were fine, it was just the safety interlock that was broken, and the owners had the good grace to allow us to use it even though the safety doors weren’t functioning. In a world gone mad with health and safety, thank goodness for some common sense.
We heard today that our container has been loaded on board a vessel. Our stuff is en route… but we still haven’t heard whether Montevideo Customs have agreed with our valuation. Still, there’s nothing we can do about it now. Forward to Montevideo!
The grape vines that we helped to prune last year were now due for harvest (vindimia), so we flew back to Extremadura in Spain to see if our efforts had been successful. It was a long drive from Madrid and we didn’t arrive at John’s finca until the small wee hours, but there was still time for a nice glass of wine before bed. In the morning we met the rest of the crew and headed out onto the slopes.
General John gives his orders
We’d heard that the vines had had a bad year, and at first we were a bit nervous that this was down to our pruning efforts, but it soon emerged that it wasn’t just “our” vines that had suffered, and indeed all the other local vineyards had also been hit by the dry growing season.
Last time we’d seen these vines, they were little more than gnarled stumps dotting the hillside. It was fascinating to see how they had responded to our pruning, with two leafy stems springing a metre or more from each carefully selected nub. Some stems were bare of fruit, many held only a bunch or two, but some were weighed down with grapes.
Festoons of grapes
Rafa and Jorge get to work
Jorge, some grapes, and a nice view of the vineyard
Bronwyn and Jorge and the first sack
Happy harvesting
A few of the bunches had been attacked by fungus, and could not be harvested. A badly timed frost had wiped out many of the tempranillo buds, while leaving the other varietals intact. Up on one slope, a surprising quantity of fruit had sustained some kind of physical damage despite being protected by nets, so we cut out the bad ones before tossing the good fruit into the basket.
The top half are damaged
Most of it’s OK, though!
Soon our hands, clothes and tools were dripping in sticky juice under the hot autumn sun. Pausing occasionally to snack on fresh figs or swig water from bottles, we laboured on until the tractor trailer was crammed with sacks of fruit.
Twenty sacks of wine grapes, not too shabby
Friends arrived from a neighbouring finca, bringing still more friends, and we tucked in to a table groaning with food, washed down with cold beer.
A break for tapas and beer
Then we needed all hands on deck to unload the grapes from the sacks into buckets, pour them into the crusher, tote away the buckets of stalks, ensure that each grape made several passes through the machine, and finally convey the buckets of sweet juice to the wine vat.
Everything depends on getting this right, and so it is intense and focussed, but also great fun. In the short breaks between unloading each sack of fruit, I looked around the sunny courtyard filled with busy smiling people, and it seemed that I could feel the presence of generation after generation of winemakers, all meeting in this place at this time of year to begin the magic.
The crushing begins
Loading the grape-crusher
…and out comes the nectar
The grapes and skins go through a few times
This is what it’s all about!
Into the vat, complete with skins
Five hundred litres of grape must later, it was time to make up a batch of yeast and start the fermentation process. The vats would now need to be stirred every two hours for the next couple of days, so John wouldn’t get much sleep but it’s worth it to get decent quality wine.
Starting the yeast in the must
Stir thoroughly every two hours
WIth the main tasks completed, it was time to take the children on a tractor ride while we started to tidy up and hose down. When the kids returned, they took over the clean-up, although possibly the dogs and children may have ended up wetter than the equipment.
Everything is sticky and needs a wash
All hands to the clean-up
I’m helping
Later that evening, the neighbours threw a party which went well into the night, drinking wine and chatting under the stars. We didn’t emerge from our beds until the following afternoon, briefly considered clearing up the nets from the vineyard, and then put that off ’til tomorrow in favour of a hike up to the old Roman dam. On the way back down, we collected blackberries to make jam, and set them boiling while we settled down to yet another sumptuous meal. There isn’t anything quite as relaxing as a lazy evening at the finca. Perfect peace
2014 is a year not only of Bronwyn and my significant round-number birthdays, but also of our tenth wedding anniversary. This is a year that we have been planning for since before we were married; this is the year that everything changes.
During our wild and wonderful travels around the world, we have been seizing opportunities and laying ideas like duck eggs. A very few of them hatched and wandered off or were eaten by pike, but most of them hung around and slowly grew to adulthood. Some even turned into swans. All of them come into their full plumage in 2014. This is the year that we get all our ducks in a row. Quack, quack, quack.
We never expected this particular duck to be the first. In fact, its basic features are less duck and more cuckoo. Decades ago in a different life I made an investment decision that, for most of its long and sometimes expensive life, was a lemon. It bounced along through recessions and financial crises, being bought and re-sold by commercial players in the sub-prime market, but the policy itself was locked in to mature in 2014. I had always assumed that when I received the pitiful payout, I would then invest it in some other (hopefully more profitable) venture.
So here we are. The investment matures next month, and mysteriously has picked up a bit of value in recent years, despite the global recession. But what to do with the payout, in a world of minimal interest rates and austerity?
At about the same time, we realised that if we were going to stay in the UK, we really really didn’t want to keep haemorrhaging rent payments, and we were already feeling over-exposed in the property market, so we didn’t want to buy another house. So where would we live?
After the dramatic success of our life on our first yacht Pindimara, we have always planned to buy The Next Boat and sail her home to Australia from wherever we happened to be. This wasn’t due to happen until about 2019, but we suddenly realised that we could kill three birds with one stone by buying The Next Boat, and living on her until we were ready to leave.
One of the best things that I did when purchasing our first yacht, Pindimara, was to accompany the surveyor on his inspection. Over the course of a morning I had learned far more from him than he later put in his report, and was still benefiting from his advice years later.
In our search for a surveyor for Elizabeth, then, we used three simple criteria: The surveyor had to have good qualifications, respond quickly to email, and welcome the buyer’s involvement in the survey. We chose Ian Anderson and booked a day off work.
Out she comes! Always a nervous moment.
Ian was really, really thorough, and together we spent almost a day going over the vessel with a fine tooth-comb. We could find absolutely nothing amiss.
Perfect.
Ian flew off to Nigeria to survey a warship, and Bronwyn and I agreed to pay Derrick the full asking price, as long as he had her anti-fouled (after all, she was already out of the water for the survey) and would sail her back to Southampton for us. He readily agreed, and also offered to take us sailing so that we could get used to her before delivery.
We had a great sail with the Derrick and Audrey on Elizabeth. We all got along very well and had a lot of laughs, and the trip highlighted a number of design improvements that Bavaria have implemented since building Pindimara. Elizabeth has an updated rig with in-mast furling, which make single-handed sailing much easier. Purists argue that a furling main sacrifices performance, but it quickly became clear that Elizabeth was much, much faster than Pindimara, and that the battenless rig was much simpler to reef single-handed. The electronics were also better integrated, particularly the autopilot which worked effortlessly.
The new skipper takes command.
A couple of weeks later, we all met up again in Southampton. Derrick shed a quiet tear as he gently patted Elizabeth goodbye, and The Next Boat became our new home.
For a number of years now, we have been renting out our apartment in Montevideo. Once the building was complete and we realised that we were going to have to go and earn a crust somewhere else for a few years, we had a choice of either short-term letting to tourists (for US dollars), or long-term letting to locals (for Uruguayan pesos). Having very little wish to earn dollars, and with a vague feeling that we should be giving something back to the community, we engaged a local rental agent to find us a local tenant.
Uruguayan tenancy law is interesting. Before moving in, the tenant needs to provide an initial deposit to cover six months of rent. Since most people don’t have this kind of cash, they typically achieve this by using the title deeds of their parents’ house as collateral. On the flip side, the contract is unbreakable and the landlord is obliged by law to extend any year’s tenancy for a second year on request, and almost certainly for a third year, provided that the rent has been paid.
One of our early discoveries was that the concept of ‘being up to date with rent’ is marvellously flexible. It’s perfectly normal for the tenant to be months behind, or to make a part payment because they happen to be short of cash. We had one tenant who continued to pay back-rent long after he moved out.
Another aspect of tenancy is that you really do rent just the walls. A tenant will typically bring all their own furniture, white goods, light fittings, and even (and especially) their own hot-water boiler. The tenant can thus choose whether they want to use gas or electricity to heat their water.
Here are some agency pictures of our apartment, taken during an inspection.
The rear lounge, adjoining the kitchen
Stair, kitchen and mezzanine from the front lounge
Restful nook on the mezzanine
Bedroom area on the mezzanine, looking toward the lounge, with stairs up to the rooftop terrazza
In general, we have had a positive experience of long-term renting to local people. However, our relationship with our latest tenant, and with our agent, has become rather disgruntled of late. Out of the blue, the agent reported that the tenant was upset because the gas company wouldn’t turn on the gas supply due to a fault. This came as something of a surprise to us, because although we do have a gas supply, neither he nor any of the previous tenants had shown any interest in using gas, so it had never been connected and we’d never known that there was a problem.
It took a little while to organise a repair because the fault was located inside a neighbour’s apartment, and we had to knock down part of their wall to fix it. In the meantime, our tenant started withholding rent to compensate his loss, even though he hadn’t been using the gas supply at all throughout his tenancy. He then started angling for a decrease in rent. Instead of fighting in our corner, our agent began backing off from the whole affair and wouldn’t deal with either the tenant or us.
Note the new gas cooker in the corner, which appears to be working.
To cut a long story short, we got fed up with the whole thing, but we were far from the action and the agent was not providing us with any support. Then suddenly the tenant announced that he wanted to break the contract from his side. Officially he should have bought his way out of the contract, but we jumped at the chance and told him we’d call it quits if he cleared out, while simultaneously informing our spineless agent that we didn’t require his services any longer, and we were going to leave the apartment empty.
The upside is that finally, after five years, we now have the opportunity to use the property ourselves. Even though we have visited Montevideo on several occasions, we haven’t been able to spend even a single night in our own apartment, and we’re really looking forward to it. But first, there’s the little matter of redecorating and refurnishing…
Everybody who has ever owned a yacht is continually, even if only in the background, thinking about The Next Boat. With some years in the UK ahead of us, we had idly been putting some thought into one day buying a new yacht and sailing her home to Australia. There was no real urgency, but we had some investments maturing and no real idea what to do with them, so we had been keeping half an eye on the ‘yachts for sale’ pages of the internet.
There was one lovely world-cruiser in Florida, and another nice example in the UK’s west country. We put in some quiet requests for more information, and discovered that the Florida boat was already under offer, and that the UK yacht’s owner had suddenly changed his mind and didn’t want to sell after all.
A third likely candidate showed up near Southampton. She was a ten-year old Bavaria 37, slightly larger than our previous yacht Pindimara but to the same familiar and proven design. In addition she was the roomier “Master’s” version, with the advantage of a two-cabin layout and only a single head. Because she was a private sale, she was considerably cheaper than other similar boats from dealers, and yet she looked to be in remarkably good condition with most of the extras that we wanted.
We discovered that the owner, Derrick, had just spent a week sailing her east from Southampton and then north up the coast to East Anglia, but England isn’t very big and nothing is really very far away by road, so we drove over to see her.
Well, hello there!
We were quietly impressed. Derrick, who has been sailing her for almost ten years, is an excellent hobbyist electrician and woodworker, and has kept her in great shape. Every repair and change was an improvement on the original without materially affecting her design. We immediately commissioned a marine survey.
The reason that Iceland exists at all is due to the mid-Atlantic ridge, the boundary between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates which runs pretty much north-south down the centre of the Atlantic Ocean. The two plates are moving apart at a rate of several centimetres a year, being pushed apart by molten lava welling up between them. Some of this new material gets pushed up above sea level and forms Iceland, which is why the country is so geothermally active – hence the geysers and hot springs.
One of the items on my bucket list has always been to visit the mid-Atlantic ridge. I had always vaguely assumed that I would have to get there using some kind of submarine, but I hadn’t realised that the ridge is visible as an identifiable geological construct at Þingvellir in Iceland.
One of the many spreading cracks at þingvellir
The site is so obviously unique that when, a thousand years ago, the newly formed alliance of Icelandic farmers needed a central place to meet, they chose Þingvellir. For hundreds of years, the Law Rock which sits on the ridge was the site of Iceland’s legal deliberations. In time, wrong-doers were also punished here, usually by being outlawed from society for a fixed period of time, or to duel on an island in the Öxará River. When the country converted from the Norse to the Christian religion – an event which also took place here at Þingvellir – the punishments got more severe, for instance in the case of incest, the man would be beheaded and the woman drowned by being dragged across the lake in a sack. Although the modern parliament now meets elsewhere, important national events are still celebrated here.
Path along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at þingvellir
Lake for drownings inside the rift
Even though I’d now seen and touched the edges of two neighbouring continental plates, it still didn’t really feel as if I’d properly ticked off the Ridge from my bucket list. I had been thinking about a submarine and instead found myself ambling along a tarmac path with bus-loads of tour groups. Yes it was picturesque and fascinating, but something was missing.
Luckily Bronwyn had already thought of this, and had booked us a scuba dive to the bottom of the Ridge. We were met by the incomparable Nina and Wouter of Scuba Iceland. It’s so nice to occasionally meet up with other travellers who are such kindred spirits. They were taking us down into Silfra Fissure, known to be one of the best fresh-water dive sites in the world, and the closest thing possible to diving between the two continental plates.
Silfra is part of a river system that drains melt-water into Lake þingvellir, so it’s only a couple of degrees above zero. For this dive we donned thermal underwear, then a fleece under-suit, then a thick neoprene dry-suit. Because of all this additional buoyancy, we also had to carry a lot of extra lead weights, plus big tanks, so getting dressed was quite the process and definitely not a solo affair. Eventually, though, we were ready and staggered down to the start of the fissure.
The Silfra Fissure awaits
Bronwyn only half-dressed for the dive
The dive is in three phases. The first part is prosaically named ‘the toilet’ and is a narrow channel along the Ridge. Then there’s The Cathedral, and enormous open space littered with tumbled lava which has fallen from the walls rearing on either side, and finally the Blue Lagoon, which has a deep sandy bottom scattered with freshwater springs. Visibility is crystal clear at 120 metres, and the glacial melt water shades everything a beautiful shade of blue.
The Silfra Fissure. I borrowed this picture from Scuba Iceland, I hope they don’t mind
Silfra is a shallow dive, rarely deeper than ten metres. Buoyancy control is always a little hair-trigger on shallow dives. This was my first dry-suit dive, and my first dive in fresh water, so there were a lot of new variables to deal with and I struggled to equalise my buoyancy and ran into a few rocks along the way. Nevertheless I had plenty of time to appreciate the ethereal beauty of the place, as well as occasionally just hanging out in the fissure and thinking, “I’m inside the mid-Atlantic Ridge!”
The journey from the north west to the south west of Iceland takes a couple of days and passes through a number of areas containing waterfalls and geothermal activity. We had intended to make an early start, but got chatting to the nice people at the HestaSport activity centre in Varmahlíð and it was after ten when we finally hit the road.
The initial climb over the pass to Blönduós was beautiful in the sunlight, with fresh powdery snow being blown in ever-moving snake-like patterns across the road and down the frozen river alongside.
Windblown snow snakes
We stopped off at Deildartunguhver, the largest hot spring in Europe and probably the most voluminous hot spring in the world. The flow is now piped off to serve the hot water needs of the neighbouring towns, but there is a long strip of scalded land where boiling water bubbles and spits to the surface.
Bronwyn enjoys a steam bath at Deildartunguhver
Our next stop was at the twin waterfalls Barnafoss and Hraunfossar. The first (‘child falls’) is a narrow ravine which used to flow through stone arches. The story goes that the mother of two children who died there broke the arches to make it safer. The second (‘lava falls’) is quite interesting. It’s not really a waterfall as such, but a line of spring water pouring out from between two strati of lava rock, resulting in a long line of small falls dropping into the river below.
Barnafoss
Hraunfossar
Our room for the night was at an out-of-season golf hotel, the Icelandair Hamar in Borgarnes. It was operating with a skeleton staff, but fortunately one of those was the excellent chef and we once again dined in perfect Icelandic style. This country is a foodie heaven.
We kept the curtains open that night, and were once again treated to a spectacular display of northern lights. It was brief – only about five minutes long – but enormous, with green-tinged arms spreading right up into the sky in a shimmering triangle.
Dawn (10 am!) saw us already on the road, because we needed to put some miles under our belt if we were to tackle the standard Reykjavik tourist trail, the Golden Circle. Passing through Laugarvatn on the way to Geysir we found ourselves feeling a bit peckish. We by-passed several ‘coffee cup’ traffic signs and then found the ‘knife and fork’ which meant a proper restaurant. At the door of Lindin, we were greeted by the owner and head chef, who seated us and presented us with a simple menu of extravagant dishes. We had scored again.
As a starter I had four different carpaccios of game; goose, reindeer, horse and whale, accompanied by a rather excellent goose liver pate. Bronwyn had been hankering for a salad, and although there wasn’t one on the menu, the chef knocked one up from the contents of his greenhouse. For mains, Bronwyn had another of those stunning Icelandic lamb dishes; the lamb here is to die for. I went for an almond-encrusted fillet of arctic char. All wonderful. We left fat and happy.
The eponymous water spout at Geysir no longer performs on a day to day basis, it is only active during earthquakes. Fortunately the nearby Strokkur still runs every eight minutes or so. We watched quite a few cycles, varying from quick bursts to big jets, or even double jets. The thing that surprised me was the short duration of each blow, only a second or so. We entertained ourselves watching other tourists trying to catch the eruptions on film.
Strokkur does its stuff at Geysir
The final waterfall on the Golden Circle tour is Gullfoss, the largest waterfall in Europe. It was by now close to sunset, and the wind chill was seriously bitter, so we scuttled around the falls mummified in layers of fleece and feathers. Gullfoss itself is pretty impressive, with a wide upper fall followed by a second at ninety degrees down into a transverse gorge, all hung about with snow and ice. There is a path down to the waterside, but it was encased in ice and closed for the winter season, so we peered down at the falls from above.
The upper half of Gullfoss
The lower half of Gullfoss
Shivering but content, we hit the road and headed for Reykjavik, where we needed to drop the car off at the rental office. As I pulled out onto the highway, I felt a moment of melancholy that our road trip was nearly over. Then the setting sun peeked out from the clouds and illuminated the snow-covered slopes beside us, and the sadness was lost in a gorgeous pink haze of beauty.
It was time to leave Akureyri and return to the west, but this time we decided to go over the top of the pass rather than back around the coast. It had been snowing quite heavily for several days, so we were a little relieved to wake to blue skies. The snow-ploughs had done a good job, and we got over without any trouble.
Thanks, mate. Good job.
Grettislaug revisited
A few days ago, we tried to get to the geothermal pool at Grettislaug, where legend has it that the outlaw Grettir the Strong warmed up after swimming seven Arctic Ocean kilometres from the island of Drangey. On that occasion our map was incorrect and we ended up on the wrong side of the peninsula.
This time we had better directions. The last section is a minor road which was described as ‘icy but passable’. The road was indeed thick sheet ice, but the spiked tyres held their own. About two kilometres from the pool, there was a farm gate. We got out to open it, and discovered that even though the car was doing tolerably well, we could barely stand on the slippery surface.
Bronwyn gingerly operates a farm gate on treacherous footing
Another half kilometre, and we could see the end of the road down by the sea shore. However, the ice was now stacked in transverse ridges and the car was starting to slide. I was confident that I could safely take us down to the shore, but less sure that I’d be able to get us back up the hill afterwards. For one of the very few times in my life, I chose the risk-averse option, and spun the car round to face back the way we’d come. The only way that we could go further was on foot.
That was far easier said than done. It was impossible to even stand on the road without crampons, which we had neglected to pack. The fields on either side were also iced up, but occasional tufts of yellow hay projected through, and it was possible to very gingerly make progress. After a few hundred metres, we admitted that we’d never make it, certainly not without risking a certain bruising or worse. We turned round and carefully picked our way back to the car.
Looking back at the car, which I’ve already turned round to face back up the road. This bit’s OK. I suppose I should have taken a picture of the road behind me!
A question of gait
Emma from HestaSport had saddled up some horses for us in nearby Varmahlíð. The Icelandic horse, which resembles a Shetland pony, is the only breed of horse allowed in Iceland, having been introduced here around the 1000 years ago and kept pure ever since. The reason that the rules are so strict is that it is now the only breed of horse that naturally possesses five separate gaits. Elsewhere in the world, two have been lost, modern breeds being only able to trot, canter or gallop. Icelandic horses also have the tölt and the pace. The tölt is fast and yet comfortable because, since only one hoof is on the ground at any one time, there is virtually no up-and-down motion in the saddle. The pace is a very fast sprinting motion where the horse rocks from side to side with both left feet on the ground, then both right.
The ground was icy here, too, but the horses had spiked winter shoes which made them sure-footed even on sheet ice. Emma told us that they are so good on ice that new riders often forget when they dismount, and end up sliding underneath the horse because they can’t stand up. Certainly these horses had no problem negotiating the icy, snowy, tussocky ground.
Crampons for horses!
Mön and Mósa ford the river
There’s always something new to see in Iceland
On the way back to the stables, Emma showed us how to tölt, and we had some fun changing the pace up and down. It’s a really versatile gait, and you can genuinely just sit in the saddle and let it happen, it’s like floating on a cloud. Why can’t all horses do this?
Heat and Light HestaSport also have some lovely little cottages on top of a nearby hill, and we had rented one for the night. Our little cabin has 360 degree views and is one of five clustered around a geothermal hot tub. After preparing dinner in our kitchen, we lazed under the stars in the 40 degree water and watched as the first slight haze of the northern lights appeared. There was a clear cold sky so we were hopeful of an auroral display later in the night, but it was too early yet for anything to happen.
Much later, as I was penning this blog with all the lights off and the curtains open, a glimmer of movement caught the corner of my eye. At exactly eleven, a shimmering band of light spread out across half the sky. Streamers shifted abruptly back and forth, searchlights shone brightly into the heavens, and mysterious black bars of anti-light danced back and forth along the shining arc. Half an hour later, the lights went out and it was all over, but we felt privileged to have witnessed the display in this amazing place.
A tale of two waterfalls
Half way from Akureyri and Myvatn is Goðafoss (God’s waterfall), so named because when the region converted to Christianity, the chief threw all the old Viking religious icons over the edge. The snow-storm was blowing a gale, but we arrived just as the sun rose over the mountains and the mist began to clear. Walking tentatively out to the falls, it wasn’t immediately clear which parts of the snowfield were safely laid upon volcanic rock, and which spanned minor tributaries of the river, but we got close enough to have a good look.
Goðafoss
To complete the set, we also wanted to visit Dettifoss, the highest-volume waterfall in Europe, nominally two hours away by car. The route passed Lake Myvatn and then climbed higher, and ever higher. The road surface vanished beneath drifting snow.
En route to Dettifoss
About 40 minutes shy of the route indicated by our hire car’s GPS, I suddenly hit the brakes. There was a signpost to what was clearly a shorter, better way to the waterfall. I reversed, turned off the highway, and almost immediately came up against a chain slung across the road and a sign, ‘Impassable in winter’. Obviously the computer knew something that we didn’t.
I reversed back onto the highway, and we continued on. The tarmac ran out and we were technically on gravel, but it made little difference because the road was anyway covered in sheet ice. We crossed a tiny little suspension bridge, turned a corner, and piled into a deep snow drift. Another chain. Road closed. We now knew something that the computer didn’t.
The road not travelled
Geothermal Myvatn
Reversing our tracks, we headed back toward Lake Myvatn. The nearby volcano of Krafla has erupted 29 times in recorded history, so the area is full of geothermal features. We stopped off to look at the volcanic fields of Námafjall, a colourful area of steaming rock, bubbling mud pots, and smoking fumaroles. The thermometer claimed 1 degree centigrade, but the wind chill was bitter, and we were glad to warm ourselves by the bubbling vents.
Bronwyn warms her hands
Mud pot at Námafjall
Across the road is a geothermal power station. We discovered that the visitor centre was closed in winter, so we decided to drive up to the volcanic fields of Krafla but the road was blocked by snow and anyway, even if we’d got through, any kind of hiking would have been precluded by the blizzard which was now coming in horizontally.
A snow-covered caldera near Myvatn
The only sensible thing to do was to go swimming, so we headed for Myvatn Nature Baths, a geothermal hot swimming pool. We were warned that because of the strong easterly wind, the western end of the pool was off limits because all the boiling water tends to congregate downwind. We ventured tentatively in that direction, and it was indeed blistering. The rest of the pool, though, was lovely, and the wind was continually churning the water so that there were pockets of warm interspersed with pockets of really hot. There was also a cold swimming lake and a pair of steam rooms. Bliss.
It might be cold out there, but it’s warm in here
Eventually dusk started to fall, and along with it, more snow. It was an interesting drive back to Akureyri, but we made it down to sea level with only minimal sliding, and were soon tucking in to a good warm fish dinner at the hotel.
It was a long drive up to Siglufjördur, Iceland’s northernmost town, but the snow-covered volcanic scenery was beautiful. For several hundred kilometres we had the company of a couple of French hitch-hikers, who were heading to Akureyri to work for their lodgings on a sheep farm. The weather was fine when we picked them up, but the roads became icy as the temperature dropped to zero and I was glad of the studded tyres. We dropped the hikers off as close as we good, but I don’t envy them farm work in this weather.
On the road to Siglufjördur
We were booked in to a little house near to the docks, with clear views of the sky above the fjord. The overnight aurora forecast was good, with high activity and clear skies, but in the end there was no display. The morning, however, brought gale-force winds and freezing rain. We cooked a quick breakfast and then slithered down the road to the Herring Museum. Everything was dark, and more to gain shelter from the sleet than in any real hope, Bronwyn pushed at the door and it opened. Inside we found a hand-bell, which summoned a cheerful man who explained as he unlocked the rest of the museum that they didn’t keep opening hours in winter, they just opened up if anybody showed up.
The museum is a masterpiece, and has already won several awards. It spans three buildings that document the sixty-five years of Iceland’s ‘Herring Adventure’. In the early 1900s, Iceland was the poorest country in Europe. One day, Norwegian fishing trawlers arrived, chasing the herring shoals. Finding good catches, they bought property along the Icelandic coast and began processing their catches there. The locals soon caught on, and sleepy Siglufjördur became a thriving industrial centre, the ‘Atlantic Klondyke’, attracting workers and investors from far and wide. Fortunes were made as the Icelanders took over all of the fishing fleets and built processing plants up and down the coast. The herring industry soon represented at least 25% of the country’s GDP, and post-war Europe became heavily dependent on Icelandic herring meal as animal fodder.
Restored buildings along the old harbour front
Then in the early 1960s, the herring catch began to decrease. Scientists warned of an impending crash, but ‘herring fever’ was in full swing and everybody started building bigger and better trawlers and faster and more mechanised processing plants. This kept supply in line with demand until 1969, when the herring failed to show up. The boom was over, and the herring towns just melted away.
Nevertheless, the entire episode is credited with turning Iceland into a modern industrial nation. Those who had made money in the Herring Adventure employed the newly mobile and motivated work-force and moved into cod and other industries, and the nation prospered. In the early 21st century, the herring even came back.
The Herring Museum consists of three restored warehouse-style buildings. One showcases the offices of a typical herring company, and the accommodation given to the itinerant workers who showed up each year for the herring sorting season. It also houses a couple of very interesting films of the herring catch coming in, one dating back to the early 1930s and the other which was produced for the 1939 New York Expo, which gives you an idea of just how important it was.
Bunks for the herring girls
The second building contains a complete herring processing plant. Any herring that weren’t good enough to be stored whole in barrels, were fed into a factory, where the oil was boiled out and bottled, and the remainder crushed into animal feed.
1950s advert for fish meal animal fodder
The third building is the real jewel in the crown. It contains the most incredible collection of, well, stuff. It’s all contemporary with the Herring Adventure, and includes a fleet of genuine fishing vessels of all sizes, moored up against a simulated dock as if they it’s the middle of the night and they’re waiting for their crews. The superb thing is that it is not organised like a museum, it’s intended to be a complete reconstruction of daily life. You can go anywhere, climb everything, open all the doors, pick things up and look at them. Inside cupboards you’ll find boxes and tins of food, if you lift a bilge hatch you can climb down into the hold and find all the tools and parts that you would expect if you were aboard a 1960s fishing vessel. Scattered around the dock are little workshops and nets being mended, chandleries packed with all sorts of exciting goods. It’s hard to describe what a wonderful treasure trove it is; we had it all to ourselves and spent the entire morning exploring.
Arty picture of our shadows in the fog lamps at Siglufjördur
On deck among the fish holds
Bronwyn mans the galley below decks
The only thing that finally dragged us back to the car was the building gale outside. Somehow the wind sleeting over the roofs of the warehouses was chilling the buildings far below the nominal 2 degrees on the thermometer, and our extremities were starting to freeze as we poked about in one more ‘just let me look in here…’
Bronwyn takes the helm
Our car’s parked out there somewhere
Somewhat reluctantly we got into the car, and headed out into the blizzard toward Akureyri, which will be our home for the next few days while we explore Lake Myvatn. After a couple of indifferent drinks in our hotel bar, we headed across the street to the incomparable Rub 23 restaurant, where I had minke sashimi followed by five different fish fillets, each flavoured with a different ‘rub’, and Bronwyn had three kinds of fish sashimi (including a beautiful fresh cod) followed by a wonderful slab of ‘sous vide’ beef. To mark the occasion, we splashed out on a bottle of my favourite Meursault wine. A perfect end to a perfect day.
There’s a toll tunnel out of Reykjavik, which was thick with smog from traffic fumes. We emerged coughing into the sunrise, which is less impressive than it sounds because sunrise at this time of year is at 10 am. We were heading around Iceland’s ring road for the western peninsula of Snæfellsnes. The GPS in our hired 4WD kept saying “Please take the second exit from the roundabout onto One”, until we turned her off, because there is broadly speaking only one highway of any length on Iceland, which is the One that we were on.
The landscape near the city was rugged with gnarled volcanic rocks dusted with snow, but as we climbed higher we began to see enough forage for the ubiquitous Icelandic ponies.
Icelandic pony and small mountain
Another Icelandic pony and another mountain
Once we arrived at the peninsula, we decided to circumnavigate it anticlockwise, taking in the Snæfellsjökull (glacier) on the way, if the pass happened to be open.
The northern coastline is dotted with little fishing harbours, and we stopped in one for lunch. We ate the local cod, which was fresh and beautifully prepared. The bartender was an ex-fisherman, and I asked him about the depleted cod stocks that had been on the UK news for much of the late 1980s, but he said that as far as they were concerned, there had never been a noticeable cod shortage, and there had always been plenty to be found.
Fishing fleet at Akranes
We had noticed a number of tasteful roadside sculptures along the way, and were rather impressed by some of the modern churches. The one on the hillside above the restaurant had a lovely sweeping modern exterior and a simple Lutheran interior, complete with a beautiful stainless-steel organ and a simple oil painting instead of an altar piece.
The church at Stykkishólm
Stykkishólm village
Further along the road is the little mount of Helgafell, surmounted by a ruined chapel. The local legend goes that if you climb to the top without either speaking or looking back, then you should stand in the ruin, face East and make three wishes. We parked at the bottom and duly began to climb. Presumably it is much easier in the summer! I don’t think that many people attempt this in an icy wind when the ground is frozen and icy, but we did finally make it to the top. Bronwyn did vocalise a little on some of the dicier sections, and I’m not sure if leaning down to lend her my hand counts as ‘looking back’, but we made some wishes anyway. Possibly one of the wishes should have been that there was an easier way down…
Bronwyn slides up the last few yards to the ruin on Helgafell
Helgafell church (and tractor)
Our next intended stop was down a track which we judged too icy even with our studded tyres, so we continued on to the turn-off to the glacier. We quickly encountered a sign which stated in English ‘Impassable’. We checked with a local who was working on his truck, and he said laconically, “Closed. There is snow”. As we drove off, the glacier dumped a blizzard across our windscreen.
The change of route gave us the opportunity to drive on to Djüpaloénssandur and walk down to the black sand beach, which is littered with the remains of a trawler which went ashore in 1948. The wreckage has been left as a monument to those who died, and touchingly it does not seem to have been disturbed except by the sea.
Wreck of the “Epine” on Dritvik Beach
Idiot abroad at Djüpaloénssandur
On this beach are the ‘lifting stones of Dritvik’. These are four large boulders of varying weights alongside a flat waist-high platform. The story goes that if you could pick up the 25kg ‘weakling’ and put it on the platform, then you could work onboard a Dritvik fishing boat in a junior capacity. In order to work as an oarsman, you needed to lift the 54kg ‘half strong’. Bronwyn managed the weakling, I managed the half-strong, but neither of us attempted the 100kg or 154kg weights.
25kg ‘The weakling’
54kg ‘half-strong’
As dusk was falling, we started to look for restaurants along the way, because we had gained the impression that there wasn’t a restaurant at our next hotel. The few that we found were either closed for the season or not yet open for the evening. In the end, Bronwyn phoned ahead to ask if we could get anything to eat close to the hotel, and they rather tentatively suggested that we should book into their restaurant. Thank goodness that we did! Both the hotel (Hotel Búðir) and the restaurant were stunning. Fine dining overlooking the fjord, with the mountains glowing in the background. The food – an untranslatable local fish – was gorgeous. Afterward we whiled away the evening with locally brewed porters and that typical Icelandic duo of birch-bark liqueurs, Björk and Birkir.
We needed to find a hotel somewhere between Seville and Malaga, and stopped off half way at a town called Antequera. This was an almost random choice, but we liked it so much that we stayed on. It’s a lovely town, founded by the Romans as Antikara, we infer as a midway garrison between the olive groves of the centre and the trading ports of the coast. There are few Roman remains there now, but there are a plethora of city walls, churches and cathedrals, all clambering picturesquely up the steep hillside to the castle.
Antequera from the Alcazar
The town is a warren of steep cobbled streets
Looking down the hill toward San Sebastian
The hotel were keen to direct us toward a nearby restaurant, but we were put off by the coach parking and English menus. Instead we located a couple of nice little bars, cafes, and a superb Michelin recommended restaurant, the Restaurante Reine. This latter is part of a Hospitality School, and when we arrived early and off season there was only one waitress on duty. As far as we could tell, the three of us were the only people in the restaurant, and yet she not only cooked seven impeccable courses but also appeared with the decanter at perfect intervals, and by the time we’d finished our coffees, the kitchen had already been scrubbed clean.
El Torcal
The most popular tourist destination in the area is El Torcal, a wide area of Jurassic limestone that has been eroded into classic and picturesque karst formations. There are two circular hiking routes through the system, and we took the longer 4.5 km one. The sign said that it would take two hours to complete the circuit, and – perhaps uniquely in the history of national parks – it actually did. This is because there is no real path, just markers sticking up as you scramble from rock to rock, and there are innumerable side tracks, tunnels, caves, and high points to be explored.
Karst erosion and freeze-thaw splitting result in the curious and ever-changing landscape at El Torcal
Scrambling in El Torcal
Bronwyn takes the path less travelled
I understand that it is often too hot to visit in summer, but in January the temperature was only just above freezing. We soon warmed up, and made it round just as dusk was falling and the clouds were moving in.
Lobo Park
Just down the road from El Torcal is Lobo Park, which is a collection of wolves from around the world. All of them are captive-bred, often cubs taken from zoos that don’t have enough room for them. The owners then bottle-feed them so that they become accustomed to humans, although not domesticated. Once released into one of the many large enclosures, the wolves range freely in packs. Our guide explained that they had already fed this week, but she brought a bucket of meat scraps with her and – although wild – they were happy to come close to the fence for a snack.
Alaskan timber wolf
When we were about half way around the park, all of the wolves in the entire valley suddenly started howling, an explosion of joyous sound to which it was impossible not to grin in response. It reminded me of the excitement of sled dogs when they realise that they’re about to go for a run, but what were these wolves so interested in? Our guide, also grinning, explained that the park’s owner, Daniel, had just entered the property. Because he has bottle-fed every one of them almost from birth, he has a very special place in their psyche.
A chance meeting at a party, and we found ourselves driving to the Extremadura region of Spain to help prune grape vines. Extremadura lies to the centre of the country, butting up against Portugal. It is effectively a desert, with high summer temperatures and frequent droughts. These conditions are excellent for the production of wine, particularly dark reds from tempranillo and garnacha grapes, and our friend John needed a hand pruning his vines ahead of the spring growing season.
The finca in Extremadura
John has thousands of vines, and a competent person can prune about ten an hour, so there was a lot to do, especially as Bronwyn and I were complete beginners. However, John was a patient tutor and we soon got the hang of it.
There is a lot more to vine pruning than just hacking off the old growth. You have to evaluate the state of the vine, try to figure out what the last pruner was trying to achieve, make your own decision about what you want to achieve in terms of the number of branches and the direction that you’d like them to grow in, and then cut away everything that gets in the way of your chosen result. This includes cutting away useless suckers and last year’s stumps, sawing off failed branches, stacking stones under the trunks so that they don’t sit in ground water, and judiciously knocking off any tiny buds that will ruin the final shape. It’s not physically hard, but mentally more taxing than you would think, and sometimes we found ourselves sitting down next to a plant and talking to it while we tried to figure out the best way of encouraging it to grow a good crop.
Vine-pruner extraordinaire
The days quickly formed a pattern which went: Drink wine from the vat and laugh until the small wee hours; sleep til midday; prune vines til dusk; repeat.
John also makes some excellent olive oil, but some of the eating olives had been sitting in brine for too long, so Bronwyn spent a pleasant afternoon rinsing and re-packing them.
We did also find time for some long tramps around the countryside, and for foraging trips to the local markets. On one rainy day when pruning would have been a chore, we climbed up to a Roman dam that had been built at the top of a local creek. Despite the soaking wet foliage, we attempted a cross-country route which took us hiking through ancient olive groves and clambering over fallen rocks, discovering on the way an old embankment which might just have been the Romans’ original construction road. After some laughs and spills, we did finally make it to the dam, which is in remarkable condition considering its age. There is a slot that obviously used to contain a sluice, which has been slightly widened out at the bottom by thousands of years of erosion.
On top of the Roman dam
A little eroded, but still good solid Roman engineering
Deep in the heart of the Extremadura desert, the little town of Trujillo is famous as the birthplace of Pizarro and other conquistadores. Far from being the cream of Spain’s military forces, the invaders of the Inca and Maya nations were often penniless Extremaduran farmers who had been suffering from years of drought. Although a few were poor gentry or at least soldiers, many had no experience of either sailing or war, and few either survived or made their fortunes. Those that did return, spent their gold prodigiously, building castles and palaces on the hill above Trujillo, with fountains and pleasure gardens. Sadly those that returned were also ignorant of the ways of wealth and investment, and after a very few years the gold ran out, and they moved out of their palaces and back down into their farms.
The result of this curious historical legacy is that the little town is architecturally much grander than it might otherwise have been. The last time that I was here, most of the palaces were still in ruins, but since then Trujillo has been visited by relative prosperity, and many of them have been restored.
Despite my many perambulations across the length and breadth of Spain, I have always avoided visiting Seville. This was not because I didn’t want to go there, which I emphatically did, particularly because I wanted to see the site of the 1992 Expo. I wanted to do the city more justice than a day trip while on my way to somewhere else. Serendipity tossed in a few days to kill while driving from Trujillo to Malaga, so we thought that we might as well spend them in Seville.
On our arrival by car, we got thoroughly lost in the tiny alleys of the old town, a warren of one-way systems and dead ends. As we reversed out of yet another pedestrian walkway, We swiftly realised that if we indulged our usual plan to take a hop-on hop-off bus, we would miss all the interesting old parts of the city, because there was no way a bus would fit down them. Once we eventually ditched the car in a car park that was more expensive than our city-centre hotel, we decided instead to rent a bicycle tour guide.
We arrived at the bike store to discover that we were the only clients that morning. Because of this, and because “you are young and can cycle”, our guide Antonio decided that instead of simply doing the normal city tour, we would also tour some of the lesser known sights and take in the 1992 Expo. This would mean stepping up the pace a bit, but he thought that it was probably do-able.
The 1992 Expo
The Expo was pivotal in the formation of modern Seville. Until then, the city was a bit of a nowhere place, with no particular crop or market to distinguish it from its neighbours. In fact, through its long and chequered history, there have been periods of hundreds of years when the city didn’t exist at all, particularly after the river port silted up and all the excise business moved to Cadiz.
Then Seville hosted the Expo. The government co-opted the rather beautiful premises of the local ceramics factory and issued invitations. Hundreds of countries built pavilions to showcase their wares. The French brought an Ariane rocket, the Japanese built the largest wooden structure in the world, and the Australians opened a bar. The Expo was an immense success, and kick-started Seville’s tourist industry in such a way that it never looked back.
The former foyer of the ceramics factory, showcasing their wares
The base of one of the ceramic kiln stacks
The French left their Ariane behind
Although many of the pavilions were taken home after the festivities were over, some were left behind. One notable case was the Australian pavilion, a bar with one month’s licence which had been such a success that the owner skipped town with all the proceeds, leaving behind all his staff with no wages or tickets home. They petitioned the government, and received permission to continue operating the bar for a full year, so that they could recoup their losses.
Bronwyn cycles past the Moorish Pavilion, now used as a store room.
There are also some buildings dating back to the 1929 Expo, which was a showcase of all the Spanish nations, plus a couple of extra invitees such as Israel (which did not then yet exist as a country). Plaza de España is a tremendous edifice built in a mixture of styles including Mudéjar, which is a beautiful faux-Moorish architecture popular in the city. The Plaza is now largely used as government offices but the canal is a popular spot for rowing. Antonio told us that, when he was growing up, this was a good first date where you could attempt to splash water on your girl’s top to make it more transparent.
Bronwyn cycles across La Place d’Espana
The Alcázar
Everybody we met told us that a visit to Seville was not complete without a visit to the Alcázar (Royal Palace), so we spent an afternoon poking around in it. Originally a Moorish fort, the Alcázar consists of many Arab courtyards with water features and mosaic tiling, surrounded by extensive gardens. Even in winter it is quite a lovely space.
Bronwyn reflected in one of the courtyards of the Alcázar
One of the many garden vistas
Artist at work in the Alcázar gardens
The City
Sevillians have an interesting theory about the history of their city. They maintain that it was founded by Hercules, who was a refugee from Atlantis (Tharsis) which had been flooded with sand by a tidal wave. The story goes that Hercules set up twelve trading centres around the Mediterranean, which became entangled in the Twelve Labours of legend, with the founding of Seville somehow related to cleaning out the Augean Stables. Sevillians also recognise that much of their infrastructure was implemented by Julius Caesar, and there are statues to both of these founders at one end of the Alameda de Hercules.
The cathedral is sometimes touted as the largest gothic cathedral in the world. However, it was pointed out to us that (a) only a small part of the cathedral is gothic, and (b) since the Vatican is by definition the largest cathedral in the world, Seville was not allowed to consecrate the whole building. Still, it’s an impressive pile with a great tower.
Seville cathedral.
But what about the oranges? Seville’s name is inseparable from the orange fruit, and the trees are everywhere. However, none of them are edible. It is alleged that they were introduced during a period of Arab rule, when the pith of the sour oranges was used to provide acid for the production of gunpowder.
Sweeping up the damn oranges
Definitely Mudéjar, not gothic
There are plenty of tourist-trap restaurants in Seville, but by ignoring any place that was on a main street or advertised an English menu, we managed several respectable crawls of lovely little bars. We drank copious copas of good Rioja, and ate innumerable tapas of (usually) Iberian ham and cheese. The locals were always welcoming, and obviously proud of their place in their blossoming city.
One of the delights of travelling in southern Spain is the architectural contrast caused by repeated waves of Arab and Christian colonisation. For instance, the Arabs might hold sway for a few hundred years, incorporating pre-existing Roman stones into their mosque. Then the Christians might arrive, knock down the mosque, and use not only the pre-dressed stone but also enslaved Arabic stone masons to rebuild a cathedral. Of course, the Arab stone masons only know how to build in their own style, they know nothing of Gothic architecture, and so inevitably the cathedral gains an Arabic flavour. A few hundred years later, the Arabs might return, knock down the cathedral, enslave all the Christian stone masons, and build a mosque, with the same result. Some of the most wonderful examples of Spanish architecture, such as the Alhambra in Granada, are the product of this kind of history.
The Mezquita from the Puente de Miraflores in Cordoba
The history of the Mezquita Mosque-Cathedral in Cordoba is probably unique. When Christians invaded the currently Arabic city, they appreciated the beauty of the current mosque, and instead of demolishing it wholesale, they decided to incorporate much of the original building into their new cathedral. They kept the outer orange gardens, and also the inner courtyard. The courtyard was open to the outside world in the Arabic style, so they filled in the external arches with chapels in the Catholic style. Finding that they were unable to conduct Christian worship with all the sight-lines blocked by arches, they knocked out the centre and added a cathedral-style tower, dome and choir. The result is a gorgeous blend of the two architectural styles.
Bells and oranges
The Arabs knew a thing or two about irrigation
The most obvious feature of the Mezquita is the outer courtyard of double arches. The 856 columns of jasper, onyx, marble, and granite (constructed using pieces of the pre-existing Roman temple, plus others from the nearby Mérida amphitheatre) are connected with red and white striped arches. Much of the striping derives from the use of differently coloured of bricks, but in some of the outlying areas, where money was tighter, the stone has been painted instead. Either way, the result is stunning.
The famous striped double arches of the Mezquita
Along the outside walls, you can see the bars of the retro-fitted Catholic chapels
Exterior window of the hypostyle hall
Detail of the ceiling of the hypostyle hall
The original mosque had a really beautiful mihrab or prayer niche, which has been retained in the current cathedral.
The mihrab
Ceiling of the mihrab
In the middle of the mosque, the Christian invaders then built the heart of a cathedral, retaining many of the original mosque’s features.
One of the original mosque’s central domes
The organ and the choir
Looking straight up into the cathedral dome
Photographs don’t really do this place justice. You have to visit and soak up the ambience. A beautiful corner of the world, one of those true architectural delights.
The January weather in England was typically dire, and neither of us were working, so we rented a flat in Malaga. The idea was to spend a relaxing few weeks just hanging out in the sun and learning Spanish. We got a cheap flight and before we knew it we were ensconced in a nice little apartment in the centre of the city.
Malaga from the Alcazabar
Although we’d only recently been in Malaga on another jaunt and still remembered our way around, we thought that we’d take a guided bicycle tour of the city with Malaga Bike Tours, which proved to be a lot of fun. Coincidentally it was also a bank holiday, el Dia de los Reyes, which is the day that Spanish children open their Christmas presents, and so the town was empty and quiet. Our guide, Izzy, was very relaxed and more than happy to sit around waiting in the sun while we nipped off to examine the inside of churches or explored the botanical gardens.
Girl on bike, with Malaga in the background.
Fountain in the Plaza del Obispo
Malaga and indeed much of southern Spain was Moorish territory for hundreds of years before the Christians pushed this far south, and so the architecture is often a blend of the two architectural styles. When Mosques in particular were captured, they were often simply re-purposed as churches with little amendment. The result is that the churches are often a lot more colourful and intricately carved than is usual even in Catholic Europe.
Mosque doorway in what is now a church
On the other hand, Malaga’s cathedral was built from the ground up, the project taking long enough that it embraces the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque styles, until finally the project ran out of money when building the second of the planned two towers. The cathedral quickly gained the affectionate nickname La Manquita (the cripple), and when much later the authorities planned to finish the tower, there was an outcry and she was left alone to this day.
The unfinished second arm of La Manquita
The city is bisected by the Guadelmedina river, which in common with most of the watercourses that descend from the mountains of Malaga is really a dry wadi, particularly since it has been dammed to form a water supply. An attempt has been made to turn the dry river bed into a recreational area with grass and fountains, but unlike the rather splendid linear park in Valencia, the architects haven’t really pulled it off. All that remains is a beaten-up and graffiti-strewn strip of rubble that is largely used by dog-walkers and skateboarders.
Looking upstream on the Guadelmedina
Una copa Rioja? Don’t mind if I do.
Of course two of the wonders of Spain are the meat and seafood. Pictured below is a meat platter that we ordered in a little roadside bar, and a squid platter that we ordered in a cabana on the beach.
No vegetables were harmed during this meal.
Now that’s what I call a calamari!
The Alcazaba
High above the city are two castles or palaces, the Alcazaba and the Gibralfaro, joined by a slender double-wall that snakes up the ridge between them, a little reminiscent of the Great Wall of China. Originally built by the Arabs, they have been repaired and rebuilt many times across the centuries, resulting in an interesting mish-mash of styles. Even the original builders incorporated pillars and dressed stone from an earlier Roman amphitheatre.
The Alcazaba
Roman pillars in a Moorish arch
Orange trees in the Alcazaba
The palace, now only a shell, must have been stunning in its day. Even now, little fountains play in the courtyards, and tiny artificial streams run in channels down the centre of every mosaic path. It is a very beautiful and relaxing place.
Fountain in the Alcazaba palace
Water channels line the paths
Window detail inside the palace
The Gibralfaro
Although originally you could walk along the defensive wall between the two castles, that path (Le Coracha) is now closed to visitors. However, a switchback of marble tiles takes you along the south side of the wall, with views out over the port and bull ring.
Malaga bull ring from the Gibralfaro
There isn’t too much left of the palace itself, but a walkway along the fringing wall is worth it for the views.
View down the Coracha to the Alcazaba
Defensive battlements around Gibralfaro
A walk along the wall
View from a guard post
Jardin Botánico-Histórico La Concepción Out beyond the northern suburbs of Malaga lies La Concepción, the world-famous botanical gardens created back in 1855. Climbing up the side of a steep hill, the gardens comprise a network of little paths and streams crammed with biological specimens from all over the world, all luxuriating in the balmy Malaguese climate.
It took us a while to get out there, because rather than take either of the direct buses, we inadvertently chose the slow stopping bus which eventually dropped us in a nearby suburb, but local buses are always an adventure, and we happened to get off outside a farmer’s market which allowed us to buy cherries for lunch.
We spent the whole afternoon wandering around the gardens, enjoying the different collections and relaxing in shaded corners to enjoy the views.
The Cupola in Jardin Botanica
Moorish styling in the botanical gardens
Hammam al Andalus
And finally, what better way to recover from a hard day’s tourism than to relax in an Arab bath house? We visited the Hammam al Andalus several times. There are hot, warm and cold pools, hot stone slabs, and a steam room. The interior is just beautiful and there’s nothing quite as relaxing as lying floating in a hot pool while gazing up at the intricately carved domed ceilings.
The hot pool at Hammam Malaga (promotional photo, not one of mine)
We also indulged in a few kessa massages, which involve a series of gentle and relaxing sensations. First hot water is gently poured over you body, then you are covered in an enormous lather bubble which pops gently against your skin, before finally being scoured by an exfoliating glove… and repeat. It is superbly relaxing. If we lived here, we would go every week.
We were up and out at half past five in the morning for the short drive to the Taj Mahal. Although they were clearly geared up for large numbers of tourists, there were only a few dozen people in sight, and no queues.
Touts for rickshaws, tuk-tuks and tongas clustered around, insisting that the entrance to the Taj was over a kilometre away, which of course it wasn’t. We took a tonga anyway, a carriage drawn by an old and skinny horse with an uneven gait,and were relieved to find that the journey was only a few bone-jarring hundreds of metres around the next corner.
All aboard the Tonga Express
Intensive handbag checkpoint
After being frisked and scanned through yet another security check, we ran a small gauntlet of prospective guides and photographers. In the end we allowed a particularly persistent photographer to attach himself to our group on the grounds that he didn’t want any money unless we chose to buy his photographs.
It was first light, very humid and sticky. The Taj loomed mysteriously from the mist. It is obvious why it’s regarded as one of the Wonders of the World. It really is quite beautiful.
The Royal Gate
First glimpse of the Taj Mahal through the Royal Gate
The Taj Mahal (Crown Palace) is a mausoleum, built in the early 17th Century as Emperor Shah Jahan’s monument to his late wife. It stands in an elaborate garden containing four reflecting pools, and is flanked by a mosque and a guest house. It has a beautiful dream-like presence that can only be hinted at in photographs.
Probably the classic Taj photo, across one of the reflecting pools
Tourists (or their photographers) trying to take the classic Taj photo
Our own photographer had us posing here, posing there, with madam, without madam, standing up here, sitting down there, hands in front, hands behind… Until both Ankur and I cracked at the same moment and cried “Enough!”
Ankur, Tanu and Amaira are posed for a shot
Bronwyn is slotted into place for yet another photo
After we’d got rid of the photographer, we had a pleasant and uninterrupted wander around the grounds. As we approached the Taj itself, we realised that it is much bigger than its ethereal looks convey.
Approaching the looming wall of the Taj Mahal
Tanu and Ankur reflected in the pool
The interior, while encrusted like everything else with inlaid semi-precious stones, is a simple dark open space containing the sarcophagi of the king and his wife. It has an amazing echo, and although there were only a handful of us moving quietly and respectfully around the tombs, the dome amplified the sound to a multitude of hundreds. It must be really loud in there during the peak tourist season.
Inside the dome of the Red Mosque
Looking out over the Yamuna River
Exploring the upper level courtyard
Every tiniest detail is intricately carved
Sweepers work continually to clear the immense marble courtyards
As the sun started to beat down and the tourists began to flood in, we took our leave. On the way out, we dropped into the photographer’s stall and discovered to our surprise that his pictures were rather good, so we bought them. Then we ran the gauntlet of marble trinket salesmen and, avoiding the clamouring tonga touts, made our way back to the hotel for a pre-breakfast nap.
We planned to do a circular tour around Northern India, and our Punjabi friends Ankur and Tanu wanted to come too, because they’d never had a chance to be tourists in their home country. In true hospitable Indian fashion, Ankur instantly arranged a car and driver to take us all on a huge arc through Rajisthan and Punjab.
After a full day of exploring Old Delhi, we woke refreshed at our hotel. I was keen to have dosa for breakfast, a traditional South Indian pancake, but the chef, aware that I am a coeliac, warned me that his version contained wheat flour. Then he cheerfully made up a new batch from pure gram flour, and served it with spicy potatoes and a fiery sambar soup.
After this most excellent start to the day, we caught a taxi to meet our driver, Happy, who would be doing all the hard work for the next few days.
Together with Tanu, Ankur and five-month-old Amaira, we piled into Happy’s people-carrier and hit the road for Agra.
Actually it wasn’t quite that simple. There are few road signs in India, and the accepted method of navigation is to shout questions out of the window. Even then, it seems to be part of the Indian psyche to make something up or to tell you what you might want to hear, rather than to admit that you don’t know. We therefore took a straw poll of half a dozen rickshaw drivers before finding two answers that matched.
These guys are probably lost too
Eventually we found the toll road, and apart from the regular police checkpoints (security fencing across the road that constrict the traffic into a slalom but which are otherwise ignored), we seemed to be the only vehicle moving, something of a shock after navigating the crowded streets of Delhi.
On either side of the highway, boggy land was being drained and the clay dug out and fired into bricks in the hundreds and hundreds of little kilns spread out across the landscape.
Brick kilns between Delhi and Agra
The clay was being dug to a depth of about a metre, with walls left standing around every square acre or so. It looked as if water (and perhaps night soil) was then being pumped into each rectangular plot, which was then being planted with crops. The produce was later stored in thatched and mud huts.
Thatched huts on the outskirts of Delhi
Eventually we arrived in Agra, where the traffic was just as chaotic as in Delhi. All we had was the postal address of the hotel, so Happy navigated by asking people every few miles if they’d heard of it.
Traffic in Agra
The randomness of the answers intimated that nobody had, but we passed many miles of shack hostels leaning up against local shops, before passing through an area of impressive government offices, which opened out into a sprawling confection of turrets and crenellations which turned out to be our hotel, The Grand Agra.
One small wing of the Grand Agra Hotel
As well as the now familiar check for car bombs (a mirror on a stick under the chassis, and a poke around under the bonnet), we also had to pass through a metal detector in the foyer, and watch as our luggage was unloaded through an airport X-Ray machine, before being allowed to check in. Once Inside, the hotel was impressively palatial, and indeed at one end they were building a ‘presidential suite’ with its own helipad and views over the Taj Mahal.
Gardens of the Grand Agra, with the Presidential Suite (the brown bit) under construction in the centre
We had originally intended to visit the Taj at sunset, but we would have had to rush to get to the ticket office before it closed, so we decided to go at dawn the following day, giving us the excuse to relax with some pleasant beers in the bar as the sun went down.
Not a bad little bar, this
Later we ate a splendid meal at the restaurant, which we had to ourselves apart from a legion of waiters and a sitar player. Very very stuffed, we waddled out into the darkness and through the water garden to our rooms, surprising a trio of men with rifles who are presumably the night watch.
What can I say about driving in old Delhi? There are cars and trucks and rickshaws everywhere, all mixed up with pedestrians and bicycles and porters. There are no valid road markings and few signs. Horns sound continuously, but not in anger, just to alert other drivers that you are inches behind them, because nobody uses mirrors.
A minor discussion while negotiating a junction
Bronwyn and I had just emerged from Red Fort with our friends Ankur and Shalu, who had engaged a couple of rickshaws to take us all on a sight-seeing tour of the old town. Our driver was brilliant, pedalling us up and down the tiniest of soukh alleyways, panting and puffing under what I imagined to be the unexpected weight of two tall westerners. However, while waiting at the top of a particularly steep hill, our driver laughed good-naturedly at his colleague labouring along behind us, because neither Ankhur nor Shalu are particularly tiny either.
Struggling uphill
Some rickshaws are older than others
Rickshaw traffic in Old Delhi
Downtown traffic
Porters at work
Pile ’em high
Room for one more
We visited a thousand-year old temple with hundred-year old mosaics, belonging to a strict Hindu sect that didn’t allow any leather inside. Shalu volunteered to stay outside with our shoes, belts and bags while an elderly toothless monk showed us around. We couldn’t take any photos inside either, but it was an old space filled with kitchen cupboards and old chairs, with occasional rather spectacular mosaics and sculptures. Overall it was a very nice little temple.
One of these door leads to the old temple
This lass was ironing on the street outside the temple
We had a good time at the spice soukh, chatting to the merchants who were more than happy to allow us to taste their wares and let us take photos of their produce. We stocked up on chai tea and some really good quality spices.
At the Old Delhi spice soukh
Our rickshaw drivers then took us up some rickety stairs above the market, past tatty-looking legal offices and stepping over sleeping people (there are sleeping people everywhere) to the rooftops where we had an unrivaled view of the old city. Locals were having a good laugh flying kites from the roof, it was a relatively cool and breezy place to hang out.
The rooftops of the spice market
Climbing up above Old Delhi
I guess all this stuff eventually falls to earth
Looking down on an Old Delhi mosque
Man at work behind the Spice Market
We were starting to feel more than a little hungry, so Ankur asked the drivers to drop us at Karim’s, a famous restaurant catering for “non-vegetarians”. Karim’s consists of an open-air triangle bounded by tiny cafes on each side. We were led up a wooden staircase to a balcony above the kitchen, where we were served some of the best Indian food that I have ever tasted. Mutton Queerma (Korma), an incomparable Butter Paneer, and an awesome and apparently nameless rice dish.
As evening drew in, Tanu arrived in her car with six-month-old Amaira, and drove us out to New Delhi to see the nightly water show at the temple of Akshardham. It took us some time to make sense of the mass of milling and excited bodies by the ticket office, being herded here and there by whistling and shouting security guards, before we realised that we didn’t need a ticket at all if we didn’t want to visit the temple building, which anyway was just closing. There was however an enormous list of banned articles, including cameras and phones, food and drink, any kind of bag, and some odd things such as USB drives and, amusingly, ‘drunkards’.
This meant in turn that there was another immense jostling crowd for the cloakroom, with lots of pushing and shoving and shouting as people tried to store their bags. Instead we dropped all our prohibited items back at the car and joined the queue for the queue for the security check. There was still lots of pushing and shouting and attempts at queue-jumping, but in an amiable kind of way with lots of laughter. Every ten to fifteen minutes, the security guards at the head of the queue lifted a rope and everybody surged forward, sprinting to join the back of the next queue.
Here people were separated by whistling guards into separate lines, who maintained order by solidly body-checking anybody who tried to change queues. Eventually we made our way through the scanners and into the temple gardens, which were very serene and scattered with water features and sculptures of mythological figures.
As dusk fell, we were herded gently out of the gardens into the main courtyard of the temple itself, an incredibly impressive recent building built mainly by volunteers from pink stone and white marble.
Akshardham tourist photo with Shalu, Amaira, Ankur and Tanu
The courtyard consisted of a wide area of pools and fountains, and we found a place to sit amongst the families perched around the low retaining walls. As darkness fell, the ceremony began with blessings accompanied by a large swinging brazier of flame. Then the music began, synchronised with playing fountains underlit by dancing coloured lights and lasers. The crowd stilled, and we all stared in awe. It was beautiful, haunting and mesmeric, a gorgeous spectacle. There is a short promotional video here which doesn’t do it justice.
After the half-hour show, the main temple opened to non-ticket holders, so we left our shoes at the front desk and wandered in. It is very impressive, and to my Western eyes reminiscent of walking into a large cathedral but with the statues of saints replaced by swamis. The temple was built by the richest sect in India, and it shows. Every surface is intricately carved and gilded, and instead of a golden Buddha, there is a statue of the man himself. Around the walls, colourful mosaics depict scenes from the Swami’s life, revealing a pleasant man doing a lifetime of nice things before dying peacefully of old age. Compared to other religions, his is certainly a pleasant and refreshing story.
There was a very long queue for tickets at the Red Fort in Delhi, but we noticed that there was a sign above the desk that read ‘Gentlemen’. It turned out that there was another queue designated ‘Ladies’ with only two people in it, so Bronwyn nipped over to get our tickets.
The Indian flag flies above the Lahani Gate
Entering the Lahari Gate
Although the fort is essentially a series of ruins containing a small museum and some tourist shops, it is guarded by soldiers in sand-bagged machine-gun nests. Once we were past the security check at the Lahari Gate, we found ourselves in a covered courtyard which once housed a silk and jewellery bazaar for the royal household of the Mughal era, but which now holds somewhat more prosaic emporia.
The slightly unglorious Chhatta Chawk bazaar
The entrance to the Chhatta Chowk arcade
The Diwan-i-Aam, or public audience hall
An impressively scalloped audience hall led us out into the main body of the fort, and through another gate under the Drum House, an impressively sculpted building – now a museum – where musicians used to play. Only royalty are allowed to ride through the gate, but luckily we had neglected to bring our horses with us.
The Naubat Khana, or Drum House
The gate under the Naubat Khana.
Inside the main fort complex are a scattering of harem and palace buildings, all beautifully decorated with carved marble, along with numerous ponds, fountains and channels, one of which runs right through the harem. Although these are currently dry (and now provide seating for security guards), it must have been quite a paradise in its day. In fact a pair of archways to the Hall of Private Audience are inscribed “If heaven can be on the face of the earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.”
Inlaid mosaics in the Diwan-i-Khas (Hall of Private Audience)
Diwan-i-Khas interior
Cooling water would have run through the Rang Mahal
Hanging out with Ankur while they renovate the harem (this could take some time)
The centre of the fort is taken up by the ‘Life-Bestowing Garden’, originally 200 square feet of gardens, but these were destroyed during the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion. All that is left is a dry reservoir with a marble pavilion at each end and a red sandstone building, the Zafar Mahal, in the middle.
The Zafar Mahal, a late addition to the central reservoir of the Hayat Bakhsh Bagh (Life-Bestowing Garden)
We were beginning to gasp in the unrelenting dry heat surrounded by all these memories of cool running water, so we retraced our steps through the bazaar, and headed out into Old Delhi for lunch.
The Queen Elizabeth pulled in to Malaga dock, and we hopped off to explore the city. Most of the passengers jumped into the line of waiting taxis and buses, but we chose instead to stroll along the sea defences to the old lighthouse that marks the beginning of the town.
Arrival in Malaga
Underneath the lighthouse, a cheerful man had lit a fire in an old rowing boat – a tradition along this coast – and was cooking fish for sale in the neighbouring cafe.
Roast fish for lunch
I had vague childhood memories of tower blocks and traffic, so I was prepared to be unimpressed, but in fact we both instantly felt at home in this happy, vibrant town. The visitor from the sea instantly finds himself in the exotic gardens of Malaga Park. This was built at the end of the nineteenth century when it was realised that most of the citizens of the city could not afford to visit the wonderful Botanical Gardens that are situated to the north of the town. To this end, the local ship owner instructed his captains to bring back trees from whatever part of the world they found themselves in, as they shipped their cargoes across the seas. The result is a lovely strip of very exotic trees, scattered with mosaics, fountains and sculptures.
Brass donkey in Malaga Park
Fountain in Malaga Park
The most obvious building in town is the cathedral, known locally as ‘The Cripple’ because it was never finished and is missing a tower. Built over such a long period that each facade is from a different architectural era, the interior of the cathedral is awe-inspiring. There are dozens of altars and chapels, and an incredible ceiling that just makes you want to lie on the ground and stare.
Romanesque frontage of the cathedral
Malaga cathedral knave
Just look up!
We didn’t really have time to visit the Alcazabar (castle) on this occasion, but we did nose around in the Roman amphitheatre below it, and the recent archaeological discovery of enormous stone vats that were used for brewing a famous fish sauce, the recipe for which has since been lost to antiquity.
Roman amphitheatre below the Alcazabar
With only a day to spend in Malaga, we finished our trip by visiting the striking group of buildings known as the ‘ABC’, for ‘Ayuntamiento, Banco, Correos‘ (Town Hall, Bank, Post Office).
Malaga Town Hall
Detail of the Town Hall
Roof detail of the Post Office
Fountain near the ABC buildings
Then, as was normal for this whistle-stop voyage, it was back to the ship for dinner.
Although there seems to be little obvious crime in Montevideo, it is noticeable that many ground-floor windows are protected by wrought iron grilles. We had always assumed that this was a throwback to the bad old days, but when our rental agent asked for a cage over the glass hallway to the rooftop garden, we were happy to oblige because although it is our own private terrazza, it is at least theoretically accessible from neighbouring rooftops.
Simple wrought iron grille and door protecting the access to our rooftop terrazza
We were a little surprised when, a couple of years later, a tenant asked for a grille to be put over the lounge window. Bear in mind that this window is indoors, looking out over the building’s main marble stairway. The panes are tall and slender, an attractive feature of the stairwell, and the first thing that a visitor to any of the apartments sees when they enter from the street.
The tenant sent us a photo of the sort of thing he was expecting, even worse than our rooftop bars, like the security on a basement window, a thickly barred affair reminiscent of a Dickensian workhouse.
The subsequent conversation got quite heated. It was his contention that it was his right to demand that the landlord turn his home into a fortress on request, and that he intended to withhold rent until it was done. I was equally adamant that I had chosen the apartment for its Italian colonial styling and the last thing that I was going to do was turn it into a prison, particularly since he had presumably chosen to rent it for exactly the same reason.
If we had been on site or in the same time zone, the situation may well have been resolved amicably, but the increasingly acerbic conversation was filtered by email through the weak translation skills of our increasingly ineffectual agent, who in the end gave up and just forwarded our emails back and forth in whatever language they happened to be written.
Getting rid of a tenant in Uruguay is practically impossible. Officially they must pay their rent or get evicted, but in reality this is more of a promise that one day, the rent might be paid, eventually, if things go the tenant’s way, and until then it seems that they can just sit and argue and make small token payments until the situation is resolved to their satisfaction. Even in the normal run of things, when there were no arguments and everybody was happy, it was perfectly normal for our tenants to be months behind in their rent, which the agent regarded as nothing to be concerned about.
Something had to give, and it seemed that both the tenant and the agent thought that we were being unreasonable in quibbling about paying for pointless structural alterations to our property. Thankfully we had already had experience with the iron-workers who had built the rooftop cage, who had done quite a large job at reasonable cost. We sent them a series of photos of nice ironwork that we’d found on the internet, and asked if they could make something more in keeping with the style of our property.
Luckily they were able to oblige, and if we have to have a grille at the front of our apartment, then at least this one is pleasant to the eye.
Now that we had purchased our forest in Tasmania, we had a great camping destination (albeit one where all our gear needed to be packed in over the creek on foot), but where should we build our house?
Our steeply sloping 2008 camp site. Note the staked retaining wall/ foot rest to stop us from rolling down the hill.
With 14 acres of dry sclerophyll forest to choose from, we spent several visits stomping about, clambering over fallen trees and poking at the ground, we slowly formed a more detailed mental picture of the terrain. The high Southern slopes are steep and rocky, and the low Northern slopes are steep and boggy. To the East, the land falls away steeply to one side. To the West lies the official route of Klynes Road, although in reality there is little more than a rough logging track which terminates at the creek crossing on our border. Still, it is the closest thing that we have to a demarcated border with the farm on that side, so we didn’t want to build in sight of it in case something changes there in the future.
In the end, we decided to put the house on a shelf of less steeply sloping land, more or less in the middle of the forest. After a lot of scrambling around and climbing trees, we ascertained that a raised deck would give us fine views across the d’Entrecasteaux estuary, over the tops of our lower forest. The higher wooded slopes to the South would protect us from storms rolling in from the Southern Ocean. Bravely, we hammered some stakes into the ground.
How about right here? The site in 2008.
It was still only coloured sticks in a forest, with no access except on foot by crossing the creek at the bottom of the property. However, a neighbour who had built a house further down Klynes Road had access to a bulldozer, so we commissioned him to run a causeway over the creek, push through an access track, and clear the brush from the building site.
2007
2012
The house is gonna be here! The brush cleared in 2012.
We’d asked him to leave the larger trees for the moment, but to clear anything that had fallen down. This had the unexpected benefit of providing us with chest-high stacks of drying fire wood which will probably last us for years.
Perched atop just one of our little piles of firewood.
We have no immediate plans to start the house build; all that is far in the future. But now that we can get a four-wheel drive in to our cleared building site, we have a perfect camp retreat at the bottom of the world.
Home away from home. Our considerably more comfortable camp site in 2012.Making good use of the wood pile.
For several years, all of our camping gear had been stored under a bush, wrapped in a tarpaulin. On every visit, we found more holes in our tarp, and sometimes nibble-marks on the tools themselves. We decided to construct a more permanent shelter for our gear, and to this end bought a prefabricated garden shed and some railway sleepers.
Digging the foundations for the shed. It’s nice firm clay down there.A man and his shed.
We were hanging out at The Andaman, our favourite luxury hotel on the island of Langkawi off northern Malaysia, and we needed to get to Kuala Lumpur in the south. Since we we had just come off the Trans-Siberian through Russia, Mongolia and China, we decided to continue by surface transport instead of flying.
But first, several days of luxury at the wonderful Andaman, always our home from home when we pass through this region.
The Andaman is truly a rain forest hotel
Tempted to have a cocktail?
The table is laid for dinner
Our friend Kim had flown in from Thailand, and we whiled away the time swimming in the balmy sea, paddling kayaks around Datai island, eating perfectly prepared cuisine and drinking far too many cocktails and bottles of wine. Bliss.
Kim circumnavigating Datai Island
One interesting feature of Datai Bay is the remains of the fringing reef, which was smashed in a storm some years ago. The broken pieces all washed up in the shallows near to the beach, and each piece settled down to become a mini-reef of its own. There are staff whose job it is to wade out into the debris every day, collecting specimens and putting them in an artificial reef behind the hotel. This acts as a breeding ground and hatchery, with the ultimate intention of rebuilding the original fringing reef. In the meantime, if you are careful you can wade out at low tide and see reef life that you would normally not see without diving gear.
The eyes of a clam peeping out from inside a head of coral
An anenome on a broken fragment of reef
Eventually we had to to return to real life, so we dropped Kim at the airport and headed down to the quay for the first leg of our journey, the ferry to Georgetown on the island of Penang. We waited in the terminal and watched the approaching front of a gathering rain storm. As the heavens opened, our gate opened, and the terminal degenerated into semi-organised mayhem. The 300 or so of us who were lucky enough to have boarding passes pushed down the cramped gangway, stacking our luggage in a pile at the front of the cabin, and crammed into our plastic-clad seats.
Outside in the fog we could see a queue of other ferries being pummelled by the waves as they waited for us to clear the dock. The crew hurled more and more packages aboard as still more passengers arrived, screaming into their mobile phones. Even as we cast off and pulled away, a steady stream of new arrivals were still leaping aboard, stevedores flinging their luggage unceremoniously onto the roof of the cabin.
A line of arrivals waiting for the dock
We’d noticed previously that the forward end of both passenger decks were protected by rows of welded steel plates, and we soon found out why. As we hit the rolling swell, the bow buried itself deep into the quartering sea. The pilot did a great job of zig-zagging to try to give us a more pleasant ride, but inevitably on each turn we were pushed back under water.
After three and a half hours of corkscrew progress, we disembarked into warm rain and humped our packs up to our favourite Georgetown hotel, the Yeng Keng. Since our last visit they’d built a cafe on one side of the courtyard, and – damp and hungry – we snuck in five minutes before closing and scoffed a very satisfying Malaysian meal washed down with white wine.
The covered sidewalks of Georgetown
Detail of a temple archway in Penang
After a good sleep and an enormous breakfast (two complete servings of Nasi Lemak, and why not?), we headed out into the stunning heat and humidity for the short walk back to Georgetown jetty. We were had been on the car ferry to Butterworth before, and it is pleasant to stand in the open structure of the car deck and feel the warm wind on your face as it makes the short and scenic journey across to the Malay Peninsula. It’s even nicer because, in this direction, travel is free.
Approaching Butterworth
Colourful Penang car ferries lined up at Butterworth dock
We had already purchased first class rail tickets from Butterworth to Kuala Lumpur, so we ambled unhurriedly in the direction of the rail terminal. The station turned out to be closed for redevelopment, and we were redirected to a temporary structure which was largely closed. After a little searching, we found a small courtyard bar, which was also closed. However, the ceiling fans were running over the battered trestle tables, and there was a snack stall so we settled in to wait with some cans of soft drink.
There were a couple of cafes fronting the courtyard, both firmly closed with rolling shutters. While we sat there, the owner of one of them arrived and cracked open his shutter, pouring a tray of food in front of the gap. A whole family of cats and kittens emerged and began to eat, presumably this was his answer to any possible rodent problem in his stores.
Some local kids came and sat nearby, complaining to each other about their parents’ backward attitudes, and how they wouldn’t allow their children to get ahead. It was intriguing, but we never found out what they were talking about because it was time to head back to the temporary station, which had just opened. It was full of disgruntled passengers who had been told that the daily train to Bangkok had been cancelled and had been replaced by a bus service. Frankly I wouldn’t have complained, as we gathered that the reason that the service had been cancelled was that it had been derailed.
Boarding our own train, we found ourselves in one of those rather tired and battered carriages which are typical in Malaysia. Travelling first class just means that you get an assigned seat, and a pretty girl who brings you water and a piece of cake when you board. However, our seats were at the front of the carriage with copious leg room, and thankfully the flat screen TV did not seem to be working. This was fantastic news because usually they run a loud and endless loop of irritating advertising jingles.
We settled back to enjoy the ride as we travelled the entire length of the Malay peninsula. The windows were actually too dirty to see through, but by scrunching down in doorways I could get a reasonable view of this beautiful, fertile, and above all jungle country.
Mangrove islands on Kolam Bukit Merah
Arriving finally in Kuala Lumpur, we immediately headed out for food, and were once again stunned by the Malaysian attention to cuisine. A simple bowl of chips is a thing of beauty, and once you settle down to a good fish dish, you’ll never come up for air.
A simple bowl of chips at a roadside bar. Beautiful.
Suitably refreshed, we finished our trip at our favourite KL bar, the Hap Seng Belgian Beer Cafe. It’s not overwhelmingly beautiful and there isn’t much to see apart from passing traffic, but the stools are comfortable, the staff are attentive and the beer is perfect. What more could you ask for?
Boarding the Trans-Manchurian Express in Ulaanbaatar, we immediately noticed a marked improvement from the elderly Mongolian rolling stock in which we had trundled across Siberia. This time, we had been allocated a proper first class carriage with two beds, an armchair, and even a semi-private toilet shared with the next compartment. The friendly conductress kept popping in with hot water, tea and coffee (these latter came in sachets described as “3 in 1”, which apparently means that they consist of 50% sugar, 50% powdered milk, and a hint of tea or coffee).
Our Trans-Manchurian first class carriage
Warning in our semi-private toilet
We dozed off the excesses of our final night in Ulaanbaatar as the train climbed up onto the steppe. Waking up hungry, we made our way to the restaurant car. In contrast with the pleasantly homey but food-free Russian restaurant car which had accompanied the train across Siberia, this Mongolian car was quite plain. In place of the two elderly Russian ladies providing plates of potatoes and pickles, were uniformed waiters and chefs, and an extraordinarily expensive menu denominated in US dollars. We ordered one lunch and one breakfast between us, and it came to an astonishing $40, and that was with many of the key ingredients missing. When we first sat down, we explained that we couldn’t eat wheat, and the waiter leapt to the conclusion that we were vegetarians and no amount of argument could get him to change his mind, so we picked at our salad and watched in salivating horror as everybody else tucked into their bacon and chops. Still, at least we got to eat a lot of eggs.
The steppe ambled past our window under an enormous sky. A few mines, occasional herds of horses and camels, men with big sticks herding goats, sparse handfuls of yurts, and the odd truck.
The endless steppe
We whiled away the time reading the train’s magazine, which is hilarious. One long and rambling folk tale seems to have been randomly generated by an online translating engine. It goes on for pages and is completely impenetrable, but peculiarly beguiling as we try to fathom what the original text might have said.
And then there’s the section on Mongolian cuisine, which goes on to list six pages of two-line recipes for cooking heart. It starts with “heart with carrot”, before moving on to “heart with carrot and turnip”, and then “heart with carrot and turnip and potato”…
At seven in the evening we stopped at the Chinese border, and everything got complicated. Most trains in Eurasia use a standard track width, which allows the interchangeable rolling stock to be mixed and matched along international train routes. However, Russia and Mongolia use a narrower track to everybody else, so it is not possible for the Trans-Siberian to proceed across the border onto Chinese rails. The rather exciting solution to this problem is to jack up the entire train with everybody aboard, remove the Russian bogies, and replace them with standard ones.
Our train was shunted into a large shed and lined up with a series of hydraulic jacks. As the train lifted, men ran around underneath hitting things with hammers until the bogies came free. We understand that in earlier times it was not permitted to watch the process, but on this occasion we were all glued in fascination to the grimy and mud-smeared windows. Once the Russian bogies had come free, they were pushed away, and a new set of Chinese bogies came rushing in, pulled by an underground cable.
Jacking up the train to release the old bogiePositioning the new bogie under the fitting spike
The whole process took a couple of hours, followed by another hour of banging and shunting as they put the train back together. Immigration was a formality, merely involving glancing at passports and checking the toilets for stowaways, and so we drifted off into a comfortable sleep.
Since the restaurant car changes at every border, we were interested to compare the new Chinese restaurant with the Russian and Mongolian ones, particularly as our last meal had been almost protein-free and we were starving. However, when we arrived for breakfast soon after opening, it was packed and we were told to come back at 10am for lunch. There were no platform vendors at the stations, so we quietly hugged our grumbling stomachs and chewed on our last remaining pieces of dry biltong before rushing to the restaurant car precisely on time.
The car was empty, and we gorged on two lunches each, crispy chicken and diced breast and peppers and rice and salad and eggs… we were so happy to eat. The price was only 80 yuan (about 8 pounds) including beer. Bronwyn offered to pay the bill using our Mongolian currency which we had forgotten to change at the border, and the price was 80,000 which was somewhat suspiciously exactly the amount that Bronwyn was holding in her hand, and which incidentally was about 80 pounds! We turned down the kind offer and paid in yuan.
Our somewhat unreliable guide book had insisted that we get up early if we were not to miss the best of the scenery, but it wasn’t until we had finished lunch that the landscape started to change. The train was running alongside the Guanting Reservoir, a large lake in a deep gorge that seemed to have been lined by white marble terraces, in part to prevent the valley from crumbling into the fields of sweetcorn and sunflowers below.
Stone terraces along the Yongding River
Tony gets very excited about breaking his fast
The lower reaches of the Yongdong River
I think that this was the Huyu National Scenic area, but the camera’s GPS wasn’t working at the time
The gorge was scattered with major engineering works, dams and power stations and bridges, all against a backdrop of spectacular mountain peaks, especially as we chugged up through the Badaling and Huyu national parks.
Finally after some eight days rolling across Siberia, Mongolia and China on the Trans-Siberian railway, we arrived at our final destination in Beijing.
Beijing railway station in the smog
Together with fellow travellers Gar and Tony, we stumbled blinking into the smog-laden sunshine, to find that the queue for taxis stretched clear across the square. The line of overheated and overladen shoppers and tourists snaked obliviously around a tented area of plastic tables, presided over by a smiling man with a portable freezer full of ice and beer. We looked at each other. It seemed rude not to.
We had been keen to get some first hand experience of Mongolian yurts, because we’ve been toying with the idea of building one on our property in Tasmania. Since we were already in Ulaanbaatar, we headed 50km out onto the steppe to spend a few days at Elstei Ger Lodge. That was our first lesson; in Mongolia, yurts are called gers.
Mongolian yurt, or ger
Our home for the next few days consisted of about a dozen yurts spread out across the flat grassy steppe. Each yurt contained three brightly painted wooden beds inset with drawers, a few small pieces of painted wooden furniture, and a central wood-burning stove.
Ger interior with typical bright paintwork
The sun shone and the steppe was beautiful and so very quiet and peaceful. It is very fertile from horse dung, and far from being simply grass, the flora is a vibrant mix of green plants and fungi. Insects abound, particularly a cricket that makes a clicking sound as it flies. One of my favourite pastimes was to walk about a quarter of a mile out of the camp, in any direction, and to simply stand still and absorb the silence.
The Mongolian steppe, it seems to go on forever
The Ger Lodge had attracted an interesting and eclectic bunch of travellers, and one night, after the bar closed, the hard core of us carried all the remaining beer and a considerable quantity of vodka back to our yurt for an after-party. I don’t think that anybody really remembers the whole night, but there was some wild dancing to our portable ipod speaker, a certain amount of lying-in-the-grass-and-staring-at-the-stars, and at least one lengthy who-can-think-of-the-best-toast competition.
Partying with Gar and Tony, Cheryl and Amy. I’m pretty certain that none of us remember this photo being taken.
We mainly missed breakfast but brushed up OK for lunch, which comprised of mutton accompanied by vegetables from the Lodge’s garden and greenhouse. The meals were cooked and served by enthusiastic local students, and it was impressive the number of ways they found to prepare different and tasty dishes from a limited range of ingredients.
The days were spent in a happy haze of sitting in the sun, playing with balls and bows and arrows, and just wandering off and standing staring into the distance, admiring the views and the horses running free across the landscape. In the evenings, the bar had a selection of traditional Mongolian board games, including the intense “Pentagon” which is played on four rotating boards.
I doubt that Ghengis’ hordes need be concerned
Bronwyn entertains a passing guest in our yurt
One afternoon, Oggi our guide took us riding out to meet some friends of hers who live in a ger out on the plains, with their children and horses. They welcomed us into their home, which was not dissimilar to the yurts that we were staying in, and introduced us to fermented mare’s milk (a bit like scrumpy. Yum!), mare’s curd (not unlike clotted cream), and a curious biscuit made entirely of mare’s cheese that had been dried in the sun (not unlike a parmesan-flavoured cracker).
Our lovely guide, OggiLocal family at home in their yurt
Mare’s cheese biscuits drying in the sun
Bronwyn and a Mongolian horse
The Mongolian saddle looks a bit like a Western saddle, and the reins are held one-handed. To move off or accelerate, you say “Choo!”, and to canter you simply stand up in your stirrups. On the way out I had a bit of a stubborn horse which was moodily intent on following the tail directly ahead of it, but on the way back I had nice feisty one which was happy to go exploring, bounding over tussocks and sandy dunes. Out in front, I was able to briefly fancy that my steed and I were riding at the head of a vast Mongol horde, thundering across the steppe. But possibly my horse was just keen on getting home for dinner.
Having arrived in the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar, we met Oggi, our guide for the next few days, who took us out on an orientation walk. We began at the grand Sukhbaatar Square, named in honour of the founding member of the Mongolian People’s Party who was largely responsible for the switch from Chinese to Soviet rule, and whose statue stands in the centre.
Sukhbaatar Statue
Chingiss Khan looks down from parliament
Sukhbaatar Square
Some visiting dignitaries were expected, which explained the red carpets and the honour guard outside the parliament building.
Even visiting dignitaries need to take a selfie
Honour guard outside parliament
Khubilai Khaan
Away from the pomp of Sukhbaatar Square, it is obvious that the city is quite poor, with rotting buildings and rutted roads, unsurprising given its recent history of economic occupation by first the Chinese and then the Russians. Looking around, it’s obvious that the main industry is anglophone tourism from the Trans-Siberian railway. Many shop signs are in English, and it seems that every corner has its karaoke, ‘Irish’ or ‘London’ pub. Mind you, we did try an ‘Irish’ bar and it had none of the usual fake tat, in fact it was really just a high-end Mongolian bar with a Western name, and therefore much more pleasant than we expected.
The next stop on our little tour was the Gandantegchinlen monastery, destroyed (along with most Mongolian Buddhist sites) by the communists in the 1930s but rebuilt when the Russians left in 1990. The original copper and gold buddha was taken to Russia and melted down, but it has been replaced by a 26.5 metre gilt copper statue, the Migjid Janraisig, which stands inside an impressive purpose-built temple.
Photography is not allowed inside the temple, but once through the door, we found ourselves in a huge space held up by four gaily painted tree trunks, surrounding the enormous buddha. Wooden terraces cling to the inside of the walls on several levels. As we circled the statue in the approved pilgrim’s direction (clockwise), hundreds of statuettes of Yush, the buddha of longevity, stared at us from stacks of shelves to our left. Each carving is different, and each is dressed in a different coloured cloak, representing the inevitability of ageing.
On our right, between us and the great buddha, stood a great many brass prayer wheels, constantly in motion as visitors give them a boost as they go past. Some are quite elaborate with projecting handles, but most are simple cylinders which are spun with the flat of the hand.
Outside the temple are the impressive golden feet that are all that remain of the original buddha statue.
Feet of the old buddha eclipse the temple
Post detail at Gandantegchinien Monastery
Roof detail at Gandantegchinlen Monastery
On the outskirts of the city stands the Soviet-era Zaisan Monument, which we climbed for great views of the city. It was built to honour the Russian casualties of World War 2, but also has friezes commemorating peace-time comradeship between the USSR and Mongolia.
The steps up to the Zaisan Monument
The view from the top
Soviet mosaic on the Zaisan Monument
Looking down on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar from this viewpoint, it is clear that major construction is going on, which Oggi told us was all new housing.
Ulaanbaatar cityscape, withconstruction in the foreground including a huge new buddha
As soon as we left the monument, our bus got mired in traffic. I’ve seen a lot of traffic jams all over the world, but I’ve never seen quite so many cars packed into such a small space, inching along with only millimetres between them. Incredibly, there were people trying to hitch lifts and even hailing taxis from the side of the road, but the traffic wasn’t going anywhere and it would have been much faster to walk the short distance into town.
Eventually our driver fought free of the gridlock and turned onto one of Mongolia’s few graded roads. This is a bit of a misnomer, as it must be decades since it was last surfaced, and it has now decayed beyond any reasonable use. Traffic streams in both directions, but across the full two-lane width of the road there is often only space to get one vehicle between the pot-holes at a time, so the traffic consists of a wildly zig-zagging single line of cars and trucks heading in opposite directions. In places the road is so bad that the line snakes off into the increasingly boggy grassland before returning to the highway.
One of the better sections of highway. On the bad bits, I couldn’t hold the camera steady.
We were out here to visit the Chinggiskhan (Ghengis Khan) Monument, an amazing 40 metre stainless steel statue on top of a 10 metre museum complex dedicated to the Mongolian Empire and the Khans who ruled it.
Chinggiskhan Monument
Worth a second photo, I reckon
At its height, the Empire spanned most of Eastern Europe and almost all of Asia including China and Japan. The museums contain artefacts from over 100 years of turbulent history, most of them bronze weapons and tools, along with fascinating descriptions and maps. While we were examining the contents of the second museum, deep inside the main structure, there was a power cut and everything went dark. The staff all had torches and were unsurprised and well organised, but our visit to the museums was over.
However, the building was still full of visitors who had not yet climbed up to the viewing platform on the horse’s head. The lift had obviously stopped, and the stairs that run up inside the stainless steel statue were in complete darkness. Nevertheless, we formed an international human chain, and with the help of cigarette lighters and mobile phones and not a little humour, we all made it to the top for great views of the statue and of the surrounding countryside.
The longest arm of the sprawling entity know as the Trans-Siberian railway was built to connect Moscow to Japan via the port of Vladivostok on the eastern coast. However, we had chosen to head south from the major junction at Ulan-Ude, boarding the Trans-Mongolian Express which travels down into Mongolia and then on to China.
We had been travelling through Siberia for almost a week. The restaurant car had run out of food, but we had been buying supplies from platform vendors along the way. This had worked just fine for the first part of the trip, but as we approached the Mongolian border the vendors had completely dried up. For some days we had been living on ice cream, beer, and some biltong that was left over in our luggage. By the time we reached the border at Naushki our stomachs were complaining loudly.
Mongolia ahoy!
We knew that 215 minutes had been set aside for customs formalities on the train, so we sat quietly waiting for the customs officers to arrive in our compartment, wondering if there was possibly any nourishment to be had from the curtains, or perhaps from our boots. When the Russian emigration officials arrived, we glumly handed over our passports, to be cheerily told that because we didn’t have any documentation, we were now free to leave not only the train, but the station.
Not pausing to argue with this perhaps unique official viewpoint, we ran for the door and joined the stream of hungry travellers barrelling down the platform. A farmer’s market had been cleverly set up just outside the gates, and we descended on it like locusts. We then spotted a little café where I laid into a very satisfying meat borscht followed by a stack of pork chops and onions. Fantastic.
After a couple of hours we got back on to the train and were handed our passports. The train moved about fifty metres and stopped. A phalanx of Mongolian immigration officers boarded and began to take the train apart, lifting the floors, pulling down the ceiling panels, and checking under the seats and on the luggage racks. Presumably they were looking for stowaways. Only afterwards did they pay any attention to the passengers and their documents.
I was quite relieved about this, because due to some apparently needless intransigence at the Chinese embassy I had my Russian visa in one passport and my Mongolian and Chinese visas in another one. I had not been looking forward to explaining why I had two passports, because dual nationality is not widely understood in many otherwise civilised countries, but now that I had already retrieved my Australian passport I simply handed over my English one and nobody knew the difference.
An Australian leaves, and an Englishman arrives. Very James Bond.
Mongolian immigration kept us up well past midnight, but finally the carriage settled down to sleep. For the most part, anyway: the two conductresses who run our carriage spent much of the night running up and down the corridor shouting and laughing and randomly opening and then slamming our compartment doors. I can only think that this was some kind of payback for us keeping them awake during our night-time parties (see my previous blog entry).
We had set our alarm for breakfast and woke very confused because although the train was under way, nobody else was stirring. We eventually realised that the train had switched from Moscow time to Ulaanbaatar time. Because the Russian section ignores all the intervening time zone changes, we magically jumped five hours at the Mongolian border, and we had inadvertently set our alarm for 03:00 train time. Back to bed.
At 06:00 we woke to cloudy skies above fields of fenced corrals, each containing a white canvas yurts (known as gers in Mongolia), interspersed with what seems to be stalled Soviet-style construction. We had heard that, since self-determination from Russian rule, 70% of the Mongolian population have abandoned their enforced ‘western’ life-styles and have returned to their traditional nomadic living. There was plenty of evidence of that from the train.
A scattering of gers on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar
Mongolia’s recent history is not a particularly happy one. The country was ruled from China for some years until it gained a spurious sort of independence by allying itself with the USSR. Unfortunately the only difference in the new regime was that Mongolia’s vast mineral wealth began to head north on the Trans-Siberian railway instead of south. Neither the Chinese nor the Russians wanted to build processing plants on what was effectively occupied territory, preferring instead to transport the cheap raw material back home, where local industries would benefit from processing the low-value ore into high-value commodities.
On gaining true independence in the nineties, Mongolia continued to use the Trans-Siberian to ship unprocessed ore because it didn’t have the cash to invest in its own processing plants. However, we hear that they are making a deal with Australian mining giant Rio Tinto who, in exchange for copper and gold mining rights, have agreed to building processing capacity on site. Hopefully this will start a renaissance in Mongolian fortunes.
We disembarked hungry and dirty in Ulaanbaatar. Our first stop was – blissfully – a local spa where we showered and I had a chance to shave my increasingly unruly beard, before demolishing a buffet breakfast of rice and fruit and eggs. Only then were did we feel ready to go out and sample the delights of the big city.
We only need to board our pre-booked compartment on the Trans-Siberian Express, but our driver insisted on coming into Moscow train station with us and waiting until our platform had been announced. This took a while, so we hung around outside the station bar and sank a few Lowenbrau beers and tried to make conversation with him in pidgin Russian and French. By the time the Trans-Siberian rolled in, we were rolling a bit ourselves.
As we walked the length of the train, looking for our assigned carriage, we noticed that standing in each doorway was a pair of Mongolian conductresses, each smartly dressed in a white shirt and a blue skirt, sometimes a very short blue skirt.
All aboard the Trans-Siberian Express, Moscow to Beijing
We found our compartment, which was officially a four-berth but, because we’d paid for first class, there will only be two of us in it. It’s a tiny little space but our home for the next week or so. The train shook itself and then moved slowly out of Moscow station, destination Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia and then Beijing in China, six thousand kilometres on the longest railway line in the world. I stuck my head out of the window and howled; I am on the Trans-Siberian Express!
Our compartment in a Mongolian carriage on the Trans-Siberian Express
Our carriage is full of travellers, we have Chileans and French on either side. As night fell, all six of us got amazingly sloshed on canned Tuborg from the restaurant car which is an arduous nine carriages away.
The next morning, we started to learn a few of the features of this train. Each carriage has a ladies’ and a gents’ toilet, but the gents’ on our carriage isn’t working. I tried to use the gents’ in the next carriage, but was firmly turned away by the conductress there, so our carriage’s toilet is now effectively unisex. Either way, it has no toilet paper, but luckily we brought some with us.
At the end of each carriage is a wood-fired samovar, tended by the conductress, which provides hot water for drinks. Although we did bring coffee and a press, there is no crockery or cutlery, and we didn’t think to bring any with us. However, with the aid of a pair of nail-scissors, we managed to fashion a flimsy coffee cup out of the base of a water bottle.
Corridor party
Impromptu coffee cup (or wine glass)
Along each corridor is a red woollen carpet, nailed to the wooden floor with long brass tacks that keep popping out. The conductress endlessly patrols this carpet, either sweeping it or hammering the tacks back in. I’ve already trodden on one of those tacks, which leaked blood everywhere, but worse than that the carpet sheds little pieces of red wool which get into every crevice of your luggage and which pile up in little drifts on the floor of each compartment.
On our first morning, we made the long trip to the restaurant car for breakfast. We gathered that although this particular train consists of Mongolian rolling stock (and therefore Mongolian staff), the restaurant car gets changed when we cross borders. Since we are still in Siberia, the restaurant car is Russian, but will be exchanged for a Mongolian one at the border town of Naushki. We sat down to a pleasant dish of potatoes fried with dill and garlic, with a side of pickled cucumbers, plus our own pressed coffee in a borrowed water glass.
At about lunchtime, the train pulled in to a station. It looked pretty quiet and desolate, but we got out anyway to stretch our legs. Suddenly there was an explosion of elderly ladies, sprinting across the tracks and ducking under trains, carrying trays of fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, smoked fish, bread, and even cling-filmed plates of fresh hot food. I bought some freshly roasted chicken with boiled potatoes, and Bronwyn scored a couple of salted gherkins from a plastic bucket. We also managed to buy some sturdier soft drink bottles so that we could make better coffee cups. Just about everything cost 100 roubles (about two English pounds) per item. The chicken tasted superb, far less bland than the stuff sold in Western supermarkets, and the potatoes were wonderful.
Bronwyn and some freshly roasted chicken
Karla works on keeping her fluids up
All this time, we had been chugging across a rather monotonous flat Siberian landscape of birch, pine, and the occasional open field. At the base of the Urals, our old engine was exchanged for a new one. We started to climb, but slowly. Were the birches looking a little thinner?
The trees thinned out into grasslands. Occasionally we passed a rock-crushing plant or train repair yard, and now and again a village of wooden houses. There were no signs of crops apart from some extensive market gardens behind some of the houses, and – very occasionally – some hay ricks, although it wasn’t clear what the hay was for, as we didn’t see any farm animals.
Fairly typical view of Siberia from the train windowThe occasional cluster of buildings, with market gardens
The Trans-Siberian isn’t really about the outside world, it’s all about the microcosm that is the train, and it didn’t take long for us to fall into its rhythm. In the morning, after sweeping out the night’s accumulation of red dust-balls, we’d hang out in our compartment and catch up on our reading. During the day, we’d hang out of the window and watch the world go by. Occasionally a freight train would trundle past on the other track. We’d snack on yesterday’s left-overs and wait patiently for the next stop, where we would leap out and grab meat, beer, ice cream, whatever was being sold by the ladies on the platform. In the afternoon, we would entertain visitors (our largely empty carriage was always popular with people travelling second class). In the evenings, we would party.
The world trundles by in a relaxing blurPassing strangers
Onward, ever onward
Bronwyn scores ice cream!
The Readings ‘at home’
And then, one night, near the tail end of an exceptionally good party, our compartment suddenly filled with armed police who confiscated our passports and made Bronwyn pour all our glasses down a sink. Then they took away our few remaining bottles of booze, including a rather expensive bottle of French wine that I had in my luggage for a special occasion. It was all a bit of a surprise, and since we didn’t have any languages in common, somewhat mysterious.
A few days later, they returned with an interpreter, who attempted to explain. It seems that each train has a contingent of police who live in one of the rear carriages. They told some story about us keeping other guests awake, but since the party had extended the full length of our carriage and included not only everyone in every compartment but also some people from other carriages, we could only infer that we were keeping our conductress awake and that she had made a complaint. At any rate, they gave us our passports back, suggested that we should party in the restaurant car instead of our carriage, and said that my special wine bottle would be returned to me when we arrived in Ulan Bator.
That night, we all went to the restaurant car and drank them out of beer. The two elderly Russian ladies who ran the restaurant shuffled calmly to their supply fridge and re-stocked. These ladies were great, they were everybody’s great-grandmother, fussing around the tables in their flowered dresses and permed hair. In the day, they liked to sit in the corner and snooze, and by night they slept on the floor of the restaurant. Before long we were clearing up the glasses for them, and when we’d finished the second cabinet-full of beer, we waved them to stay seated and just helped ourselves directly from the supply fridge while they smiled and waved their gratitude. We’d been drinking some fairly boring lager up until now, but I found a whole cache of more interesting beers in a back corner of the supply fridge, which was nice.
One peculiar thing about the train is that it always keeps Moscow time regardless of the fact that it traverses seven time zones. This means that the concepts of ‘breakfast’ and ‘dinner’ drift considerably from the day outside; midday outside now corresponds to about six in the morning train time, which introduces a certain amount of jet-lag (train-lag?) in the staff. After a while, we realised that the two ladies were nodding off, so we bought some more beers and left them to make up their beds on the floor. We didn’t want to have a repeat of the police fiasco, so rather than returning to our carriages, we decided to party in the tiny space between the restaurant carriage and the rest of the train. That worked too.
Party in the corridor of the restaurant car
This platform beer-seller was happy to see us
One of the few real towns was Omsk, which seemed large and prosperous, and had actual kiosks on the platform instead of mobile vendors. We bought hot chicken and bananas and thought we’d have a quick look around the town, but there were armed police everywhere who were preventing passengers from leaving the platform. In fact it was here and at another station close to Irkutsk that we realised that many of the platform vendors weren’t locals at all, they were actually travelling on our train with us, and hopping off at the stations to sell goods to the locals. In the stations with a heavy police presence, they simply sold clothing and plastic goods out of the train windows.
T-shirt, madam?
On-train advertising display
Suddenly a lot of things fell into place. I had wondered at the purpose of all these tiny little communities in the wilds of Siberia. What were these people doing out here? But now I realised that it is the train that is their raison d’être, without the train there would be no people. It is a nine thousand kilometre linear village, which has sprung up alongside the necessity to ship ore from one side of this enormous country to the other.
Many of our fellow travellers disembarked at Lake Baikal, but we had some deadlines to stick to so we stayed on board. We’ll see the world’s deepest freshwater lake on another occasion.
Houses on the shore of Lake Baikal
We likewise passed through Ulan Ude, which seemed to be a pleasant and prosperous city. Scattered amongst the Soviet-era apartment blocks were smart new houses, and closer to the tracks were the same kind of wooden home that we have seen all the way across Siberia, each with its own market garden packed with vegetables and fruit.
The railway here is also lined with lock-up garages. Some of them appear to be derelict, but others have been fitted with chimneys and new roofs. Do people live in them, or do the owners keep a fire burning to keep the cars from freezing in winter? We could not tell.
Garages with chimneys near Ulan Ude
Brightly coloured paintwork was common on private houses. I was amused to see that the most common colours were pale blue and pale green, both of a shade usually to be found only on railway stations, signal boxes and signal poles.
Nice paint. Looks familiar. Any idea where can I get some?
We got a new engine for the final run down into Ulan Bator, this time a smoky diesel. Close now to the Mongolian border, the terrain changed completely. The railway lifted up onto an embankment as it followed a small river that wound its way through an old flood-plain, with a small range of hills rising up on either side. The flat plain was purple with heads of wild garlic, but it was the scent of a badly tuned diesel that drifted in through the window. It wasn’t long before my hands and face were black with grease. Never mind, Mongolia is just around the corner.
Moscow’s Red Square is enormous. Everybody tells you that, and they are all correct. Everybody also says that it’s too big to photograph, and they are right too. It is bounded on one long side by the red outer wall of the Kremlin, and on the other by the enormous and expensive GUM shopping mall.
Not even one whole side of Red Square! I’ve used Cheryl Woodhouse’s picture of GUM, because I couldn’t take one.
In the Soviet era, GUM carried the same products at the same prices as any other store in the USSR, but because of its proximity to the Kremlin, it tended to actually have items in stock, so enormous queues used to build up outside. During Perestroika, the GUM morphed into a collection of expensive boutiques and jewellery shops, and now no Muscovite shops there, because it is cheaper for them to fly to Italy to buy those same products. Indeed, every shop that we passed, with its expensive wares and guarded by impeccably dressed and very bored staff, was completely empty of customers.
Colourful Olympic signage inside GUM
At one of the short ends of the square is the Resurrection Gate, rebuilt like much else in this area after it was torn down by the Soviet regime so that tanks could roll unobstructed into Red Square for parades. At the other end is of course St Basil’s, which is exactly as beautiful as you hoped it will be, and which somehow managed to survive the communist era because it was used as an armoury.
Resurrection Gate and Iberian Chapel
The towers of St Basil’s
The cathedrals of Red Square are really incredible confections. On the left is the Nikolas Tower.
On our visit, the central part of the square was fenced off while workers removed a temporary ice rink and put in stands for an upcoming display of military marching. We made our way down the fourth long side, past the long queue of people waiting to file past Lenin’s tomb, to see the changing of the guard for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Changing the guard for the Unknown Soldier
The entrance to the Kremlin
This quite lovely sculpture outside the Kremlin is usually hidden by fountains, but luckily they were cleaning it.
The Kremlin We’d been told that obtaining tickets to The Kremlin was a complicated process, and indeed it was. Initially we queued at the entrance, and when we reached the front, we were told that we should have pre-bought tickets in the Alexander Gardens below. We left and found a little row of ticket cabins. Each one displays a poster showing different “technical break” times of half an hour, twice a day, at which time that cabin will suddenly close and leave the queue hanging until they open again. The game is to judge which of the cabin queues will allow you to get to the front before that queue has a technical break.
An additional complication is that tickets for the Armoury only come on sale at certain times, and go off sale when that ‘sceance’ is full. If you happen to reach the cashier after the end of one ‘sceance’ and before the start of another, then you are out of luck, which presumably explains why we were told that tickets for both the Nikolas tower and the Armoury were ‘impossible’. The nice lady did, however, allow us to buy a general admission ticket.
We queued up at the Kremlin entrance again, and on reaching the front, I was turned away because I was wearing a small backpack, much smaller than the hand bags being carried by the women who were being admitted in front of me. Perhaps I should have asked Bronwyn to carry it, but now I had to go back down to the gardens and check it in to a cloakroom. On my return, I was finally allowed in.
Finally inside, with the Tsar Cannon, the biggest in the world (although it was never fired)
The Kremlin (fortress) contains five cathedrals and a palace, along with numerous political buildings which appeared to be undergoing major reconstruction. Our ticket entitled us to visit each cathedral and palace, and also the surrounding gardens. At each doorway, and elderly lady solemnly signed our tickets so that we could not pass that way again.
More cathedrals than you can shake a stick atMore onions than you can shake a stick at
Inside, each cathedral was painted from floor to ceiling with saints in the usual Orthodox style. Each painting forms an icon, which church-goers pray to as an intermediary because they aren’t worthy to pray directly to their god. Instead of an altar, there are more icons, but these are individually painted on wood panels which are stacked in five or six rows up the wall. As individual icons get refurbished or gain popularity they are moved around between churches, and the upshot is that all the best and most powerful icons end up in the best and most powerful churches. Those churches are in the Kremlin, and many of their icons date back to the 14th century. This is all very interesting, but after five cathedrals full of them, we were quite tired of looking at icons.
‘Ivan The Great’ Bell Tower
Some nice wrought iron, and a cathedral
Lovely painted detail on this door
It isn’t all cathedrals, here’s the garden
We did try to get into the Armoury even without a ticket, but were politely turned away, so after a snack and a drink in the rather lovely gardens, we headed back out into the big city. We needed to buy some supplies before boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway.
The Moscow State Historical Museum, just outside the Kremlin walls
Waiting at the Aeroflot terminal in Riga, Latvia, we were becoming increasingly amused by the antics of a backpacker at the next gate. Two pretty girls were waiting to board the plane to Tashkent in Kazakhstan. It seemed that the young man had befriended them, and had suddenly bought a ticket to join them on their plane. It is technically possible to travel without a visa in the Baltic states if you have a letter of invitation from a local hotel or tour operator, but clearly he didn’t have one. I imagine that it would be possible to sort this out, perhaps by quietly greasing the wheels of commerce, but he wasn’t getting very far by declaiming wildly, “I don’t need a visa, because I am French!”
We had both visas and letters, so we left him to it and boarded our plane to Moscow. On our arrival, we emerged into the scrum of sign-wielding drivers and suddenly realised that we couldn’t be sure to recognise our name in Cyrillic. Eventually we established that none of them were waiting for us, but then a late arrival came hurrying up with a board carrying our names in Latin script.
Our transport wasn’t exactly a limo, in fact we climbed up into the front of a delivery van full of crates of vegetables. Several things immediately became clear. Firstly, there was something seriously wrong with the transmission, resulting in a serious rumbling vibration at speed. Secondly, we heard the rumble all the time because our driver went completely flat-out, treating all other traffic like obstacles in a video game, passing on one side or the other and using all of the available road, including both hard shoulders, exit ramps and lane dividers. We looked in vain for seat belts as the driver squeezed the big truck into spaces that wouldn’t accommodate a motorcycle.
The other drivers apparently regarded this behaviour with complete equanimity, without a hint of squealing tyres or honking horns. However, I only saw one other vehicle driving in a similar manner, and that was a taxi that incredibly managed to weave in front of us on one of the hard shoulders.
Eventually we arrived at a securely guarded gate and were decanted, shaken but not stirred, into the guarded lobby of our hotel, complete with security turn-styles. Our room was pleasant enough, though, with views out over Moscow’s iconic red and white chimneys.
The chimneys of Moscow
It was clearly time for a beer. The hotel’s barman seemed a bit surly at first, but thawed a little when we all had a laugh at a 10-year old Chinese boy who came in to try to buy beer ‘for his brother’. Later in the evening, we discovered that the barman works 12 hour shifts every night from 9pm, so he was just a bit tired.
We were feeling a little jet-lagged ourselves next morning, but soon perked up after a pleasant breakfast before meeting our guide, Diane. She showed us how to use the metro (28 roubles to anywhere), and the three of us descended to the Green line, which was built during Moscow’s second wave of metro building, when Stalin declared that money was no object and that it had to be the best subway in the world. He got what he wanted; stations from this era are an amazing confection of echoing marble halls with high vaulted ceilings.
Eat your heart out, London Transport! Stalin’s Metro.
Three stops later, we were in the heart of the theatre district, with its impressive collection of building in styles ranging from Classical to Romantic, and Soviet in the form of the former KGB headquarters.
The heart of the theatre district
As we walked, Diane talked about growing up in Soviet communal housing, with three to five families sharing a kitchen and bathroom. She was ambivalent about perestroika, when each family was assigned a new flat just for themselves, which was theirs to own and do what they want with. Although she could see that this put Russians on the same footing as other Europeans, she mourned the loss of the social aspect of shared housing, where everybody looked after one another. This concept of universal flat ownership kick-started the fledgling capitalist economy, and the city has a feeling of general wealth and integration. The city is clean and well-kept, and the populace seemed dynamic and well-off, particularly the women wearing expensive and sexy European fashions. We looked for echoes of the Soviet era but only noticed the security guards in booths on every escalator, and the very large number of workers that seemed to be necessary to perform the more menial jobs.
This enormous building is for training cavalry indoorsThe Pashkov House, originally built for a wealthy landowner
Some of the buildings that we’ve see, such as the lovely little pink and white cathedral on Red Square, are recent copies of historic buildings that were blown up in the Soviet era to make way for more suitable projects. There is a heart-breaking photograph of the fabulous Cathedral of Christ the Saviour being demolished to make way for a half-kilometre high brutalist memorial topped by an eighty-metre statue of Stalin. While the deep foundations were being dug, war broke out and work was halted. The hole was used as a swimming pool until finally a copy of the original cathedral was built by public subscription.
The monument’s foundations were so deep that the architects added a second underground cathedral beneath the first, and then Moscow’s first underground car park beneath that.
Both cathedrals are liberally gilded inside and intricately decorated. Being Orthodox, there are no pews or seats inside, and the walls are ringed with icons. These are paintings of saints that are venerated, prostrated before, and kissed in the hope that the saint will mediate between you and god. Quite a few shawled elderly women were energetically throwing themselves at the feet of, and kissing, every saint in the enormous space. Cleaning these paintings must be a long job.
Cathedral of Christ the Saviour
Ministry of Foreign Affairs (one of Stalin’s Seven)
Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building, another of Stalin’s Seven Skyscrapers
We said goodbye to Diane, ate a great lunch at a nearby Italian restaurant, and then went in search of the cheap river ferry that plies up and down the Moskva as part of the cheap Metro network. We couldn’t find the ferry, but instead a man in a naval uniform sold us a ticket on a tourist boat that cost ten times as much. We had no idea where the boat went, but it turned out to be a great way to see Moscow, and as a bonus it also had a small bar.
On a tourist boat on the Moscow River
Once past the astonishing memorial to Peter the Great’s inauguration of the Russian navy, we passed blocks and blocks of Soviet-era communal housing, including one ‘luxury’ building (only one family per apartment) that had been built specifically to house artists and writers, who could then easily be spirited away in the night by the KGB. Diane had told us that if you saw your neighbours’ lights on after midnight, then you knew that you would never see them again.
Monument to the launch of Peter the Great’s navySlightly unexpected, a Buran space shuttle in Gorky Park
Interesting cooling towers on the GUGN
Universitet Gumanitarnykh Nauk (GUGN)
We still didn’t know where we were going, but all the other passengers disembarked at Kiev Metro station so we did the same and had an easy ride back to the hotel.
Apartment block near Kiev Metro
After a short nap, we headed out to a nearby Lebanese restaurant and dined on charcoal-grilled meat with pickled vegetables, washed down with Armenian wine, finishing up with a nice fruity shisha.
Ending the day with a perfect mohito and shisha
As everywhere in Moscow, the service was friendly and attentive and we had a great time, eventually stumbling back to the hotel in the small wee hours, ready for the next day’s sight-seeing. Tomorrow we were heading for the Kremlin.
Having recently purchased a pair of Brompton folding bicycles, we thought that we’d take them to Bordeaux, so we fairly randomly booked in to a guesthouse, 123 Chemin du Bord de l’Eau in Macau, just down the road from St Emilion and Margaux. The owners were away when we arrived, although their gardener let us in and made us comfortable, so we set off in the evening to find something to eat. It is the off season, so every business in Macau is closed, apart from the pizza shop.
Stephan the pastry chef had a good laugh when we told him about my wheat allergy, because he only cooks pizza and bread. However, he worked out a neat compromise by baking a pizza with a cream sauce instead of tomato. That way I could pick off the correctly cooked toppings without getting them contaminated with the bread crust. Brilliant! And naturally, we washed it down with a nice bottle of Bordeaux.
Stephan and his solution to gluten-free pizza, after I’d finished eating it.
The next morning we cycled out to nearby Margaux in search of an open vineyard.
Brompton in Margaux
An illuminated cafe ceiling in Margaux
Most vineyards were closed for the off season, but we did come across Chateau Dauzac, where the wonderfully welcoming staff were dumbfounded to see tourists so far out of season, but gave us a great tour and wine tasting.
You’ll notice that the vines aren’t green, so it’s probably winter.
On our return, the owner was back, the incomparable Serge: Ex-restaurateur, ex-wine maker, now hotelier, chef and artist. We all got on well and Serge announced that he would cook dinner for us, producing awesome quantities of foie gras both au naturel and lightly fried in duck fat, also figs grilled with goat’s cheese, and endless superb rich dishes washed down with lashings of wine. He even invited us to share a bottle of his very own St Emilion wine, which is no longer in production but quite lovely. We had not initially intended to stay another night, but changed our minds and agreed to return after visiting St Emilion.
The town of St Emilion is beautiful. We did bring our bicycles with us, but after one look at the steep cobbled streets, we decided to explore on foot. Previously a fortified town, St Emilion stands on a rocky outcrop overlooking its vineyards. I would imagine that it is probably crammed with tourists in the summer, but on this January weekend it is empty.
Nobody here but us chickens
Closed for business
The fifth century church is a marvel, with its domed ceilings and extensive gothic extensions.
Door to St Emilion’s church
The domed ceiling of the interior
From a local shop, Bronwyn obtained the key to the clock tower (Closter), to give us unrivalled views of the town.
The clock tower
Bronwyn has the key
St Emilion from the clock tower
St Emilion through stained glass
Before leaving St Emilion, Serge had arranged for us to visit another vineyard, Chateau Figeac, where we and some visiting Italians were given a good-humoured tour by an impressively multilingual guide.
More barrels than you can shake a stick at, at Chateau Figeac
Back at the house, Serge excelled himself, and co-opting Bronwyn as a willing sous-chef, produced a marvellous tuna savichi, followed by langoustines and a stupendous magret du canard. To top it all off, Serge produced his own creation Framboise Tchekhov, a marvellous dish of strawberries in a caramelised sauce.
Go team Serge!
Bronwyn tackles magret du canard
Delicious. Just perfect.
On the next morning, resisting the temptation to stay for the rest of the year, we packed up the bikes, and – promising to return – headed for the Pyrenees.
The train from Oslo to Bergen is famed for being one of the most picturesque journeys in the world. The train stops often on its way up into the mountains, picking up passengers from the outlying regions of Oslo, and then settles in for the long and beautiful haul along the granite spine to the coast. I have done the trip before, and wanted to show it to Bronwyn, as it seemed like a great way to celebrate our wedding anniversary. However, this is the electronic age, and half the passengers in our carriage closed their window shades to concentrate on their laptops instead of looking out of the window. The two guys closest to us carefully occluded half of our view by closing their blind, and then packed up their computers and went to the buffet car, possibly to drink beer and watch the scenery go by, leaving the rest of us in the dark. It took some judicious seat-hopping, and a certain amount of hanging out of the door windows, to appreciate our journey.
On the lower slopes, hay fields scattered with occasional wooden cabins were punctuated by tiny villages and towns clustered along rivers, each community widely separated from the others but always painted bright colours, usually red or yellow.
Stunning views from the Oslo-Bergen train
After several hours of climbing, we attained the snow-line. Here again there were scattered cabins, but between and among them was nothing but scattered and shattered rocks, with only the occasional bowl of summer snow. Presumably these places are unusable outside of the winter months. The few towns are given over to skiing, but in November they were not yet open for business, although the pistes were being mown in preparation.
Shattered landscape above the snow line
Impressive melt-water waterfalls sprang from the dark granite as the train plunged through tunnel after tunnel, some bored through solid rock and others constructed from sturdy timber as a defence against avalanches. Melt-water lakes, some already re-frozen, sat amid a lunar landscape. Very beautiful.
Finally we arrived at our destination, Myrdal, at the top of the world, where the famous Flåmsbana train waited to take us down to sea level. Privately run, this is the steepest non-cog train in the world, dropping 864 metres in 20 kilometres of beautiful switchbacks.
Myrdal
All aboard the Flåmsbana!
The genial conductor pointed out some of the finer views, and suggested that if we moved to the disabled compartment, there was a window that could be opened for a better view without exposing the other passengers to the 6 degrees outside. As we dropped into the first incline, we caught a glimpse of the Rallarvega, the mountain trail from Myrdal to Flåm which we intended to walk later in the week. About half way down the valley, the train stopped for a few minutes so that we could get out and admire the thundering Kjosfossen waterfall.
Rallarvega
Kjosfossen
As the track flattened out into the valley above the fjord, we descended into cloud, and when we emerged from the bottom it was dusk. The tiny but beautifully formed town of Flåm spread out before us, and we stepped out of the train onto the quayside.
The building in the middle is the Marina Apartments, where we stayed
Eating in Flåm
We moved into a lovely little apartment overlooking the fjord. We’d felt lucky to get the apartment at all because both of Flåm’s hotels had said that they were full, only their most expensive suites were available, but in the event it turned out that they were actually empty and running on skeleton staff for the off-season. It was the same story with the restaurants. The receptionist at the Fretheim needed to see our reservation, so we tried the other restaurant in town. There was nobody there until we tried the kitchen where we found a surprised waiter chatting to his girlfriend, but we dined very pleasantly on catfish in black butter sauce. On another evening we made a reservation at the Fretheim, to find of course that we were the only diners, although the salmon tartare and venison in red wine were delicious. Both restaurants were operating on a two-dish menu which would not change for the off-season, so we were doubly glad that we had a fully equipped kitchen in the apartment.
Pink champagne on our balcony. It was cold, OK?
We never tired of the ever-changing view from our apartment
Flåm and Old Flåm, looking back after climbing up to Bekefoss
A cruise down Naeroyfjord
One morning, we took the local bus to Gudvangen, involving a 5km tunnel to the top of the pass and then an 11km tunnel back down to sea level, in order to catch the ferry back to Flåm. The point of this was to see the Naeroyfjord, designated a World Heritage Site because of the unspoiled beauty of its fjord terrain. We were very lucky that the sun had boiled off the cloud layer and although it was very cold, we sailed under a clear blue sky. The scenery was breathtaking, not least because of the crystal clear reflections of the mountains in the water, disturbed into surreal shapes by the waves of our passage.
Naeroyfjord reflections
Distorted Naeroyfjord reflections
Disturbed by our wake
A passage in Naeroyfjord
Undredal
Aurland
Before the mast
Hiking from Myrdal to Flåm
One morning we took the Flåmsbana back up to Myrdal, so that we could walk back down again. There is a trail, the Rallarvega, which was originally built by the navvies who were building the railway, but which is now mainly used as a precipitous mountain-bike trail. Years ago, while back-packing in this area, I had hiked down this trail and still remembered the experience with fondness and awe, so I was keen to introduce Bronwyn to the experience.
The main line to Bergen goes right, the Flåmsbana goes left (and down…)
Myrdal, at the top of the Rallarvega
The Rallarvega starts its downward plunge
Bronwyn and waterfall
Reinhard and waterfall
The views are fantastic, and the sheer scale of the vertical cliff faces that tower above is enough to make you feel utterly insignificant and so very privileged to be there, crawling like an ant down the face of the glacial valley.
Photos can’t do justice to this wonderful place
At the bottom of the gravel track, the Rallarvega becomes a formed road and winds along the valley floor. Occasional farms dot the landscape, but at all times the heart-breakingly sheer mountains tower above, punctuated by endless waterfalls. By each fall, some early settler has evidently built a house to take advantage not only of the water, but also of the view.
Emerging from a tunnel
John Martin painting (without the damnation)
Commuting from this Flåmbana train station would not be such a hardship
After almost 20 kilometres, we came abreast of Old Flåm, where we paused to admire the neat little church and its gravestones with their tale of a few families with familiar names (Flåm, Fretheim) spread over hundreds of years. Like the landscape, the social scene changes only slowly.
Arrival at old Flåm
Aegir Brewery
There is a brew pub in Flåm, but for most of our stay it had remained firmly closed. Over our stay I had managed to drink several of their products at different restaurants and hotels, particularly their stunning Imperial Stout. Norwegian alcohol prices are notoriously savage due to heavy taxation, but at NOK 185 (about GBP 18) for a bottle, I reckoned that this was probably the most expensive beer that I had ever drunk.
And then one day, the brewery doors were open, to reveal a bar modelled on a Viking longhouse, with carved wood and reindeer pelts and a large fire.
Bronwyn at the Aegir Brewery
After a few pints of the excellent stout, I got chatting to the brewer, Evan. It turned out that he had taken a batch of the stout that I was drinking, and then matured it in oak whisky barrels to make what he called ‘Lynchburg’. This was so good that, in an attempt to prevent it from being all drunk at once, he had almost doubled the price to NOK 340, or GBP 34 a bottle. This did not prevent a visiting American from buying the entire stock. Luckily for me, Evan had kept a case back for himself, and I was able to buy one, now definitely and without doubt the most expensive beer that I have ever drunk. It was worth every Krøne.
Travelling light as usual, we arrived at Oslo airport with only cabin baggage, booked an express train from an automated ticket machine, and after a clean and fast trip emerged blinking into the Autumn sunlight. The friendly Hotel Thon was easy to find, and we were given a room on the second floor with a balcony fully fifty feet long and twenty feet wide.
A lion was waiting at Oslo station
Enormous balcony at the Hotel Thon
Close to the station is the Aker Brugge, an area packed with restaurants, all with busy outside areas, everybody chatting and drinking and eating. Many of the seats were draped with sheep fleeces, and at other restaurants the waiters handed out blankets as you arrived, so that despite the ten degree chill, short sleeves and mini-skirts were not uncommon.
Outside dining, Oslo style
We chose to eat inside a cosy Italian restaurant, where the drinks were the typical Scandinavian triple the English price, but the service was friendly and the food was excellent. Eventually we ambled out into the last hours of light, intending to get a quick nap at the hotel before going out on the town.
The Radhuis
On the way back, we passed an enormous brick building that looked like a power station but which turned out to be the Radhuis or town hall. We stopped to admire some friezes along the outside walls, carved wooden scenes from Viking mythology, and then suddenly realised that the building was still open to visitors.
Oslo Radhuis
We went inside and found ourselves in an enormous space, not dissimilar to the turbine hall at the Tate Modern in London, but painted throughout with allegorical wall friezes not only there, but also in a chain of spectacular rooms that led around the second storey.
Wooden carvings outside Oslo Radhuis
The inside of one of the Radhuis rooms
The main hall of Oslo Radhuis
The paintings were in the style of 50s communism, all square jaws and bold colours, with heavy emphasis on agriculture and industry. However, each frieze told a story, and that story was often a complex mixture of mythology and the recent German occupation, mythical figures juxtaposed with prisoners in concentration camps. The bear of Norway baring its teeth at uniformed trolls as they tear the clothes from the newly released princess. Very stark and very effective.
A rather jingoistic frieze in the main hall
It was evening when we finally tore ourselves away, and continued to our hotel for that nap. Our alarm went off later that night, but we were happy to ignore it and sleep through for the next twelve hours. After all, we were on holiday.
Frogner Park (Vigeland Park)
The following morning, after a breakfast of coffee and herrings, we headed out to the glorious Frogner Park, which has long been one of my favourite places in Europe. This entire green space is given over to the works of Gustav Vigeland, who designed and built the whole thing over a ten year period. The weather had been a bit glooomy, but the sun came out and glowed from the carpet of yellow maple leaves underfoot, as we joined the hundreds of tourists enjoying several hundred works of art spread over almost a kilometre.
The view back across the bridge from the central plaza.
I love these guys! Cocky son.
Another beautiful study
Once you leave the bridge of bronze sculptures, you climb up to the centrepiece of granite pieces.
Eventually you realise that he’s not kicking them, he’s trying to save his falling children.
The ages of man, the dead at the bottom supporting the youngest on top.
The Oslo Museum is situated in Frogner park. We watched a very clever and entertaining film called “1000 years of Oslo”, which was put together in an amusing way from shots of museum exhibits and paintings. It covered exciting periods of boom and bust, wealth and poverty, and then skipped suddenly from the 1920s to the present day, missing the occupation and holocaust. The actual museum did much the same thing, with a display for every period of settlement since the Vikings except for the World Wars. The Norwegians had an ugly war.
On our final evening, we headed up to the Grünerløkke district, which is famous for its local bars and cafes. We were not disappointed, there were establishments of every style and ethnicity. We stopped at a few for glasses of wine and snacks, and were pleased to find that – presumably because of the vastly over-taxed prices – each small glass of wine was checked and re-checked and treated with a great deal of respect.
At one bar the owner suggested that we try a soup made from lamb, cabbage and potatoes. It was very good, and we were told that in traditional bars it is made available as a cheap dish for the benefit of heavy drinkers. I did have trouble getting my head around the idea that anybody who can afford to be a heavy drinker in Scandinavia might need cheap food, but the concept is still admirable. At another bar I scored a beautiful lightly poached whole trout with leeks and a cauliflower sauce. They certainly know how to keep their patrons happy in Oslo.
In order to break up yet another long-haul flight, we decided to hang out in Hong Kong for a few days. After a shaky start (I dropped my laptop in the arrivals hall, completely smashing the screen), we found a hotel shuttle bus and headed out into the city. My first impression was that it felt a bit like Hawaii, which puzzled me until I realised that the similarity lay in the combination of the familiar – the road signs, the cars, the engineering – with the exotic – the Hanzi characters, the huge towers of tiny apartments, the great luxury of the transfer bus that we were in.
Our hotel, the Cosmo in Kow Loon, was a tower of some 20+ storeys crammed with tiny little glass-walled boxes. There is room for a small but comfy bed and a little shower/sink/toilet area walled off with glass. Every surface is mirrored to give the illusion of space, and the outside wall is entirely glass, giving a stunning vista across Mong Kok, the most densely populated area in the world.
Cosmo Hotel in Kow Loon
Cosmo Hotel in Kow Loon
The rooftops of Mong Kok
Given that Mong Kok is also famous for its shopping, we dropped in to a dealer to buy a new laptop, and then left them transferring my files while we headed off to explore.
Hong Kong trams are lovely, like skinny London buses with open windows, nice and breezy when they’re not crowded. We took trams all the way down to Causeway Bay, and then all the way back across town to the Peak, content to just sit and watch the world scurry by.
Tram to Happy Valley
Advertising
Bamboo scaffolding
Central Hong Kong
Laundry day
We grabbed lunch at a local Chinese eatery, where the waiter was very obliging after he got over his fear that we didn’t know what we were doing. Then we began the long climb up to the cable car station for The Peak.
Waiting for the Peak Tram
The last time Bronwyn had been here, there was a viewing platform at the top, but now there was an enormous mall and even a Madame Tussauds, with escalators leading up to restaurants and to the new ‘Sky Tower’. The views from the top were very impressive.
Escalators up to the mall
Smile!
Looking out from the Peak
To complete our view of the city, we randomly chose a ferry in the harbour to find out what it looked like at sea-level.
Hong Kong from the water
Nathan Lane is Kow Loon’s major shopping strip. We went out looking for shoe shops and tailors, but after a couple of hours of fighting off tailor-pimps and wristwatch-pimps in the street, we took refuge in a bar and drank margaritas instead. When we emerged, the bright lights were shining, and we decided that the best vantage point to enjoy them would be across the river in a steak house on the roof of a hotel, where we could order a ‘side dish’ of an Alaskan crab leg to go with our steak.
Following a particularly stressful work contract, we felt in dire need of a rest. There are few better places to regain your soul than an island in the South Pacific, so we rented a beach hut in Fiji.
A beach bure in Fiji
Yatule Beach Resort
Our little hut (bure) did not come cheap, but on our first morning we lay in bed and listened to the surf thundering outside, and began to feel the first vestiges of peace. Our window looked out across the bay to the fringing reef. As far as we could tell, we were the only guests in this little cluster of huts, but staff were already sweeping the famous Natadola Beach of flotsam from the night’s tide, ready for our first dip of the day.
Start the day with a cold beer
Apart from a handful of bure, the Yatule Beach Resort has a simple bar and an even simpler restaurant, really just a cafe. After trying out a few of the local beers in the bar, I decided to try the local rum, Bounty, which had been recommended by our taxi driver as the best cure for my persistent cough. The suggested mixer was coke, but that just makes all rum taste the same, so I asked if they had any sugar cane syrup, a traditional mixer in many rum-producing countries. They didn’t, so Bronwyn suggested that coconut juice might be a nice compromise, but this threw the staff into consternation and they went into a huddle behind the bar. Finally after some close deliberation the waiter returned, all smiles, to say that rum and coconut juice was available, and would only be a moment.
Seconds later, the barman left the building at a run and returned, panga in hand, with a freshly dressed coconut the size of my head containing not only coconut juice but also ice, a straw, and enough rum to fell a camel.
The perfect rum mixer
The Intercontinental
A few hundred metres along Natadola beach is the Intercontinental, which bills itself as “seven star”. We weren’t sure what that was supposed to mean, so we resolved to find out. On our first foray there one evening, we discovered that all the bars and restaurants had already closed. On the following evening we popped over a bit earlier to find both “cocktail happy hour” and “local cultural entertainment” in full swing. As usual, you’re never really certain how much genuine culture goes into these shows, but the participants were certainly having fun and were keeping the Intercontinental guests enthralled.
For my part, I was more fascinated by the onlookers themselves. The Intercontinental has exorbitant room rates, and we were curious to see what kind of people stayed there. We’d dressed up a bit in case we needed to fit in with ball-gowns and tiaras, but instead found ourselves surrounded by English families in sports clothes and sun-dresses. Innumerable face-painted children were being chased around by cheerful hotel nannies, and seven-year old kids were running around recording the chaos laden with high-end camera equipment.
The staff were reasonably attentive but the cocktails were poorly thought out, and the wine menu was very interesting. At one end of the range they had Veuve Cliquot, and at the other they had Gossips, which is infamous in Australia for being the absolute cheapest red plonk that you can buy in a bottle, retailing for about $3. It is all but undrinkable, and was available at the Intercontinental for $30.
When the guests all vanished into the dining room, we briefly considered joining them, and then slipped back down the beach to our quiet little bar instead. We did however return on another occasion to try out the Intercontinental’s “fine dining” restaurant, which was quite the experience. All the ingredients were on spectacular display on a mound of ice, including some amazing striped rock-lobsters that we just had to sample, preceded by sashimi, sushi and bouillabaisse. The service was exemplary, the food wonderful, and the bill enormous, coming in at around $700 for the two of us.
The Natadole
In marked contrast, on another occasion we wandered over to a small hotel complex called The Natadole, comprising a small network of rooms interconnected by a series of walls and openings which promoted a gentle cooling breeze. We ate several excellent meals of similar quality to the Intercontinental but much cheaper and friendlier. The Natadole only has a handful of bure and they don’t accept guests under the age of 16, so it has a completely different ambience. In Fiji the food portion sizes are always rather small and the drink measures rather large, so the manager Tonga always sent us away reeling and happy.
Riding on Natadola beach
Island Time Slowly we began to unwind. It doesn’t take long in the South Pacific. Sitting in our bure after a gentle swim in the ocean and a leisurely breakfast of fried eggs, rice and papaya, washed down with coffee, we idly watched people work outside our verandah.
The hotel staff had dug an enormous hole in the sand above the tide line, and were emptying into it wheelbarrow-loads of littoral debris that had washed in overnight. Some really big stuff came in each day on the tide, and out in the water we also found ourselves sharing our swim with very large fish, possibly even some kind of tuna, as well as the occasional log or fallen tree.
I love watching people work
Away from the beach
Obviously the whole Natadola beach area, while on the face of it beautiful and idyllic, is a managed environment for tourists. Chatting to the staff at various resorts, we’d found that they all live in a village at the end of the beach, so we set out to have a look. This entailed following an old railway line through the woods and over into the next bay, accompanied by cheerful staff commuting between shifts, and a large number of goats.
Eventually we arrived at the village
We finally arrived at the village, which consisted of simple buildings built largely from corrugated iron, most with a single fluorescent tube lighting the doorway. Kids and chickens played in the dust, and adults on well-groomed horses peddled optimistically for rides while elders sat in the shade, selling piles of oranges.
At first we couldn’t understand why, even here, there was a fledgling tourist industry. Surely not too many tourists came through this way? All became clear when we emerged from the other side of the village and onto the Natadola Bay golf course, the local attraction which the Intercontinental was built to service. We had passed an old sugar-cane train parked on the tracks, perhaps in other seasons it runs to the village and guests can then walk or ride to the golf course.
Sugar cane train
Out on the first tee, a smart security guard in a booth politely but firmly asked where we were going and where we were staying. He then waved us cheerfully through, but we ran into these guards everywhere, apparently ringing the entire beach and golf course. Ostensibly they were there to protect the guests from theft, but I suspect that they were really intended to prevent locals from using the facilities (perhaps unless they looked sufficiently colourful). At any rate, nobody was playing golf that day, so we had the place to ourselves.
The Natadola Bay golf course
Somebody had left a sculpture of me on the fairway
On a random motorcycle camping perambulation around the Australian state of Victoria, we noticed the town of St Arnaud on the map. Years before, we used to drink a very nice wheat beer called St Cloud from the St Arnou Brewery, so on a whim and on the barest similarity of names we decided to make that our next stop.
A rest-stop in the Victorian Grampians
On arrival, the town showed great promise, with sturdy gold-rush era buildings lining a prosperous-looking high street, including three large hotels. Wonder of wonders, there was even a camp site in the centre of town nestled up against the race track.
The camp site managers didn’t know of any brewery, which didn’t greatly surprise us as there was no real reason to think that St Arnaud was any relation to St Arnou, but they vaguely suggested that we might try the sports club up the hill. Sports clubs are not renowned for their real ale, so after quickly pitching camp we ignored their advice and headed for the town centre.
The town was strangely quiet, in fact we seemed to be the only living things apart from the locusts. Maybe everybody was already at the pub? We headed for the nearest one, which proved to be not only closed, but apparently closed down. Still, with the impressive Commonwealth Hotel only a few metres away, competition was presumably fierce. Arriving at the door of the Commonwealth, we found a sign saying ‘premises for lease’. We back-tracked to the third pub, but this too was closed and boarded up from the inside. We looked up and down the empty street. Where was everybody?
St Arnaud
We ambled back to the camp site, and recalled the sports bar ‘up the hill’. The indicated trail took us to a harness-racing track, nicely maintained with a central cricket oval, but devoid of life apart from a couple of kids in the distance playing in the nets. On the other side of the track was a building that looked very much like a bar, but it was still as a grave. Nevertheless, we thought that we could see the edge of a parked car sticking out from behind it, so we began to make our way around the race course. The air was full of locusts, and snakes slithered into the undergrowth from the rotting advertising panels underfoot.
We made it round unscathed, and were heartened to find an open door with a registration book for out-of-state visitors, a sight familiar in any of the innumerable gambling-funded drinking clubs across the continent. Signing ourselves in, we made our way past the usual sad array of motionless relicts that are always to be found slumped in front of the slot machines, and found the bar. It was, predictably, empty, and did not serve any ale. There was however a barman and a wine list, so we ordered a bottle and sat by the window. We felt that the sun had already well and truly set on St Arnou, but we sat and watched it go down once again.
Since we were the only customers, we got a fair bit of attention from the barman. Can I get you some food? Some more wine? Some more water? A toasted sandwich? However, he didn’t know anything about a town brewery.
When, suitably sozzled, we finally left to stroll back to the camp site, the barman rather bizarrely warned us not to cross the oval or we’d get “attacked by kangaroos”, and could he call us a taxi? When we reminded him that we were naturalised Australians and that killer kangaroos were quite low on our worry list, he meekly led us to the steps down to the oval and bade us good night.
(For the record, the real St Arnou is 1000 km away in the Hunter Valley)
We were in Kuala Lumpur and were talking about staying on a resort for the last few days of our round-the-world trip, not a type of holiday that we would usually choose, but we were exhausted from the daily changes and felt the need to sit still for a while.
We recalled that a friend had once mentioned the luxury Malaysian island of Langkawi, so without more ado we found ourselves aboard Firefly, a budget airline with a cabin baggage limit so tiny that even our little day sacks had to go in the hold.
Following a quick straw poll of online reviews, we chose the Andaman Resort for pure hedonistic luxury. We did initially plan to visit some other parts of the island, but since the resort was set in acres of thick rainforest in a beautiful sandy bay, we never got up the enthusiasm to leave. We happily spent twelve hours of each night in blissful sleep and the other twelve ambling around on the beach, relaxing by the pool with a book, or enjoying the restaurants and bars scattered throughout the grounds.
Enjoying some freshly prepared Japanese fish
It was monsoon season, bringing daily rain without affecting the steady tropical warmth. Generally we ignored it, but one night as we sat in the beach bar the staff began setting up for a beach wedding. It seemed a curious choice by the Australian couple because regular squalls were rolling in from the Malacca Strait, and although the wedding was clearly timed to coincide with sunset, the darkening sky was already obscured by scudding clouds.
There’s a storm coming
Together with the other bar patrons, we sat with our feet in the warm sand, drinks in hand and protected by a wide-brimmed thatched roof, as we watched the hotel staff struggling to decorate chairs with wind-whipped pandanus leaves. The sound crew were attempting to wrap their gear in plastic bags to protect it from the driving rain, and we wondered why the wedding didn’t simply move to the beautiful little-used marble staircase at one side of the hotel’s immense lobby, which had ample seating and breathtaking views of the storm across the bay.
The awe-inspiring lobby of the Andaman
Nevertheless, the group stubbornly stuck to the program: A wedding on the beach is what they were determined to have.
About an hour after a cloud-enshrouded sunset, after a monsoon squall had drenched the assembled guests despite the hastily dispersed sun umbrellas, the bride and bridesmaids finally made their entrance from where they had been sheltering under a tree. The photographer was having a hard time with the premature dark of the looming thunder clouds, and all the bridesmaids got bunched up while he snapped them, leaving the bride stuck at the back of the queue and standing rather uncomfortably among the amused patrons of the beach bar.
The maid of honour came tearing up the path, shouting for the music to start. The sound crew twiddled knobs and pressed switches, but the soaking equipment produced nothing apart from a little scratchy feedback.
The bridal party finally made it to the front, where the celebrant discovered that his microphone wasn’t working. He put it down and began the ceremony without it, his words and the couples’ responses blown away by the incoming squall and drowned out by the crashing surf only metres from their feet.
The groom looked stunned. The bride looked furious. The maid-of-honour looked incandescent. The squall hit full force, all the umbrellas turned inside out, and night cast a blessed shroud on the proceedings.
Warm and dry in our reed-roofed bar, we all turned back to our drinks.
Our train pulled in to Butterworth station. Having done no research at all, we vaguely hoped that there might be a hotel nearby, but there didn’t seem to be anything close apart from a dental college. However, we did see a sign pointing to a ferry to Georgetown, so we strolled down to the quay and soon found ourselves in possession of two tickets for the grand price of R1.20, or about forty cents. There was no boat and no obvious timetable, but there were local people sitting about so we settled down to wait.
After not more than twenty minutes, a ferry arrived, so we boarded and sailed off across the calm waters of the Penang Strait. In the distance we could see a cruise ship pulling out of Georgetown. Small dhows behind us on Butterworth beach were festooned with red flashing LED lights in addition to their regular navigation lights, and this combined with a plethora of shore lights must make the otherwise dark Strait quite tricky to navigate. However our little ferry made it to Georgetown in just over quarter of an hour without any problems, and we disembarked. Randomly choosing a road to walk up, we skipped a number of rather dodgy looking hostels until we found a pretty little hotel set back from the street. It was absolutely beautiful inside, and only $75 a night, a little pricey for Malaysia but dirt cheap for us.
Mosaic over the door arch at the Yeng Keng hotel
It was late at night, but we’d seen many hawker food stalls on the way up, and the receptionist recommended The Red Garden around the corner. This turned out to be a large courtyard ringed by hawker food stalls, very busy with locals and tourists alike. In the centre was a dance floor and locals salsas, two-stepped and square-danced to a couple singing rock and roll and country tunes. Everybody was having a grand time.
Dancing at the Red Garden open air market
We chose an eclectic selection of foods including smoked mackerel, tuna sashimi, and some really excellent succulent tempura fish sticks which were described as ‘white tuna’. The only slight irritation were the beer vendors who turned up endlessly as soon as you’d taken a sip from your glass to top it up from the bottle on the table.
Hawker food stalls at the Red
Some time after midnight the party was still in full swing, but – unusually – we exercised restraint and headed to bed.
The next morning, we enjoyed ourselves doing tourist stuff in Georgetown. It’s an old colonial town with somewhat faded buildings, but the covered walkways bustle with vibrant activity. We enjoyed just strolling around and poking around, deciding that it reminded us a bit of Montevideo. We hunted down a particular bakery that makes only straight finger-like doughnuts, a local delicacy.
Roadside doughnut bakery
Deep-fried doughnut sticks
Typical covered walkways over the storm drains
Pausing to photograph a mosque, we were invited inside by a man who had been charged with spreading the word to non-muslims. Inside the mosque, we donned black cloaks to cover our western nakedness and had an interesting tour, not something that you get to see every day, particularly because Bronwyn was visiting the men’s section. Our guide grumbled a bit through his one remaining tooth, because he didn’t really approve of what he was doing, but since the government had declared his mosque to be a heritage site, he had a mandate to invite tourists.
Mosque
Minaret of the Georgetown mosque
The door of a Georgetown temple
We also checked out the unapologetically colonial area around Penang Station, now a Customs house but locally famous as the only station never to have a railway pass through it.
Penang Railway Station (spot the train)
Georgetown clock tower
The monsoon started and we grabbed a taxi back to the hotel, where after a refreshing nap we discovered that the bar was doing a buy-five get-two-free deal. We polished off the requisite number of drinks just as the rain stopped, by which time we were not only a bit squiffy but ravenously hungry. I wanted to try the Old House Restaurant which we had seen on our morning perambulations, and I was ever so glad that we did because every dish was divine, especially my ‘Hong Kong steamed fish’ which was some kind of coral angel fish and was as sweet and tender as anything I’ve eaten.
Mmmm angel fish
The following morning we had booked several hours at a Malaysian cooking class in the Tropical Spice Garden, a botanical gardens devoted to the spice trade. We knew that we could catch the 101 bus from Georgetown and that our stop would arrive in about three quarters of an hour, but we had no idea about the geographical location of the gardens. Penang is not a very big island so we soon found ourselves on a road that twisted and climbed up and around the shoreline, past endless beaches, fishing dhows, and turtles. In the end, our stop was obvious and well signposted, but of course the friendly driver gave us a wave when we got there anyway.
Penang’s Tropical Spice Garden
Cloves, cinnamon, cardamom and star anise
After a guided tour through some of the species that we would be using, we were introduced to our teacher, Nazlina, who soon had us grinding spices and emptying coconuts using ancient traditional methods. Our aim was to make Nasi Goreng, which involves coconut rice, fried anchovies, boiled egg, sambal and cucumber wrapped up into a pyramid of banana leaf.
Bronwyn crushes chilis with a stone maul
Scrapers for removing the flesh from coconuts
It was great fun, and the four of us in the group took turns to take the meat out of the coconut, smoke the banana leaves to make them flexible, and grind the sambal paste from garlic, galangal, ginger, onion, lemon grass, red chilis and fish meal.
Naza explains
The sous-chef takes command
Eventually we put all the parts together, with some accidents, into neat pyramidal parcels before settling down to lunch with some beef sambal that we’d knocked up on the side. The perfect end to a perfect morning.
Our new friend Gretchen finds that rolling those leaves is not as easy as it appears!
We arrived at Malaysia’s LCCT airport late on a Sunday evening with no luggage, no hotel reservations, and a pocket full of Ringits. Uncharacteristically we had done no research and were just going to play the next two weeks by ear.
The lady at the airport information desk suggested that we catch the No. 6 bus to a nearby station, where we could catch a train into Kuala Lumpur. This proved to be an inexpensive and excellent idea, but on our arrival at KL Sentral we were a bit puzzled to find that the only hotels in the neighbourhood were the Hilton and the Meridien, both well over R600 a night where our budget was a sixth of that. The concierge at the Hilton cleared up the mystery, as KL Sentral station is not central at all, and we needed to catch another train to get to the real main station in the city proper. Bronwyn remembered hearing about a restored Heritage hotel above the main train station, so in the absence of any other plans, we hopped the local Komuter train to see if they had any rooms there.
The hotel was built on the station platform as promised, but the windows were suspiciously dark, and when we eventually found the front door, we discovered that it had chains wrapped around the handles.
A little nonplussed, and aware that all the cafes and coffee shops that we had seen were closing, we stopped at a small street cafe to get something to eat. I picked some hawker food at random from the display of semi-congealed dishes (this place also seemed to be closing down for the night), and found myself with a very hot liver curry and some kind of hot-and-sour smoked fish. Bronwyn ordered some fresh chicken noodles from the counter, and we washed it all down with fresh young coconut juice from the shell.
Halfway through our meal, the power went out and amid some cheers everybody stayed very still in the darkness until one of the chefs found and reset the main fuse.
I asked the waiter what had happened to the Heritage Hotel, and he laughed and said that there were labour problems and that the government had shut it down. He also gave us directions to another suburb where we might find a hotel, but when we climbed into a taxi, the driver poo-pooed the idea and drove us to a hotel in the centre where obviously he got a kick-back, but it seemed clean enough and the driver was content to wait for us to check the room before being paid, so – after running the hot water and air conditioning – we booked in for a couple of days.
After a long and much-needed sleep to beat the jet lag we emerged blinking into the sunlight. We ambled around the busy streets of KL, mopeds weaving in and out of the traffic. Everybody was cheerful, the women were often beautifully dressed in vibrant colours. Although the city are at least superficially similar to Bangkok, the streets and buildings are clean and nobody pestered us to buy anything. In fact, whenever somebody approached us in the street it was usually to offer helpful advice.
Without much of a plan, we strolled over to the Petronas towers (very impressively shiny) and mooched about in the shopping mall beneath it. The mall was shiny and clean and full of high-end shops, but it is difficult to see why foreigners get so excited by the shopping here because the mall prices are much the same as back home. Food, drink and groceries, on the other hand, are very cheap indeed.
Petronas Towers
A well-earned vat of Hoegaarden
Aware that the daily monsoon was due to start in a few minutes, we popped in to a Belgian bar to wait it out. The rain persisted for an unusually long time, but the Formula 1 was showing on TV, one thing led to another, and it wasn’t until twenty-two beers later that we staggered back out into the night.
Events from then on became blurry, but we do remember playing pool in a nightclub and being propositioned by a prostitute.
According to my camera, we attended this party somewhere in KL
We vaguely remember the taxi that eventually decanted us into our hotel, where we slept like the dead until checkout time.
Emerging blinking from our Kuala Lumpur hotel, we broke our fast at a nearby cafe. Nasi Lemak is the perfect morning-after food. A big pile of rice, hot sauce, dried fish, boiled egg, nuts and some meat on the side, washed down with ‘Coffee O’ which turned out to be hot, black and sweet.
Feeling much refreshed, we bought some essential supplies – sun tan lotion, insect repellent – and headed for KL Sentral station to see if we could get aboard a train to Penang. We had previously managed to register at the train station website, but Internet bookings were only accepted three days in advance and, having already checked out of our hotel, we were hoping to leave that same day.
Locating a meter taxi – the other kind were working out far too expensive because we don’t know enough about the local area to haggle effectively – we bought a prepaid token, which worked OK except that the driver was convinced that the only reason that a foreigner might want to go to the station was to catch the airport train, and kept trying to convince us that it would be cheaper to travel by taxi.
Kuala Lumpur meter taxi
Kuala Lumpur traffic
Nevertheless, he did get us to the station in time to purchase a first class ticket half an hour before the afternoon’s departure, which all worked out rather well.
Our first class seats were nice, wide aircraft-style with loads of leg room, just as well because the trip takes over six hours. Every now and then a pretty girl came past handing out complementary cake, sweets and water. The only irritating thing was dreadful music being piped over the PA, sounding a bit like a five year old playing with a mobile phone. Thankfully it eventually also irritated the conductors who were trying to get some sleep in the empty seats behind us, so they turned it down.
For the first hour, the countryside was lush with banana palms interspersed with dwellings ranging from mansions to shacks, often with a backdrop of mine spoil heaps.
During the second hour, the landscape became largely agricultural with occasional paddy fields. Enormous and unlikely-looking hills project steeply upwards here and there, some being whittled down by mining machinery. We passed at least one processing plant, which I gather is for tin.
Three hours in, we were once more treated to the inane electronic music as the train’s infomercial played out on the TV screen at the far end of the carriage. On its fourth loop I had just decided to go and ask the conductors to turn it off when thankfully it started to show a cooking program instead.
Four hours in, and as the sun set pinkly over the distant and misty mountains, we climbed steeply up into the highlands to Tai Ping, passing more mines and refineries on the way.
Five hours in, full dark, and everybody was dozing off. Then the bloody music started up again.
We had been warned about the dragonflies, and here they were, swarms of them coming out of the desert, big fat and very very hard. Every time we stopped, enormous black crows would descend and pluck the mangled and juicy bodies from the motorbike.
We were riding across the Nullarbor Plain, the world’s largest single piece of limestone, comprising about 200,000 square kilometres of desert separating Western Australia from Southern Australia. There is only one road across, and the thousand-kilometre Eyre Highway has become a long-distance traveller’s icon. The story goes that, far from being the aboriginal name that you might expect, the word Nullarbor was coined by early explorers from the schoolboy Latin for ‘no trees’. This is something of a misnomer, because in fact this area forms part of the largest temperate forest in the world. It is a land of stark contrasts; red earth, bright green low-lying shrubs, and impressive glossy red gum trees, all stretching out forever beneath a vivid blue sky.
Look, no trees!
The logistics of living in such an arid environment preclude any kind of town on the Plain itself. There are a few hardy cattle stations out there, but along the road civilisation is represented by roadhouses strung out at intervals of 200 kilometres. Largely owned and operated by the major oil companies, they provide fuel for traffic and road trains and offer varying degrees of accommodation, food and camping.
Some are prosperous and well-appointed, others run down and a little squalid, but since 200 kilometres represents the maximum distance that the XJR 1300 can go on a single tank of fuel, we were obliged to stop at each and every one.
No trees here, either
Although it was winter and there was a fresh wind blowing in from the Southern Ocean, there was still an appreciable heat haze on the road. Mirages and inversion layers were common, and it was often quite a few miles before you could figure out what it was that was coming towards you, or even if it was coming towards you at all. The prettiest mirage turned the whole of the road ahead into a perfect reflection of the blue sky overhead, so that it seemed that at any moment you might drop off the edge of the world.
All trailers are restricted by law to 100 km/h, and since just about everything from the road trains down to the smallest car and even some of the motorbikes are towing trailers, this means that the traffic, if you can call it that, moves at that same speed like discrete beads along a wire. Horizon to horizon, you might see one bead up ahead, and possibly one far behind, but that’s as congested as it gets. Going a little faster than this, we would slowly catch and pass each road train, but it was sometimes a long battle through the vortex of turbulence that could extend hundreds of metres behind each rig.
Road Train
It is a point of pride for every Australian town, municipality or region to claim to be home to the largest, longest or oldest feature of Australia or, preferably, the world. If a particular region lacks any suitable natural features, then the locals will build something. Typical examples are The Big Trout, The Big Merino and The Big Banana. We have personally drunk beers in at least half a dozen Oldest Continually Licensed Premises In Australia.
The Nullarbor boasts not only The Longest Stretch of Straight Road in Australia (146.6 km) but also The Longest Golf Course in the World, which puzzled us a bit at first. All became clear when we realised that there was a tee and a hole at every roadhouse. The whole thing could be said to stretch out over more than 1100 km, but you have to drive for several hours down the highway to get to each tee. Of course there isn’t much in the way of green; the terrain is described as ‘natural ground’.
The plain viewed from a high scarp
Along the road, the landscape remained largely flat but the flora changed regularly, presumably reflecting changes in the underlying hydrology. The underbrush remained hummocky and rarely exceeded a couple of feet in height, but the amount of bare earth between the bushes varied, and trees came and went above. In several places we passed entire forests of dead trees where presumably the water table had dropped temporarily out of reach. In most of these, new growth was now springing up from the bases of the trunks, so presumably the aquifer had since recovered.
The lack of water was a constant theme. With only a few inches of rainfall a year, most water is trucked in to the roadhouses at great expense. Showers are available at a price, but unless you rent a cabin you are expected to bring your own washing and drinking water with you.
Sign of the times
A couple of days into the Nullarbor, we came across a road train parked in the bush and a hired motor home lying on its side. We stopped to see if we could help, but the road train driver, who had seen the accident and was now watching over the wreck, said that the occupants were fine and had got a lift out to the next roadhouse. On our arrival we heard that they had encountered a road train coming in the opposite direction on the wrong side of the road, and had lost control in their panic. We still don’t know how the roadhouse manager got it back on its four wheels, but evidently he did because it later drove in to the roadhouse car park with surprisingly little damage beyond some chamfered bodywork and busted windows.
They were lucky. You definitely don’t want to run into a fifty-metre road train.
Toy motorcycle
There are warning signs along the road for all manner of creatures, from camels to cows and kangaroos to ostriches. I suspect that many of these signs are just there to please the tourists, because for the most part the wildlife sticks to the safety of the scrub, but we did encounter a pair of emus that had come up to scrape dew from the tarmac. Seeing them in their native habitat, we realised that their hummocky bodies blended perfectly with the scrub, and it was perfectly possible to miss seeing a couple of metre-high birds if they were standing still.
On another stretch of road, I noticed a fallen log and pulled out to avoid it, and then had to swerve again because it was in fact a very large snake crossing the road and spanning almost the entire lane. I managed to avoid it, and I hope it got across before the next road train came through.
Large black crows picked up bugs that had been squashed by passing traffic, or clustered around the occasional road kill. Where there was a fallen roo, the feasting birds would usually see us coming from miles away and would take to the air well in advance, but on one occasion the birds seemed reluctant to leave. As we got closer, we realised that this time they weren’t crows, but instead a whole family of wedge-tailed eagles. As they struggled to get airborne, one of them revealed a wingspan wider than the fully loaded bike. We later heard tell of a motorcyclist who was showing off a long scar in the top of his helmet from the claws of an eagle that hadn’t quite got enough altitude in time.
A dingo ate my sandwich
As we travelled further into the region, the cost of a room for the night rose dramatically. At Caiguna they wanted over $100 for a bed, but only $15 to use their camp ground (aka the open desert behind the rainwater tanks) so we set up the tent instead. We didn’t have sleeping bags, just a sheet and some felt blankets, and as luck would have it a cold front came through and the temperature dropped to three degrees, so it was bit chilly. Mind you, the stars were incredible.
The half-way point at Eucla
After a few days, the roadhouses tended to blend together in our minds. Each had a pretty decent menu made up of frozen ingredients, jokey signs about tourists’ stupid questions, an endless supply of ‘I crossed the Nullarbor’ mugs, stickers and tea-towels, and – importantly – a well-stocked bar.
The cabins and camp sites were popular but we never had problems finding space. Once we’d watched the sunset there wasn’t much to do in the evening apart from go to the bar, and although we attended religiously every evening we were often surprised to find ourselves the only patrons. Most of the other travellers (road train drivers, grey nomads, the occasional motorcyclist) preferred to keep themselves to themselves.
A typical Nullarbor roadhouse
We did get to talk to a few fellow-travellers. The road train drivers were working in shifts and trying to stay awake, moving goods and produce westwards and, usually, empty trailers eastwards. Sometimes they stacked the empty trailers up one on top of the other to save on tyre wear, and one driver explained how it was done. Apparently they back the first trailer up to a ramp, then reverse the second trailer up the ramp and on to first. Since they’re backing up a ramp, they can’t really see what they’re doing, and since all the trailers are the same size, there is zero tolerance for mistakes. Sometimes they miss and it falls off. We also heard about the fun they have moving mining machinery, because these stupendous machines are usually much wider than the low-loader trailer, with half of each tyre or track overhanging each side. Often the machine operator refuses to risk driving onto such a thin platform, and then it is up to the rig driver to fire up the unfamiliar million-dollar machine and ease it onto the trailer himself. Sometimes these fall off too.
The grey nomads were typically towing their caravans to warmer latitudes for the winter, and everybody else seemed to be driving Perth to Sydney as a sort of endurance feat; it is after all the complete width of the continent, passing through some of the most spectacular scenery in the country. We had passed a couple of lads on the road who were towing hand-carts on foot, but unfortunately there was no safe place to pull over for a chat. We did get to speak to a young student on a bicycle who said that he’d met them on the road and was a little jealous about how much food they were carrying, although apparently they were on a very tight budget and weren’t sure if they could afford to continue all the way to Sydney. The cyclist, a very pleasant chap, had decided to cycle across the continent on a whim.
Are we lost yet?
The eastern stretch of the Eyre Highway runs along the cliff tops overlooking the Great Australian Bight. It was dusk when we passed the famous Bunda Cliffs, and the caravans were starting to circle and to jostle for prime sea-views. They always do this, but we could never figure out why, because they then seem to spend the rest of the night watching satellite television. We have considered doing a Grey Nomad trip ourselves (sort of a Brunette Nomad), and have even gone so far as to go to van shows and talk to caravan dealers. It had seemed to us that a caravan was very much like a yacht, and since we’d had such a ball sailing and meeting travelling yachties, we were keen to try the same thing on land. One of the great things about sailing in remote parts is that no matter how eccentric your fellow traveller, and whatever their walk or stage of life, they are almost always intelligent and interesting and, even if only for one evening, good company. Having attempted to similarly engage the caravanners on our travels, we had to admit that, by and large and with occasional exceptions, they were largely… not.
Bunda Cliffs at dusk
For the last day of our trip across the desert, incredibly, it rained. The roadhouses were full of celebrating station hands,
“How much did you get up at Kickatinalong?”
“Almost an inch!”
“Ah, good on yer mate. We had nearly half an inch at Dustbowlcreek.”
The road trains kicked up a heck of a spray, which made it essential to get past them but impossible to see if anything was coming the other way. Luckily the road train drivers are very aware of bikes – many are bikers themselves – and were very good about signalling when the road ahead was clear. We just kept the throttle open until we arrived at the quarantine checkpoint at Ceduna, officially the end of the Nullarbor and the start of the Eyre Peninsula.
The quarantine officer eyed our luggage and bright waterproofs with a jaundiced eye.
“Got any fruit?” he asked.
“No,” I replied, “no food at all”.
He stared broodily at Bronwyn, as if he suspected her of smuggling grapefruit under her jacket, then grudgingly nodded.
“Right, move along.”
We had crossed the Nullarbor.
The bush toward Kambalda is starkly beautiful, with the bright red of the soil contrasting with the luxurious and brilliant greens of the gum trees, low-growing scrub, and ground-hugging succulents. Whatever its size, each plant is surrounded by a circle of bare earth representing the area from which it is sucking precious water. No competing plant can gain a foothold inside this zone.
Red earth, green plants
The land is largely flat and often salty, broken only by the small hummocks of laterite gossans, interesting geological features that form after iron is leached from the soil, forming a hard protective cap that prevents the underlying rock from being eroded away over the millennia.
Laterite cap near Kambada: Prosaically speaking, it’s a naturally occurring heap of rusty iron.
A little out of Kambalda there must have been a recent major change in the underlying hydrology, because for miles and miles all the trees had been reduced to bone-white sticks. I wondered if one of the many mines in this area had redirected some underground waterway into its workings, or if perhaps there had been a series of particularly dry seasons. Whatever the underlying cause, the water source seemed to have now returned, because a new layer of lush growth was springing from the base of each apparently dead tree trunk.
We will survive!
The road trains are longer out here; over fifty metres. If they’re coming toward you with a following wind, their bow wave can get quite uncomfortable.
Take care!
We saw our first bit of road kill, but it was thoroughly tenderised and it wasn’t obvious what it had been. Certainly not a marsupial; maybe some kind of deer? Then we realised that there were feral goats grazing In the bush, some with horns as long as my arm. We also startled an escaped sheep, definitely of domestic vintage, but unusual in that it had retained a full tail, a very impressive sweeping arm with a fluffy pom-pom on the end.
The road goes ever on…
The road went on, the earth became lighter in colour, but the signs to distant mines remained as prevalent as ever. We started to see what were apparently vast flats of soft mud, which ultimately joined together to form a feature called Cowan Lake which is mined for gypsum. I didn’t quite dare try to ride the motorcycle across the inviting flat surface, but clearly a number of cars had already been doing circle work and they hadn’t made much of a dent in the hard-baked clay pan.
Suddenly we were in Norseman, where a sign warned that it was 198 km to the next fuel stop (one full tank of fuel for us), and that water was scarce from now on so that we must be sure to fill up before continuing. I wanted to investigate an intermittent knocking from the bikes drive chain and there seemed to be plenty of motels to choose from, so we stopped for the night.
A motel in Norseman
I quickly traced the knocking sound to the chain adjusters which had come loose. Fixing the problem meant loosening the rear wheel nut, and unfortunately some lazy mechanic seemed to have thrashed it on with a windy-gun instead of tightening it by hand. I hate it when they do that, as it makes roadside adjustments really difficult. Still, there were plenty of heavy rocks lying around, and by hitting it repeatedly I finally got it undone. We had booked in to the motel restaurant for dinner, and it was made quite clear that if we booked for seven, then weren’t expected to show up until seven. With an hour to kill we took a stroll around the town, which consisted mainly of a scattering of hundreds of small houses in various states of disrepair, all apparently servicing the Norseman gold mine.
The mine – and the town – have an interesting history, in that they were named after, and discovered by, a horse. The story goes that a prospector tied the horse to a tree by his brother’s tent for the night, and when he woke up he found that the horse was lame. Investigation revealed a large chunk of gold-bearing quartz lodged in Norseman’s hoof. The prospector and some friends got together and purchased the claim, and the town came into being on the site.
We wandered deeper into town, admiring the famous collection of galvanised iron camels built on the roundabout in the centre.
Galvo camels
After a little more searching we finally located what seemed to be Norseman’s only pub, and met the locals. Both of them. One sat and drooled quietly onto the bar top, while another attempted repeatedly to engage us in conversation, which might have been interesting except that he had a habit of staring up into your eyes from close range, really foul breath, and a brain that seemed to be full of little more than whirring butterflies. Quickly finishing our beers, we scuttled back to the motel.
Since it was still too early for dinner, we decided to sit on the verandah of the restaurant and enjoy a pre-prandial bottle of wine. This suggestion caused great puzzlement to the waitress, who became fixated on the idea that we wanted to cancel our dinner reservation, but eventually we sorted it out and chose a bottle of elderly Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon that seemed oddly out of place in the otherwise standard selection of cheap table wines. The waitress struggled with the cork for a very long time, until I finally realised that she hadn’t even managed to get the point of the corkscrew into the wood, at which point I gently suggested that I give it a try. The bottle was thrust into my hands with alacrity, and I realised that all the others on the shelf were screw-caps. Possibly she had never before wielded a corkscrew in anger; I began to wonder just how long those bottles had been sitting there.
The wine turned out to be very good indeed, and we sat and chatted in the twilight until our food arrived. We hadn’t expected a great deal from the dinner, but even so we were still a bit surprised when my otherwise acceptable steak came with a big dollop of instant mash, and Bronwyn’s bruschetta came smothered in a slab of melted cheddar. Still, the wine was good and there was another bottle left, so I went and fetched it from behind the bar, snaffling the corkscrew on my way back to the table.
After dinner, we met Anne, our neighbour at the motel, who was travelling in the opposite direction to us. She had a bottle of white in her luggage, and we had a bottle of champagne in ours, so we got out some chairs and whiled away the rest of the evening on the verandah outside our cabins. We asked her what the road ahead of us held in store, and it turned out that her trip so far had been almost biblical, with plagues of mice, plagues of dragonflies, and a bushfire to contend with.
Out on the road next morning, we quickly found that Anne had been right about the dragonflies. Since they’re aquatic creatures, we weren’t entirely sure what they were doing out in the desert, but they slammed into the bike with dire regularity, to be picked off by cheeky crows whenever we stopped.
Have motorcycle, will travel
Norseman gold tailings
On the way out, we paused to gawk at the tailings heap from the still profitable gold mine, and then – watching out for flaming rodents – we rode on into the sunrise.
The Golden Pipeline
Living and working in Perth on the West coast of Australia, we had finally saved up enough money to get my motorbike shipped over from the East coast, where our good friend Elizabeth had been looking after it for over a year while we were off travelling. We were looking forward to using it to explore the remoter areas of our new home state.
The XJR’s arrival on the road train transporter exactly coincided with a lucrative job offer back on the East coast. We couldn’t bear the prospect of paying the road train to immediately take the bike back again, so we decided to ride East instead. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough time to get all the way to Brisbane before the start of our new contract, but we reckoned that in two weeks we could easily cross the famous Nullarbor Plain and get as far as Adelaide. We would then catch a plane for the short hop to Brisbane and ship the bike once again; prices from Adelaide to Brisbane are much lower than from Perth, because of the vast distances involved in crossing the Nullarbor.
We had intended to hit the road at lunchtime, but what with one thing and another (moving out of our Perth flat, cleaning it for the agent, shifting all our gear into storage, taking the removal van back to the hire shop) we didn’t get started until past three o’clock. Clearly it was going to be dark when we arrived at our first stop in the gold town of Kalgoorlie.
Loaded with camping gear and extra jerry cans of fuel and water, we began to make good time. Elizabeth had very kindly had the bike tuned before loading it onto the transporter in Sydney, and it was running very sweetly indeed. Although it had been years since our last motorcycle road trip, we quickly fell back into the old routine. With effectively only a single highway leading from Perth to Adelaide, we were in no danger of getting lost, but we did have to carefully plan our fuel stops. The big thirsty 1300cc engine sucked a lot of fuel, and so we could only go about 200 km on a tank, which broke the journey naturally into two-hour segments.
Ready to roll
The Great Eastern Highway clambers up out of Perth and over the Darling Ranges before heading straight as an arrow across the Eastern Gold Fields to Kalgoorlie. Fuel was not a great problem on this first leg, with regular stops servicing road trains and commuting mine staff. Each petrol station doubled as a diner with varying degrees of home-cooked food. One might be a fish and chip shop, the next a traditional truckers diner, but the food was always good and the stops busy.
Once out of the Ranges, the terrain was completely flat, light woods giving way to unrelieved acres of grassland. The road was accompanied by two other man-made structures, the railway and the water pipeline. The Goldfields Pipeline is one of the engineering wonders of WA, running above ground for 530 kilometres and supplying precious water to Kalgoorlie and Boulder in the dry red interior. In the 1890s people in the burgeoning gold towns were dying from lack of water, and engineer C.Y. O’Connor spearheaded a campaign to build a pipeline from the coast. It was the longest pipeline project in the world, and needed a system of steam-driven pumping stations to force the water up over the intervening Darling Ranges. Although supported by the WA government, there was fierce opposition to what was regarded as an unfeasible waste of money. There is a story that on the the first test of the newly completed system, the engineer opened the taps, and… nothing happened. Mr O’Connor, exhausted from the stress, put a gun to his head and killed himself. The following day, the water completed its long journey and emerged from the pipe, and has been flowing ever since.
Pipeline and road trains
Most of the traffic in these parts consists of road trains, limited in length to 35 metres and 100 km/h and so are relatively easy to pass on the straight road, unless they are wide loads carrying mining machinery, in which case they take up most of the available space in both directions. These extra-large transporters are accompanied by groups of pilot vehicles which go ahead to warn oncoming traffic, and run interference from behind to prevent you from overtaking until the whole flotilla is ready.
Wide Load
There was a popular belief in Perth when we left that kangaroos were a big problem on this road at dusk, but we didn’t see a single road-kill corpse, so we took that with a large pinch of salt. We have lived in the Australian Capital Territory where the roadside can be lined with dead roos and wombats, and the stench of rotting bodies on a hot day can make you gag. The only living creature on this segment of the Great Eastern Highway was the occasional crow picking squashed bugs off the road.
As darkness fell, we ran into a swarm of bogon moths, big fat migratory insects that are regarded as a delicacy by some aboriginals. Caught in the headlights at 140 km/h, it is like heading into a swarm of soft bullets, swiftly covering your helmet visor in an impenetrable layer of sticky bug juice.
Kalgoorlie
The day before we arrived, an earthquake hit the Kalgoorlie-Boulder metropolitan area, destroying much of Boulder’s historical centre, so we were a little unsure what we would find in its twin borough of Kalgoorlie. However the town seemed unscathed and business was continuing as usual and we checked into the Youth Hostel without any problems.
Most of the cheap accommodation is to be found opposite the town’s three brothels, some of which are museums by day while plying their more traditional trade after nightfall.
Questa Casa, oldest brothel in Australia
From there it was but a short step to the Exchange Hotel, where negligee-glad “skimpies” served us very welcome pints of frosty beverage. The skimpies are a bit of an institution in Kalgoorlie, pretty girls shipped in from outside to pull pints wearing nothing more than a continually changing set of underwear, to the appreciation of the almost exclusively male mining population. For a while there was a bit of an arms race between the pubs, until all the wait staff were going topless, but since then it has apparently settled down a bit. The girls themselves are happy and congenial, although often not enormously competent at bar work. If you want something other than a pint of cold, it is often best to approach one of the regular, more conventionally clad bar staff.
There is a lovely but little-known balcony upstairs at the Exchange, which looks out on the whole town of Kalgoorlie, and from which you can watch the parade of punters milling around the other pubs in the centre.
The Exchange Hotel
Everybody in Kalgoorlie is small-town friendly, and we soon ended up drinking with a mixed crowd of wiry mine engineers, Maori bouncers, and Aboriginal ne’er do wells. The night degraded appropriately into the usual debauchery; the Aboriginals started fighting each other and were ejected, and the skimpies knocked off work and joined us in the Palace Hotel across the road. Somewhere in the melee, Bronwyn’s handbag disappeared, but our kindly new friends made sure that we were alright for beers.
Back at the hostel we realised that the code for the combination lock at the entrance was stamped on the fob of our room key, which was in Bronwyn’s bag. I wandered around the outside of the building and eventually located a loose window which I managed to jemmy open so at least we were able to get inside, but no amount of fossicking with my library card was going to get us through the impressive lock into our room. Luckily there were some sofas scattered about in the corridor, so we passed out on those instead.
The morning brought a spare key and rain. We had breakfast at the excellent Kaoss Cafe in the central St Barbara Square, where the chef prepares all those out-of-style English dishes that you had forgotten about: bubble and squeak, liver and onions, mince on toast, and a host of others.
Breakfast in St Barbara Square
We strolled gently around town, interspersed with coffee and cake in an attempt to clear the mental fug. The rock museum at the Western Australian School of Mines is exactly what a museum should be. No shiny plastic and multimedia presentations here. The cabinets are scarred wood and glass and a little dusty, the exhibits labelled by hand on cardboard squares containing either a detailed technical explanation, a single terse word, or nothing at all, depending on the whim of the curator at the time.
The collection houses a representative sample of every rock, mineral and gemstone found in the Eastern Goldfields, with special prominence given to the different forms of ore that are so crucial to the wealth of Western Australia. This is not a museum for idle onlookers, this is a serious tool for the fledgling geologist. Pride of place, of course, goes to the models of the biggest gold nuggets found in the early days of the gold rush, some a foot or so across and containing a thousand or more ounces of gold and silver.
Tossing up whether to stay another night or ride off in the rain, we eventually paid a last visit to the Exchange Hotel to see whether they’d found Bronwyns hand bag (they hadn’t), mounted the bike and headed east.
Bright Postie gear didn’t stop the rain
Kalgoorlie Super-Pit
On the way out of town is the Kalgoorlie Superpit, another of those technological marvels that are scattered around a state used to doing things big. Historically, gold here was mined by individual lease-holders digging shafts with little more than dynamite and a shovel, and in the early twentieth century the landscape was littered with derricks and processing sheds. Eventually there came a point where it was uneconomic for a man and a spade to dig any deeper, and entrepreneur and con-man Alan Bond came up with a plan to buy up every single mining lease and then dig an enormous pit to extract every last ounce of gold.
Bond’s business failed, but the block of mining leases was taken up by another company, KCGM, who went ahead and dug the biggest gold mine in the world. The pit is truly enormous, and aircraft landing at Kalgoorlie-Boulder Airfield now have to detour around it because it creates a huge hole in the atmosphere above. We had originally bought tickets for a tour of the mine, but this had been cancelled because of the earthquake, and we had been told that even the public viewing gallery on the top of the spoil heaps had been closed for safety reasons.
Bronwyn finds a bigger shovel
As we rolled past in a light drizzle we noticed that the gate was now open, so we rode up the hill and took a look. The mine, usually buzzing with enormous machines crawling in the stupendous space like ants, was eerily quiet, so presumably they were still running tests; we’d heard that they were going to dynamite some possibly unsafe areas that afternoon, so maybe that’s why most of the machinery had been removed. Despite the quiet, it was still a really impressive hole in the ground. Here and there up the pit wall were tiny caverns, representing the tunnels dug by the original miners, now exposed as the superpit expands downwards and outwards.
KCGM Superpit, Kalgoorlie. Look out for the enormous mining machinery at the bottom.
Back on the Goldfields Highway, it was only 300 km to Norseman, gateway to the Nullarbor. We stopped about half way in the mining village of Kambalda, partially to refuel but mainly to get some sugar as I was still having some trouble concentrating through my hangover. Next to the petrol station was the mining village itself, a community of tiny cabanas for the use of shift workers at the mine. The cabanas themselves were extremely small, with probably only space to sleep and bathe, but the site was pin-neat and equipped with a pool and a bar.
Kambalda miner’s accommodation
At about this time, I discovered that there was a message on my telephone, from Bronwyn’s mobile. The staff at the Exchange had found her hand bag, complete with wallet, phone and money, and had rung the most recently used number in an attempt to get hold of her. In fact the bag had not been stolen at all, but had been picked up by an overzealous bouncer while we were looking the other way. We turned around and headed back, picked up the hand bag and, reasoning that it was (a) late, (b) still raining and (c) we already had a room key, returned to the Youth Hostel for another night. The Nullarbor could wait one more day.
Perth has been in a drought for the past five months, but the record was broken somewhat dramatically earlier this week, when we were hit by the worst storm in fifty years. The city centre was awash with rainwater and a hundred thousand businesses and homes lost power as winds of more than 120 km/h ravaged the city. Bronwyn was in the city when it hit, and watched as pieces of scaffolding were torn from a high-rise development. Judging that the train system would be inundated, she caught a bus, which turned out to be a lucky move. The emergency services had shut down most of the roads in the core because they were far too deeply flooded for normal traffic, but the rear-engined buses were big enough to get through, albeit by occasionally driving on the pavement. The police contacted the bus drivers by radio and told them not to let anybody off until they were well clear of the city. This was fine for Bronwyn but disturbing for some of the other passengers as they watched their flooded stops sail past in the wake.
In Australia it is fairly common that storms are accompanied by large hailstones. Down the eastern coast of the continent, hailstone damage to cars is so common that it is rarely remarked upon. Here on the west coast, though, its a bit of a rarity and this particular storm generated chunks of ice ranging in size from golf ball to cricket ball, smashing their way into houses through corrugated iron and tile, and destroying car windows and sun-roofs. The damaged houses, shops and cars then began to fill up with the torrential rain.
On the next morning I cycled to work before dawn as usual, and found the roads completely obscured by a blanket of branches, twigs and leaves ripped from the suburban trees.
Storm debris
Many of the trees, rooted in nothing but drought-dried sand, had given up the unequal battle completely and were lying embedded in the roofs of houses and across crushed cars.
There’s a car under here
Most of the lights and traffic signals were out, and abandoned cars were scattered at the bottom of the steeper hills.
Passing acres of car dealers in the business district, I was amazed by the extent of the damage. On some lots, almost every windscreen was cracked, and none of the body-work would ever be the same again.
Cheap motor, sir?
One car drove past looking as if somebody had attacked it with a ball hammer.
You dimple when you smile
Once at work, I marvelled at the roof of our chill-out area, which resembled nothing more than a colander.
Not much protection from the elements
Out on my postal round, I found gardens littered with shattered roof tiles and glass. The glaziers were having a field day, simply moving up each street from one client to the next. Meanwhile the park rangers had arrived, equipped with chainsaws and cranes and chippers as they began the long task of extricating all the fallen trees without causing even more damage to the surrounding property. All around, the elderly and retired were doing their share, brushing the streets clear with brooms and, in more than one case, on hands and knees with a dustpan and brush.
Even the ants had changed their habits. When the rain hit, they must have scurried around looking for somewhere safe to put their queens and eggs, and most of them settled on the same brilliant idea; they’d move into the post boxes. Almost every brick box was teeming with insect life, usually emerging from a hole that they’d cut around the soft mortar where the house number had been formerly screwed in.
Give me a ‘C’
As quickly as the rain came, it ran away, either pouring down the roads and paths and into the river, or sinking into the parched sand. Business quickly returned to usual, albeit amid scattered buckets and with the remaining unbroken windows and doors open to air the carpets. The cars, battered and missing windows and sun roofs, are driven stoically to work in the blazing sun. A fire-sale begins on the car lots. And in the heat of the new day, I fancy that I hear the sound of a million pens, writing to their insurance companies.
There is a saying in Australia that BOAT is an acronym for Bring Out Another Thousand, and it is spooky how often the answer to the question, “How much is that cool sailing gadget?” is “a thousand dollars”. It is also an oft-quoted statistic that the running costs of your pride and joy will be about 10% of the orginal purchase cost, per year, forever. In order to test this theory, we have kept detailed records of all our expenses, and found that, for the two of us living aboard Pindimara, it was closer to 15%.
For the benefit of others who are considering dipping a toe into the lifestyle, I have provided a breakdown of our expenses year by year. All prices are given in Australian Dollars. To convert to your own currency, you could use the Oanda converter.
Annual costs as a percentage of the original Purchase Price (172,900)
Total Expenditure 2005-2006 (Live aboard, not cruising)
14,206
08.2%
Total Expenditure 2006-2007 (Live aboard, not cruising)
27,402
15.8%
Total Expenditure 2007-2008 (Live aboard, not cruising)
17,021
10.0%
5 months Expenditure 2008-2009 (Live aboard, not cruising)
17,304
24.0%
6 months Expenditure 2008-2009 (Cruising)
13,186
15.3%
Average per year over four years
22,972
13.3%
Breakdown of costs
Preparations, not cruising 2005-2006
Fixtures and Fittings
Duvet, pillows, glasses
200
Bedding, pots, pans
250
Kitchen equipment
100
Tools, kitchen equipment
90
Water hose and connectors
25
Maintenance and Tools
Toilet maintenance kit
80
Lubricant, polish
20
Quick-cover tape x 2
20
Brushes, sanding, cleaning
45
Antifouling, thinners, tape, epoxy
920
Socket and wrench for propeller
60
Slip at RPAYC
535
Slip and replace prop
550
Solar powered vent
310
Silicone sealant, brush
10
Headsail sheets
169
Silicone lubricant x 2
19
Hacksaw, bastard, molegrips
75
Hire upholstery steam cleaner
32
Fluids for steam cleaner
16
Sump pump
88
Strap wrench
8
Caulking gun, superglue
24
Filters, impeller, oil, coolant
154
Safety Equipment
PFDs, flares, grease
450
Tender
Zodiac tender, used
750
Zodiac seat
140
Tender tow rope and fittings
30
Tuff Cote paint for Zodiac
120
Zodiac glue
10
Zodiac repair kit x 2
100
Zodiac rowlock adapters
40
Running Costs
Diesel Fuel
200
Cooking Gas
20
Fees
Registration to 17/11/06
160
Registration to 17/11/05
20
Mooring fees (Gibson)
3000
Visitors berth (RPAYC)
70
Insurance
1630
Loan interest to 10/06 (on 75k)
3666
Preparations, not cruising 2006-2007
Fixtures and Fittings
Cutlery, towels, hangers
72
Maintenance and Tools
12 vac, furler sheet
90
Antifouling brushes, tape etc
72
Mainsail and foresail service
1077
New foresail and trysail
3236
Buff and polish (Reflections)
650
Tarp., pole, tubing
20
Rubber for snubber
5
Foresail sheets
83
10m anchor chain
90
50m anchor warp
60
Spare plough anchor
79
Shackles, hoses, screws
33
Stainless work (Bluewater)
7335
Haul out, gelcoat repairs
1909
Safety Equipment
PFDs, boat hook, chart
280
Bearing compass
180
Sailing gloves
38
Manual bilge pump
29
PFD yokes, harnesses
1000
Yoke recharge kits
70
EPIRB
400
Jackstays (Riggtech)
281
Tender
Walker Bay
2000
Running Costs
Diesel Fuel
258
Cooking Gas
15
Fees
Mooring (Gibson)
1750
Visitors berth (RPAYC)
30
Visitors berth (LMYC)
25
Mooring (LMYC)
75
Visitors berth (Anchorage)
290
Mooring (Anchorage)
650
Visitors berth (Nelson Bay)
500
Mooring (Soldiers Point)
997
Insurance
1549
Registration (NSW)
163
Loan interest (on 40k)
2011
2007-2008 (includes 4 months liveaboard, not cruising)
Fixures and Fittings
Engel fridge
1300
3 new batteries and regulator
1406
Canvas and panel mounts
990
Labels and lettering
68
Lights and small parts
210
Solar panels
920
Electrical wiring and parts
768
Electrical wiring and parts
112
Cigar lighter Y adaptor
10
Water tank sensors and gauge
366
Electrical and plumbing parts
89
Cool boxes
170
Lamps and small parts
162
Mounting brackets
35
Maintenance and Tools
Oil filter wrench
10
Hammer, screwdriver
37
Plumbing
16
Plumbing
16
Solder sucker
15
Solder, wire, torch
31
Rigging check and halyards
3258
Plumbing and electrics
120
Waste tank
??
Plumbing for waste tank
80
Safety Equipment
Musto Trousers
259
Sailing jacket and trousers
275
Running Costs
Cooking gas
55
Fees
Mooring (Gibson)
3380
Insurance (Club Marine)
1630
Registration (NSW)
168
Loan interest to 10/08 (approx)
1000
Tender
Rowlocks
65
2008-2009 (first 5 months only, liveaboard but not cruising
Our yacht, Pindimara, had been on sale for a few weeks in Darwin, and had in fact already attracted the interest of a couple looking for a production cruising yacht. We were, however, painfully aware that she was stuffed full of our junk, and that we had left all the sails and cushions and cupboards open in an attempt to keep her aired during the hot Darwin summer, so that she looked more like a Chinese laundry than somebody;s pride and joy.
Chinese Laundry
We took a few days off work and flew up to Darwin to move all our gear into storage and give the boat a bit of a scrub; after all, she’d by now been sitting in the marina for almost five months and we thought that she would probably need it. In actual fact she was in fine fettle, just a little damp from several months of tropical humidity which had settled in the bilges. Her decks were tolerably clean and we had suffered no cyclone damage.
Then the monsoon arrived, a monster that settled in across the entire northern half of the continent. Being tolerably well travelled, I thought that I’d seen a bit of rain in my time. This was fundamentally different. Firstly, the air temperature in Darwin’s summer months is up close to forty degrees, and humidity is hovering in the nineties. When the rain comes, it’s warm. And in a monsoon, it’s moving sideways. Reports started to come in of minor tornadoes, and photographic evidence of fish raining out of the sky. There was so much rain that the marina started to fill up and overflow from the run-off, and the boats were bucking at their berths as the water poured in through the storm drains and out through the sluice gates to the sea.
The lock master, Keith, was kept very busy monitoring the levels and adjusting and readjusting the sluices, as well as pumping out sinking boats and rescuing overwhelmed pontoons. Despite all this, he very kindly allowed us to use his office as a sort of half-way-house for our gear, because we had to get it off the boat before we could do anything, and although we had brought many cardboard boxes we only had a limited number of plastic containers that could withstand the torrential rain.
We worked out a system where Bronwyn sweated below as she uncovered ever more boxes of supplies and packed them into plastic containers, while I ran with them back and forth up and down the slippery marina to the office. Whenever the rain paused for a moment, we piled all the boxes we could into Keith’s ute and took them to a storage locker, where I unpacked again and then repacked into cardboard boxes before returning to the marina with the empty plastic ones for another load.
However fast we worked, there were always more lockers to open and more gear to check and to move. It took two days to shift a five-year accumulation of gear and stores. The food was particularly exciting; we had a rough idea that we had a few months worth of stores left aboard, but we could have eaten well for almost six months with the stuff that we found. Some of it was pretty exotic, but its hard to move food across state quarantine lines in Australia, so rather than try to ship it back to Perth, we gave most of it to a delighted Keith.
A lot of the gear that we removed consisted of useful bits and pieces that we had kept in the lazarette in case we needed to repair something; spare sets of oars, bits of marine ply, old rope, propeller parts, broom handles and so on. Rather than dump this gear in the skip, I placed it neatly nearby, thinking that perhaps somebody else might like to keep it. To my amusement, the length of time that each part sat by the skip became shorter and shorter as other yachties began to regularly check what was there. After a few hours, I couldn’t even walk the length of the pontoon without somebody calling out “Are you throwing away that old rope?” and taking it off me.
We became especially popular when we started giving away fuel, because our tanks were full and we wanted to ship the empty deck jerry cans down to Perth. Bronwyn had a similar experience when she started putting dried food, books, and boxes of cleaning products in the marina’s launderette. This was all perfectly familiar, of course. Some of the gear was stuff that I had myself picked up from skips along the way.
Finally the boat was empty, and we began the long process of scrubbing, cleaning and polishing from the bilges to the mast. Still dodging monsoon squalls, we were forever opening the hatches to let in some air, and closing them again to guard against horizontal rain. I was so thoroughly wet that I didn’t dare enter the cabin for fear of dripping water into the bilges, so I crouched under the dodger as each squall rolled over.
Finally, only twenty minutes before we had to leave to catch our flight, we were done. Pindimara looked like a million dollars, and pretty similar to the way that we’d first seen her, all those years ago.
Saloon
Galley
Forepeak
We had thought that we would be shedding some tears, but in the event we never had the time. To a large extent we had got over the grief of parting over the previous months, while we were negotiating with the dealer and putting together a suitable collection of photographs. It’s still hard to look back at those pictures without our eyes misting over, but if there’s one thing that we have learned, it is that the sea is now in our blood, and we will be back.
I came across a wonderful opportunity to train as a postman, which is a job that I have always thought that I would enjoy. For non-Australians, you need to know that postmen here do their rounds entirely by motorcycle, riding directly to each houses letterbox across lawns and kerbs and pavements. Its a subsistence-level position, but all you need to qualify is a clean motorcycle license and no criminal record, and you get to spend a lot of time outside making people happy.
I duly started the training course, which included two interesting days being introduced to the “postie bike”, which is made specially by Honda for Australia Post. At heart it is a CT130 step-through, but it has some interesting refinements, including side-stands on both sides, a hand brake, and a clutchless gear box that will idle in any gear. We had to pass a number of tests, including U-turns in deep sand and negotiating driveways, kerbs and foliage in order to access letterboxes in high and low positions.
There were ten of us in all, from a variety of backgrounds, but about half of us were grizzled veterans of some other business who were looking for a job that was more fun and involved less idiots. Following extensive weaving-in-and-out-of-the-cones, and after some slight problems mastering emergency stops using 1970s-style cable-and-drum brakes, we all passed the test.
Postie Unleashed!
The job itself is simple but fun. I arrive each day at 6 am and start to sort my letters into the 1200 or so addresses on my route. This can take anything from three to six hours, depending largely on whether it is a bill or magazine day for one or more companies. There are dozens off us packed into a large warehouse, all doing the same thing, and the jokes and ribaldry fly thick and fast.
Sorting Frame
Then I load my motorcycle with as many letters as it can carry, and put the rest of them in a van which will leave them at a drop somewhere on my route. Off I potter to my first drop, and then I follow the same route every day, getting slightly faster with every daily iteration.
Australian letter boxes are not typically attached to houses, they are mostly some kind of box or structure at the end of the garden, at least theoretically accessible by motorcycle. We are permitted to ride on the pavements and verges and, depending on where the builders (in their infinite wisdom) decided to put the darn thing, often find ourselves riding in deep sand, gravel, bark chippings, flower beds, freshly rolled lawns, and so forth. The idea is to not actually ride on peoples’ lawns if we can help it, but as often as not I find myself approaching a pristine turf of bowling-green calibre, in the very centre of which has been built a letter box. It’s summertime at the moment, and my bike treads lightly; it will be interesting to see what happens in the rain.
You’d think that there would be some regulation size or position for a letter box, but there is not. Unfortunately this means that a great many of them are completely unsuitable for the delivery of mail, whether by motorcycle or otherwise. Its not just the physical location, although some of them are built at ankle-height which makes for some interesting gymnastics. No, the real problem is that for some reason that is buried in history, the default slot size chosen by almost all builders is about one brick wide and a couple of millimetres shorter than the width of a standard business-letter envelope. By far the greater number of these small boxes are built into a wall, so there is little chance of ever fixing the problem.
Typical Perth letter boxes
The structure pictured here is typical of the breed (note also the excitingly random distribution of house numbers on this example).
It is actually impossible to post a standard letter through such a slot, without first folding it in half or screwing it up into a sort of tube. The slot is typically made of rough-cast brick or cement, and tears the edges off both the letter and your fingers as you push it through.
Imagine the fun that I have with A4 envelopes and glossy magazines! Especially when, as is usually the case, some bozo has come along the night before and has stuffed the whole thing full of advertising leaflets for cheap barbecue utensils.
Adjusting to life on land is weird. Our apartment backs on to the Swan River, and on the first day we ambled down to have a look at it. Standing on the shore, I had a strange feeling of disconnection. It took me a little while to understand that where I had previously regarded water as a highway and the land as a barrier, now the roles were reversed. I can’t just hop into our dinghy and cross to the other side; I have to find a bridge or a ferry. The water is no longer my home.
LASERS ON THE SWAN RIVER
It was not all negative. It was nice to have electricity on demand, without continually having to consider the state of the batteries and generators. It was very nice to have unlimited fresh water, although neither of us could bring ourselves to ever waste any of it.
Australians have a strange relationship with fresh water. Whereas Bronwyn and I both come from countries where water is plentiful and yet we were brought up to respect it as a scarce resource, Australia is largely desert and yet the locals are so profligate that the water tables are irreparably sinking and the few major rivers are in the process of drying up. There is no concept of recycling; all used water goes straight into the sea. We had already had an argument with our tenants in Sydney, when we found that their water usage in the little one-bedroom flat was 12,000 litres a month, compared to our 6,500 a month when we had lived there, and of course our 600 litres a month on the boat. They did have the grace to offer to pay the bill.
It was also nice to be able to sleep the whole night through without springing out of my bunk to check the set of the anchor, investigate an unusual noise, or take over a night watch. We had particularly suffered on long passages when our watches spiralled into ever-shorter increments because it wasn’t really possible to get a proper rest while the boat was under way.
Even though we are now on land and none of these problems apply, we have once again found that cruising has changed us. We remain attuned to the cycles of the sun, springing fresh-eyed from bed every morning at dawn (even Bronwyn, who before we went sailing would cheerfully sleep until lunchtime). At the other end of the day, only a few hours after dusk will find us yawning and making our way to bed.
What we miss
We know that we miss the cruising lifestyle, but it is hard to put our finger on exactly why. Some of my happiest moments have been dozing on deck under an infinity of stars, as Pindimara blazes a phosphorescent wake across a boundless sea. Some of my angriest and most frustrated moments have been while dog tired and fighting gusty squalls as angry swells tower above the cockpit. Some of Bronwyn’s worst times were the long uncomfortable passages that seemed to extend forever as the wind and current conspired against us, and some of her best were the explosion of taste in a perfect salad lunch eaten on a sparkling blue sea under a tropical sky.
In short, much of the actual mechanics of sailing wasn’t a great deal of fun, but the opportunity to go where the wind blows and to visit faraway islands, to swim ashore and explore or just to sit on a flawless beach, to snorkel amongst the fearless fish of the reef, to stay as long as you want with nobody to tell you otherwise, all these things made it a way of life worth pursuing.
And when the passage is over and the anchor is safely down, then there are the fascinating people. Old and young, waiters and doctors, paupers and millionaires, all have chosen to live out on the edge, at the interface between the land and the sea. None of them are interested in picking a fight, stealing your wallet, or spray-painting graffiti on your home. All are content to accept you as you are without prejudice or judgement, to be entertained by your story and to swap it for another tall tale in return.
We’ll be back
We will go cruising again. Obviously we need to replenish the coffers, and we are already quite deep into discussions about what “the next boat” will look like. In the meantime we have a few other projects on the go, some of which will take several years to complete, and which require some of the capital that is currently tied up in our yacht. Regretfully, then, we have decided to sell Pindimara where she is, at the marina in Darwin.
That brings this little portion of the blog to a close. Thankyou, gentle readers, for following us this far. For those of you who want to follow the next stage of our plans, keep an eye on The Virtual Reinhard.
The onset of Darwin’s cyclone season coincided with the extinction of our cruising budget. That we were broke was no surprise, as we’d always known that our little pot of money was going to run out in November 2009. We had originally hoped to have got past Darwin by then, cruising the Kimberleys and then finishing up by selling Pindimara in Perth, but that wasn’t the way that it worked out.
Cruising is like that. You stop where it looks interesting and stay as the weather and your whims dictate; timetables are vague and often thrown out of the window. We had had a spectacular year and were more than satisfied with everything that we had achieved.
Having secured a (hopefully) cyclone-proof marina berth, we now had to decide between returning the following Easter to complete the voyage, and selling her right there in Darwin. In either case, we were committed to paying monthly marina fees at least until the end of the cyclone season, so we had to first find gainful employment.
We could, I suppose, have picked up lucrative contracts in our old discipline of computer programming, but despite the obvious financial incentives, that would have felt like a step backwards from our new lives. Over the year we had gently pursued other opportunities, and both had at least tentative offers of employment in Perth, about 1500 miles away down the west coast, and so after a quick jaunt to Europe to visit friends and relatives we relocated to Western Australia.
DOWNTOWN PERTH
From research on the internet we’d already decided which suburb we wanted to live in, so we checked into a cheap hostel nearby and went out on foot to find an apartment. It didn’t take too long to visit every realtor in the area and to determine the minimum rent that we should pay for a unit in reasonable condition. We saw some lemons, of course, but gradually increased our range in increments of $50 rent per week until we found one that wasn’t actively falling down, at which point we rented it.
Cruising had fundamentally changed the way that we looked at houses. Even the smallest was far larger than Pindimara, so we weren’t especially interested in the size of the lounge or the number of bedrooms. We were only anchoring for a while, not making a purchase, so we didn’t pay much attention to decor. We just looked for a few simple criteria: gas cooking, good natural lighting, and a sensible use of the cooling Fremantle Doctor wind that blows every afternoon. The first flat that we found that fulfilled all of these simple criteria, we took.
Furniture was easy, with simple functionality being the order of the day: cheap table, chairs, desk, sofa, and an expensive mattress. Having spent the previous year storing all our fresh food in a 42 litre Engel outback fridge, we ignored the monstrous walk-in fridge-freezers on display and purchased a small bar fridge instead. Our only real concession to land-bound life was to buy a simple washing machine.
Within a week of arrival, we had somewhere to live, a bicycle for transport, and the promise of jobs.
It was quite incredibly hot. Darwin was going through ‘the build-up’, which is the crossover period between its two seasons. The humidity starts ramping up from the dry season (hot, dry) to the wet season (hot, wet), making the weather more and more muggy but without providing the release of actual rainfall. For the greater part of the day it was literally too hot to move, and we found ourselves sitting in a stupour beneath our electric fan. The boat needed to be cleaned and prepared, but even the smallest task brought rivers of sweat pouring down our backs and legs. Occasionally we made a foray to the cafe so that we could sit under the air conditioner. In the city around us, Darwin’s residents began their annual peak of suicides and murders.
This was crazy. It was time to move on. We made use of the cooler periods of the morning and evening to hose months of accumulated salt from the fibreglass. In preparation for the cyclones we removed everything from the deck, stowed the foresail, lashed the mainsail to the boom, and doubled up all the mooring lines.
AN OVERHEATED BRONWYN HOSES THE DECK
In preparation for the humidity of the wet season, we ate or discarded our remaining fresh goods, filled the fuel and water tanks, sprayed the bilges with mildew preventer, laid cockroach traps, lifted all the seat cushions and topped up the batteries. The marina laundry took a beating as we washed every piece of fabric and packed it all away into vacuum bags.
VACUUM BAGS! WHAT A WONDERFUL INVENTION
In the hot periods of physical lassitude we spent hours on the internet looking at flight schedules and job opportunities, and then spent a few minutes packing for a round the world trip. That’s one of the great things about living on a boat; if you have to catch a plane, you don’t need to spend a lot of time deciding what to bring. Everything that you own goes into a small bag, and off you go.
We arranged for Keith the wonderful and obliging lockmaster to occasionally check and ventilate the boat over the next six months, got in a taxi, and headed for Singapore.
There isn’t too much to do around Tipperary Waters marina, although the two cafes on the shore are very good and we understand that a bar will be opening soon. The Dinah Sailing club down the road is the only place to get a drink, and although friendly enough it isn’t exactly spectacular. However, public transport is cheap, and it only costs two dollars to get the bus into town and about ten to take the taxi back again.
After so long in the back of beyond, it was surprisingly great to get a good dose of civilisation. We had some excellent tapas at the Moorish Cafe in town, and together with Rob from Ku Ching we tackled the enormous seafood platter at Crustaceans On The Wharf.
We also had a good party session up and down Mitchell Street, which is the restaurant and bar district, and met some fun and interesting people (that’s you, Carlee).
It’s funny that we’re seeing a completely different Darwin to our last visit. That time it was christmas and there was nobody here and nothing was open. Right now in September, the place is hopping. Last night we went to the famous market at Mindle Beach. As well as the crowds milling around in the market itself, there must have been ten thousand people sitting quietly on the beach watching the sunset.
MINDLE BEACH SUNSET
We’re very aware that the wet season seems to be coming early this year. It is very hot and very sticky, and although it isn’t actually raining, the sky is continually threatening.
Two yachts that were heading for Perth recently gave up and turned around and came back, saying that conditions are impossible. Since that’s the direction that we’re heading, we’ve spent a lot of time canvassing the local cruisers, and even though we’re aware that one man’s “impossible” is another woman’s “fun sail”, there is a solid consensus is that we’re looking at a very hard trip down the coast.
Faced with a rough ride, and aware that since we’ve started rushing along the coastline we haven’t been enjoying ourselves half as much as we ought to, we’ve decided to leave Pindimara in Darwin for the wet and cyclone seasons, and to come back and finish the trip in the middle of next year. Not only does it give us a chance to do some work and replenish the coffers, but it also means that we’ll be able to take our time cruising the Kimberleys rather than continually rushing along and checking over our shoulders for a cyclone.
Carefully timing the tides, we went to bed for some rest before getting up and leaving at midnight. It was a starry but moon-less night, there were almost no lights on the shore of Bathurst Island, and there was no wind at all. The backwash from the steaming light off the back of the furled foresail gave a strange, misty air to the world, so that we seemed to be coccooned in an ethereal blanket. We may have left a little late, as I forgot that it would take nearly 2 hours to get out of Gordon Bay, but the tide sucked us out and then gave us a 3.5 knot boost toward Darwin.
Despite the complete absence of any wind, the water got quite exciting, a roller coaster ride. At one point we were smashing through standing waves and I was wondering how Bronwyn, even though she is a champion sleeper, could possibly be snoozing in the fore-peak. As far as I could imagine, she must have been in the air half the time. Then the whole yacht went airborne off one wave and ploughed into the next, washing the decks of the accumulated mud and ash, and replacing them with sand and shells. A tousled head appeared in the companionway. “How fast are we going?” she asked, before heading sleepily back to bed.
A little later the propeller didn’t seem to be able to get any traction. Bear in mind that it was completely black. I peered into the small pool of light cast by the stern light, and could just make out that the water was bubbling and boiling beneath us. Presumably there was so much air in the thrashing water that the prop was cavitating.
Sliding sideways into the Beagle Gulf, I suddenly had an inspiration and realised that I might be able reprogram part of the autopilot to display the GPS ‘course over ground’. Then I could judge the tidal set without continually going below to check our position on the chart. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It worked a treat, and while I was at it I added a display for the water temperature. For the record, in the middle of the night in September, it was 27 centigrade. No wonder it is popular with crocodiles.
The sun came up, and the sea became flat an placid in all directions. We couldn’t see the shore and were completely alone.
NOBODY HERE BUT US CHICKENS
Suddenly an enormous cargo ship appeared, in a great hurry to get somewhere. It passed us by and disappeared again.
WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?
Time passed. There was not a breath of wind. We motored.
The tide started to pick us up as planned for the final approach into Darwin, slowly increasing the boost until we were doing over 10 knots.
LEFT – LOG SPEED. RIGHT – SPEED OVER GROUND
We could see the Darwin skyline, but we couldn’t get a mobile phone connection. Broadband internet was working, though, so we used Skype to call the closest marina, Cullem. They explained that although they did have a free berth, we would be charged $240 for the privilege of opening the lock gate. I think not. We called Tipperary Marina, who were able to fit us in at a more reasonable price. Although they were another four miles upriver, the continuing tide made mincemeat of the distance.
The approach to Tipperary was interesting, up a river which dries out at low tide. We maintained radio contact with Keith the lockmaster, and as we were passing a seemingly unbroken rock wall, he asked us if we could see him waving. Eventually we spotted him in the dusk, and realised that there was an all-but-invisible break in the wall. It was like the Gulgari Rip all over again, but this gap was only seven metres wide.
We negotiated the lock without any problems, and found ourselves in a trim and tidy little marina full of smart long-term liveaboards. Keith was wonderfully helpful and did a great job of making us feel welcome.
We had an exciting ride out of Snake Bay in a strong nor’easter which took us at 7 knots to Cape Van Diemen, the northern tip of Melville Island. For the rest of the night we followed the coastline southward, riding the winds until they faltered in mid morning. We were starting to notice an opposing tide, so rather than waste fuel we anchored off Bathurst Island in about 70 square miles of sheltered and shallow water. Only the southern part, Gordon Bay, has been named or charted, so we dropped anchor there in about 10 metres and spent the rest of the day pottering around. I really should have been doing my schoolwork, but after many night watches with my iPod I had finally almost finished organising our music collection, so I finished off that job instead.
Although we still carried a couple of month’s worth of dried and tinned ingredients, we were desperately short of fresh food. We ate our last orange, leaving us with one sweet potato and two onions. It was decision time. Wyndham or Darwin? We had to provision at one or the other before tackling the Kimberleys. Each town had its advantages and disadvantages.
Darwin has evil spring tides, an approach route that leads into the teeth of the trade winds, and nowhere simple to stay. The choice there is between anchoring in Fannie Bay and dragging the dinghy through half a mile of mud, or booking through the lock gates into one of the marinas. Because of the drying tides, all of Darwin’s marinas have lock gates that only let you in and out at certain times, considerably restricting your freedom. On the other hand, if we could get into a marina then shopping would be easy.
Wyndham lies at the bottom of the Bonaparte Gulf and was still several days away. The winds in the Gulf are notoriously inconsistent, and the GRIB showed that we would encounter confused light winds coming from every direction. The only place to anchor is in the strongly tidal river, the jetty is apparently only useable for a few hours each day, and the actual town is a taxi ride from the river. After provisioning, it’s a long hard slog back out of the Gulf. On the other hand, we’d never been there before and it has the dubious pleasure of having Australia’s hottest average temperature (32C).
THE JOSEPH BONAPARTE GULF
The trade winds were set to slacken. We also fancied a meal in a restaurant. We chose Darwin.
When we awoke in our little mud pond in the Snake River, I sat on deck and looked across the water at the settlement of Milikapiti. It seemed strange to be anchored so close to a shoreline aboriginal community, to be connected to their broadband mast and choked by their bush fires and yet not have any social interaction.
Firstly, we are not allowed on to aboriginal land without a pre-arranged permit. Secondly, the residents of the Arnhem Land coastline, even here on the island, do not seem to make any use of boats. Although their houses and cars line the beaches, they never seem to have any jetties, tinnies or even canoes. We have passed woven branch fishing traps within wading distance of the shore, but we’ve never once seen an aboriginal person out on the water.
The upshot of this is that we can’t visit them, and they can’t visit us. It does feel a bit strange.
And then, just as we were leaving, three enormous aluminium powerboats came flying down the river and were whisked up a ramp and out of sight. I thought that I would have to revise (or even delete) this blog entry as it looked like I was wrong.
I couldn’t really see who was in the boats, so I fired off a couple of dozen shots with the telephoto lens. Later that day I blew up the images and realised that the people in the boats were all white, possibly pearl fishermen. So my comments still stand.
Ahead of us were the infamous tidal flows of Darwin and its guardian Dundas and Clarence Straits, two or more days of irresistable rips and crucial tide timetables. For a clean run, one writer claimed that we needed to maintain an average speed of eight knots, which even allowing for a following current is a bit of an ask. Lugubrious cruising guides spoke of yachts that had mistimed it and anchored up, only to be sucked out of their safe bays by the marauding rip. On top of this, it’s the end of winter and we’re heading into the spring tides when the tides exceed nine metres and everything is just that little bit worse.
DUNDAS AND CLARENCE STRAITS (SCALE: 90 MILES)
Jimmy Cornell in his influential book ‘World Cruising Routes’ states quite bluntly that it should not be attempted, and recommends taking the longer route around Melville Island, even though this adds a hundred miles to the journey and ends with seventy miles of beating into wind to get to Darwin.
Even taking the northern route, cautious tidal planning is still necessary. We left Port Essington on a falling tide, hoping to get sucked out of the bay and at least half way across the entrance to the Dundas Strait before having to fight the easterly set. The plan began well, but inevitably we ended up in a hard slog against up to five knots of current. Luckily the trade winds were behind us and we could make a few knots of headway.
Evening fell as we fought free of the influence of the Strait, and then we had a hard nights sail across the top of Melville Island. The currents were increasingly difficult to predict and we zigzagged wildly. Even at the large scale of the chart above, you can see that our route was not exactly straight.
We sailed all night and most of the next day. We didn’t seen any other boats, but we did spot a bird floating along on the sea. You might not think that this was so strange, but the bird, apparently a black and white booby, was nonchalantly standing upright on the surface. As we got closer, we realised that it was standing on the back of a turtle that was nonchalantly swimming along. The pair were still together when they passed over the horizon.
By mid afternoon we were entering Snake Bay. We knew nothing at all about this area apart from the fact that it was a north-facing river entrance that should give us protection from the south-easterly trades, and that the aboriginal community there had a broadband mast. We’d been out of touch for well over a week, and quite apart from updating this blog, we needed to check on our university work and deal with some business.
Snake Bay is divided into easterly and a westerly channels, and judging by the patterns of the sand banks on the chart it looked as if the eastern side would have less current. By the time we got there, though, the wind had shifted to the NE and was blowing straight at us, building up an uncomfortable chop. Aware that the charts only had a zone of confidence of C (“depth anomalies may be expected”), we crept further upstream looking for shelter, but found none.
It was time for Plan B. I had previously noted that it seemed to be just possible to squeeze through a 30 metre gap in the shoals and access the main western channel, before tackling a 30 metre wide bar between two drying banks which would drop us into a 5 metre deep pool inside a large drying mud lake.
In a nifty and stylish piece of navigation (I can safely say this in retrospect, since we didn’t hit anything) we arrived at the centre of the 100 metre square pool and dropped anchor in millpond smooth waters.
APPLAUSE!
After catching up with the outside world and sipping a G&T or two, we collapsed into bed for our first sleep in 48 hours. The wind shifted in the night, and blew ash and smoke from the aboriginal fires through the cabin. I imagine that it kept the mosquitoes away.
We anchored off Adams Head, deep in Port Essington, and set off in the relative cool of the morning to explore the abandoned settlement of Victoria. The temperature was still in the thirties.
In the early 1800s, England had settled parts of the eastern coast of Australia but was concerned that the northern reaches of this vast continent might be vulnerable to Dutch and French expansion from their colonies in the East Indies.
Two military bases were set up, Fort Dundas on Melville Island and Port Wellington on the Cobourg Peninsula, but both settlements failed due to the harsh conditions. The English government persisted, and in 1838 set up the civilian settlement of Victoria at a site much farther inland, at Adam Head on the shores of the large Port Essington bay.
ADAM HEAD (WITH LATERITIC PROFILE)
Surveys had shown that there was a plentiful supply of fresh water, and also that the area might support a successful trepang trade. We’ve seen traces of similar activity (trepang are also known as beche-de-mer, or sea cucumbers or sea slugs) all over the northern islands and coasts. Mrs Watson of Lizard Island was there because her husband was a beche-de-mer fisherman. The sea slugs themselves were traded at great profit to the Chinese who regard them as a delicacy. I tried one once in Shanghai, and it was indeed very expensive but also tasted pretty much the way that you would expect.
The settlement began bravely, with a prefabricated Governor’s House, a church, a hospital, thatched and shingled cottages, and a military barracks.
CORNISH CHIMNEYS OF THE MARRIED QUARTERS
For food they had vegetable gardens, imported water buffalo, and a peaceable trading relationship with the local aboriginals and with visiting Macassan (Indonesian) trepang fishermen.
Unfortunately the original survey had been conducted in the wet season, and for the other six months of the year the colony had to rely on ever deeper wells.
THIS WOULD BE A LAKE IN THE WET
A cyclone hit in the second year, and destroyed much of what had been built. The supply ships came only intermittently, and the soil turned out to be so poor that their gardens were barely better than subsistance. Malaria became a way of life, eventually killing almost a quarter of the residents.
ONE OF THE FEW SURVIVING GRAVESTONES
At times fully half of the population were in hospital, not only from malaria but also from dysentery, influenza and scurvy.
After eleven hard years, the political situation had changed and foreign incursion was no longer regarded as a threat. The survivors were shipped out and the settlement was abandoned.
Some of the buildings were subsequently and intermittently used by freelance trepang fishermen and hunters tracking the now wild water buffalo, but the bush soon moved back in. It didn’t take long for most of the signs of civilisation to be erased.
SOME INTERESTING TREES
We were becoming a little jaded with the sail across the top of the Northern Territory. Access to the entire shoreline is essentially forbidden to non-Aboriginals without a permit, and permits are not easy to get. The rest of our world consists of featureless waters and small islands that we’re not allowed to visit either.
This morning we found ourselves at anchor off Black Point, Port Essington. The bay has a pronounced roll and we awoke irritable and grumpy, and not looking forward to more mindless mileage. We feel that we’ve seen little in the last thousand miles apart from sea water and the inside of a few pubs. Without our university work to keep us occupied and to fuel our discussions, we probably would have cracked long before this. Were we going too far, too fast?
Port Essington is part of a national park, and there is a ranger station at Black Point. I called up the ranger on the radio to see if it was possible to get a permit to go ashore at the nearby historical settlement of Victoria, and received the welcome news that no permit was required for day visits. Eager to see a new face after a week at sea, I tossed the dinghy over the side and rowed to shore to get more details. Just as I was setting the anchor on the beach, the ranger’s helicopter lifted off from behind the treeline and headed off seaward. Darn!
I went up to his house anyway and found the visitor centre, which was closed. Persistence paid off as I found an unlocked rear entrance and spent a happy hour or so wandering around the nice little museum there.
On the way back to the dinghy, I stopped on the beach and dug my feet into the baking hot sand. Scattered around me were hundreds of shell and coral fragments. I picked up a handful and realised that I was looking at more individual new things than I had seen in the entire past week.
The realisation hit that, although sailing is fun, I am first and foremost a land mammal. There just isn’t enough variety on the water to keep me that interested. Rowing back to Pindimara, I imparted this new-found wisdom to Bronwyn, who of course had worked it out for herself weeks ago and was waiting for me to catch up.
We decided to take a little holiday from our holiday, and instead of continuing westward turned inland, deeper into the bay in the direction of the ruined town of Victoria some three hours away.
It felt good to be heading for a real destination that we could walk around on, rather than just another palm-fringed inaccessible beach on the way to the next one. In addition, Port Essington is sheltered from the swell but not from the trade winds, so we were soon creaming along at a steady seven knots. Flying fish sparkled across the water before us, dolphins cruised serenely alongside. Even heeled over, the boat hung reasonably steady in the flat azure sea, and Bronwyn popped below for long enough to bake a batch of scones.
We didn’t have permits to go onto aboriginal land anywhere across the Northern Territories, so we did not get off on Raragala Island and did not plan to set foot on land again until we got to Darwin. Cruisers who were doing the distance more slowly had applied for permits with variable results. One boat’s applications got repeatedly ‘lost’. Another boat got every permit that they asked for, but dated in such a way that there was no way that they could possibly use them.
Not only did we want to become embroiled in aboriginal bureaucracy, but we were also aware of the impending cyclone season, so we decided to skip Arnhem Land completely. We drew a straight line on the chart across the Arafura Sea to the Cobourg Peninsula near to Darwin.
ACROSS THE ARAFURA SEA
SAILING INTO THE SUNSET (A FIRST!)
We were at sea for two days and two nights, during which time we sighted no land, no ships, no planes, and only three items of interest. The first was a banded coral snake. The second was a very lost ten-inch crab, swimming at the surface miles from shore. The third was a juvenile petrel who roosted on our dodger for most of the second night, completely unconcerned with the comings and goings of crew with bright lights and cameras.
PIDGE
On the morning of the third day we sighted land and dropped anchor on the south-western side of Grant Island for a rest. We couldn’t go ashore, because even this was aboriginal land, but we couldn’t face any more sailing and needed to get some decent sleep. After a few hours the swell turned around and began to hit us on the beam, which is never comfortable and a sure fire trigger for lost sleep and tinkling crockery. The good news was that the sea conditions were right and there was room to swing about; I could finally try a trick that Virginia had mentioned to us months ago.
Picture this: We’re at anchor. Boats at anchor are designed to point into wind, so the wind is coming from dead ahead. The swell is slapping into us from starboard (right hand side). I got a long rope and tied one end to the anchor chain where it dropped over the bow roller, and the other end to the port stern quarter (left back) of the boat. Returning to the front of the boat, I let out ten extra metres of anchor chain, dragging that end of the rope far below the surface of the water. Strolling back to the stern end of the rope, I attached it to a winch and wound it in, dragging the stern around to port, and pointing the bow into the swell. Rather than streaming off the anchor in a straight fore-and-aft line, the boat was now hanging sideways on a Y-shaped harness. The rocking stopped. Brilliant. Thankyou, Virginia.
In the morning we got up and looked at the perfect and inviting beach. Ah well. We had no permit, and anyway it was time to move on. We hoisted sail and headed out of the bay.
Just for a change we had a perfect combination of strong following winds and a swell that was directly astern. We could move around the yacht freely, read books and concentrate on small tasks without feeling seasick. It seemed as good a time as any to learn how to make an eye splice.
SEAMANSHIP
We’d planned to reach Black Point in the large bay of Port Essington by midnight, but we were making cracking progress and turned into the entrance shortly after nightfall. It was a pitch black moonless night, and much of the territory up here is not well charted. There are some spot heights and guesstimated contours, but even these are only 95% certain to be within 2 metres vertically and 500 metres horizontally, which is quite a lot of uncertainty. Nevertheless there wasn’t much that we could do about it, so we charged through in pitch darkness at something over six knots and, navigating by GPS, dropped anchor in 5 metres of water a respectable distance on the chart from the invisible reef and the invisible shore.
Once everything was ship-shape, I got out the big spotlight to have a last check for any hazards, and illuminated Black Point Beach only a few metres away in front of the bow. We hastily weighed anchor and backed off a few hundred yards before putting it back down again.
The first barrier to our westward route was a group of three long island chains, all running parallel to each other SW to NE. The first set were the Bromby Islets sticking up ten miles from the top of mainland Arnhem Land. Then we had to cross a channel called the Malay Road and squeeze between a couple of the English Companys Islands, before finally crossing Donnington Sound and finding a route through the Wessel Islands.
The most obvious route (apart from the long way around over the top of the Wessels) was to sneak between the Brombys and Cape Wilberforce at the top of Arnhem Land, run the gap between Cotton and Wigram Islands, and then take the Gulgari Rip between Raragala and Guluwuru Islands.
WESTWARD
The only problem with this plan was that each crossing demanded a particular time of the tide. Get it wrong and we could, for instance, face a 12 knot opposing current through the Gulgari Rip.
After a little thought and some work with the guides and tide tables we realised that if we left Gove shortly after midnight, we could use the moonlight to get out of the harbour and be crossing the Brombys at slack tide just after dawn. Then we had just enough time to get across the Malay Road and through the English Companys before the tide started flooding, after which the sail across Donnington Sound would bring us to the Gulgari Rip at the top of the following tide.
One disadvantage of the plan was that the literature was quite vague about the exact time that the tide turns in each of the passes, but we thought that we had probably figured it close enough.
We arrived at the Brombys in the pre-dawn light. The channel was half a mile across and we crossed it without any problems.
THROUGH THE FIRST GAP
The gap between Cotton and Wigram was more of a dogleg and reputed to have a four-knot rip. Even though we must have been close to slack tide we still got sucked through, and had to do some fancy footwork to avoid an area of boiling rip at the western end, where the seabirds were having a breakfast feeding frenzy.
CLIFFS OF COTTON ISLAND
BREAKFAST AT THE RIP
It’s about fifteen miles across Donnington Sound to the Wessel Islands, so we took it in turns to sleep.
The Gulgari Rip between Raragala and Guluwuru Islands is also known as ‘The Hole in the Wall’ because it is so narrow and difficult to see. Decent winds saw us arriving half an hour early, and we were a little disappointed at first to see that from the our direction the gap was really obvious. We didn’t want to get too close without committing, but through the binoculars I could make out whitecaps which suggested that the eastward rip was still running towards us. We hove to and drifted in the sunshine for an hour while we ate lunch and waited for the time that we believed that the tide would turn.
At the appointed hour, which was slightly after high tide at faraway Gove, we reset the sails and discovered that the hole had disappeared. Even though I had memorised the surrounding cliff structure when we arrived, the gap was still completely invisible until we found precisely the right approach angle. Our first sight of it must have just been very lucky.
Hoping that we were now at the top of the tide, we sailed into the bay that funnelled us in to the gap, arriving at about half past Gove high tide. We knew that the gap was about 70 metres wide with 30 metres of that navigable, but that’s still only 3 boat lengths across and as we approached it at 5 knots it looked terrifyingly narrow.
APPROACHING THE GULGARI RIP
Once through the jaws, the surrounding cliffs shielded us from the winds and the sails went slack. We’d expected this and had the engine idling in preparation, but we didn’t need it because the boat started to accelerate as the Rip sucked us in.
After that, the ride got surreal. We glided with slack sails between picturesque stacks of rock on either side, with nothing to do beyond keeping the bow pointed at the far end. Here and there, people have smeared graffiti on the rocks to show that they have been through; the crew of HMAS Wollongong were particularly obvious. Tiny bays open out on either side, and it is rumoured that some of them are deep enough to shelter in if you find yourself halfway through and fighting too strong a rip. I can’t imagine trying to get into one of them with your boat already out of control.
JUST PASSING THROUGH
I shot some very bad video that shows some of these bays.
The Rip spat us out into the Arafura Sea, and we popped around the corner to a safe anchorage in Guruliya Bay to get some sleep. In the morning we had a long passage ahead of us.
Gove is another Rio Tinto bauxite mining site, but quite different from the operation on the other side of the Gulf. Whereas the town of Weipa was purpose-built in the wilderness to service the mine, there were already existing settlements on the Gove peninsula when the miners came so they had to fit in around what was already there.
REFINED
Around the harbour itself are situated the Rio Tinto Alcan bauxite refinery and alumina loader, the Perkins delivery barge terminal, fields of sodium hydroxide tailings, and the Gove Yacht Club. Everything else is in Nhulunbuy Township a dozen kilometres down the road.
YACHTS AND TAILINGS
The yacht club gave us a warm welcome, and for a few dollars we purchased temporary membership which gave us access to a shower block and laundry, as well as a key to get in the back door of the pub which was handy when the front door was locked against drunken and screaming aboriginals, an all too frequent occurrence.
GOVE YACHT CLUB
The clientele of the club was a mix of aboriginal drinkers from the dry townships down the road, visting yachties like ourselves, and workers at for Rio Tinto who chose to live aboard rather than in town. The harbour contained quite a few wrecks of old liveaboard boats that had sunk when their tenant moved on to another mining contract.
GOVE HARBOUR FROM THE YACHT CLUB
The taxi service from the yacht club into Nhulunbuy was enormously expensive, so by far the best way to get there was to hire a car for the day. The cheapest service was run by local resident Manny (08 8987 2300) who charged us fifty dollars for the day’s use of a decent Hilux Twin-Cab, immediately saving us money over the cost of a taxi each way.
The ute enabled us to provision, although not to buy alcohol because the township is dry and you need a special license just to buy it from the supermarket.
FORBIDDEN FRUIT
One of the recurrent conversational themes at the club was how difficult it was to get fuel from the Perkins barge dock. Not only was it tricky to manoeuver in and out, but there were quite a few tales about how reluctant they were to service yachts at all. We threw some fuel cans into the back of the ute and filled up at the service station in town.
Nhulunbuy had little character and could be described as a number of houses of various sizes scattered around some small apartment blocks. There were a couple of small and run-down malls offering a supermarket and take-away food, a bank, a few clothing stores and a post office. The civic pride that was so obvious in Weipa was missing here, and the streets were lined with discarded junk.
DOWNTOWN NHULUNBUY
Since we had a car, we braved the “no entry without a permit” signs to visit the art gallery in neighbouring Yrrkala. The gallery was interesting, and so was the museum of artifacts and the photographic record of the conscripted aboriginal forces in WW2, but the gallery prices seemed to us to be rather high. It didn’t seem to hurt their business, though, because the building was scattered with brand new computer equipment and bark and wood paintings that had been packaged up for delivery to satisfied customers.
We spent several evenings at the yacht club and met a lot of interesting people. A bunch of backpackers had recently been abandoned there after crewing for a yacht whos skipper had promised them flights back to Perth from Gove. The yacht had sailed off into the sunset leaving them stranded on the beach, and they’d made the best of it by working at the club. Some kind soul had put them up on one of the boats in the harbour.
We also met Jan and Neville on Panache and Selina and Stephen on Westward II, as well of course Paul on the ‘big grey cat’ who entertained us with tales of his extraordinary life sailing from place to place. Gerry and Alan gave us a tour of Black Gold, probably the highest-tech power boat in Australia, which can run on practically anything – old sump oil, chip fat, coconut oil – because it has been built around a miniature hydrocarbon cracking refinery and computer controlled blending station. On the outside it looks like a rich man’s plaything. Very impressive indeed.
Time passed, and it became clear that Gove is one of those pleasant black holes where your life can slip away in a blur of alcohol and gossip. Some yachts had been there for years. Even the GPS didn’t know what time it was, never really deciding whether we were in Northern Territory or Queensland.
The only real irritant were the sandflies. Almost completely invisible, they were always attacking our lower limbs. We tried nets and mosquito coils and sprays and even set off an insect bomb on the boat, but they were completely unstoppable. According to the chemist in Nhulunbuy, they weren’t actually biting us, but were peeing on us and their pee is really toxic. Bronwyn was particularly susceptible, and all her sandfly sores turned into violently itchy welts.
ATTRACTIVE TO FLIES
It’s a feature of aboriginal life that they love to set fire to things. You can always tell if an island on aboriginal land is inhabited because of the enormous pall of greasy smoke that hangs over it, and here on the mainland it was no different. Every piece of bush was continually burning. Even when a roadside verge had already been reduced to stark black sticks, somebody on the way back from the pub would still try to light it. Long term yacht residents talked of weekly deck washes to remove the stray ash, and indeed Pindimara wasn’t looking too clean herself.
FOOTPRINTS IN THE ASHES
We woke one morning to find the whole peninsula in flames and the anchorage disappearing into the smoke. We took one last trip to shore to load up with water, hand in our key and say goodbye, then set our sights on destinations westward.
It was time to embark on our first proper ocean passage. Although we have done many multi-day non-stop passages, we’ve never really been more than 20 miles from land and there’s almost always been some island or cape within a few hours sailing that we could hide behind if the weather turned nasty.
The trip from Weipa to Gove is a 300-mile straight line across the Gulf of Carpentaria, with no islands or shelter of any kind. We already knew from our voyage to Weipa that the weather in the Gulf was very changeable, but although our GRIB files reflected this, there was nothing really nasty in the forecast for the next few days.
We set off up the channel out of Weipa harbour, carefully giving the working dredgers a wide berth, and crossed into the open sea with a good following wind. The water was so clear, and the seabed sand so yellow, that the terns wheeling about our mast became magically green in the reflected light.
RARE AUSTRALIAN GREEN TERN
Dolphins came to see us off, jostling each other to get the prime position just under the bow. For some reason, a dolphin’s idea of a good time is to have five tonnes of yacht crashing repeatedly down on his head. Each to their own, I guess.
ME NEXT! ME! ME!
The flat landscape of Cape York soon dropped over the horizon, and we were alone in the blazing heat. The instruments told us that the boat was moving, but there were no points of reference and we might as well have been standing motionless in an eternity of blue.
NOBODY HERE BUT US CHICKENS
Later that afternoon, the wind died and left us becalmed. We began to take the sails down in preparation for starting the motor, and then noticed a curious rippling in the surface of the mirror-smooth sea. We looked around a little nervously at the clear blue sky. Nothing was visible, but we were very aware of a breathless pause. Something was about to happen.
Suddenly the cockpit was full of insects. Hundreds of them swarmed all over the boom and the Hydrovane sail, and spun in a motley cloud above the targa. I examined the nearest handful and saw that they were small brown beetles. I assumed that we had encountered a migratory swarm, but then Bronwyn shouted “Ow!” as something bit her, and we realised that there were dozens of different species of all shapes and sizes. In addition to the beetles, which seemed to be a kind of grain thrip, there were enormous black and white horseflies, dung flies in yellow and green, a variety of moths, and some big and evil-looking red-headed wasps. There were even some flightless creatures, scuttling ants and spiders.
In short, it looked as if something had sucked up all the insects from a crop field, carried them twenty miles out to sea, and then dumped them on our boat.
Some years ago, I watched small dust-devils sucking up hay and making crop circles in a field in Belgium, and only a few months ago we saw a waterspout that dropped its load of sea water onto Capricorn which was passing by, so I can only imagine that something similar happened here. The sea is surely a very strange place.
No sooner had we swept the nastiest of the insects overboard, then the wind shifted 180 degrees and we were hurriedly re-hoisting the sails to go close-hauled. It was time to go sailing.
For several days and nights we continued, with fair winds and with none at all, with large swell and small, alternately running, reaching and motoring as conditions dictated. We didn’t see a single other vessel.
KEEPING A VIGILANT LOOKOUT
When the wind was blowing, we let Harriet the hydrovane do the steering, except when the wind dropped too much and the size of the swell exceeded the force of the breeze and made the boom slap at the bottom of every trough. Eventually I worked out a way of tying the boom down, which solved that little problem.
The wind tended to die off completely at night. We came to hate the periods of extended motoring, for the following swell demanded full concentration to stay on course, hour after hour after hour. I cursed the Raytheon dealer in Sydney who was supposed to have repaired our autopilot, but who just wasted our time instead. Our problem was exacerbated by the lack of landmarks, so that instead of simply aiming for a cape or a lighthouse we had to stare continuously at the compass, which is a very tiring way of motoring. At night we had a full moon, which was good for visibility but bad for steering because it washed the stars out and gave us nothing to steer by.
When the sails were up, even without the hydrovane the yacht was balanced and we were free to get up and walk around. Under motor, we were glued to the helmsman’s position. Our backsides became raw from sitting on the hard cockpit seats in the rolling sea, forcing us to adopt ever stranger seating positions in an attempt to bring some new part of our anatomy to bear that wasn’t already red and raw. I cut up some foam and made deck cushions, which made a tremendous psychological difference but which in reality only took the edge off the pain.
The third night was the worst. Turn and turn about, our spells at the wheel became shorter and shorter before we had to call down for a change of watch. Repeatedly rousted from less than two hours of sleep, we rested our chins on the wheel and stared at the compass through scratchy, red raw eyes. We were so tired that the boat was veering as much as sixty degrees to either side. Shortly after dawn we gave up, killed the engine and just let her drift unmanned while we both collapsed gratefully into blissful oblivion.
When we awoke, the sun was high in the sky and the sea was a still as a mill pond. We made breakfast and then fired up the motor again.
The day passed slowly, with no signs of life either human or animal. And then – Land Ho! A distant beach shimmered on the horizon.
We now have some inkling of how those early sailors must have felt when their destination hove into view after months at sea. Our hearts swelled, and we began to grin maniacally. Land! Land! Finally we had something to steer for, and we began to talk about what we would do when we reached land. Would there be showers? Would there be cold beer, would there be steak? Which would we have first?
The shoreline crept closer, until we could distinguish the passage between the mainland and Bremer Island, where aboriginal fires were burning. We’d heard that this was the traditional place for teenage delinquents, who were taken there to re-learn cultural values if they had transgressed against society. If this was still the case, then they certainly seemed to be busy at the moment.
A small yacht sailed out from behind the headland, crew waving cheerily as they passed. Sweaty, smelly, salt-encrusted and weary, we waved back. We had arrived.
We are the proud owners of four thousand dollar’s worth of Katadyn Powersurvivor 40E desalinator, but so far we had never managed to get it running properly. With the coast-hopping segment of our voyage behind us and some long non-stop passage-making ahead of us, I really wanted to get it going. The opportunities for filling up with clean fresh water over the top end and down the west coast will be few and far between.
KATADYN POWERSURVIVOR 40E
The problem with water-makers is that you can only test them when you are out in deep clean ocean, because any trace of organics (as found inshore) or chlorine (as found in tap water) can permanently and expensively kill the osmotic membrane. Since arriving in northern Queensland, we had been pretty permanently sailing through orange algal bloom, which is no good at all.
The story so far was that sometimes it made water, and sometimes it just blew bubbles, and there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. I variously re-plumbed, bypassed and short-circuited different parts of the machine in accordance with the instructions in the Katadyn manual, and after carefully following the troubleshooting flow diagrams, sent it back to the dealer for testing.
The dealer fired it up, said that there was nothing wrong with it, and sent it back (a process that spanned several weeks and as many marina office drop boxes). I plumbed it back in, and hey presto it worked first time. We waited a couple of days and then tried again, and sure enough it refused to make any fresh water at all. It seemed to only work when I was testing it, not when I actually wanted some water. The dealer didn’t have any opinion apart from “there’s something wrong with your installation, maybe an air bubble somewhere”. Thanks a bunch.
Far too late in the day, I thought of consulting Nigel Calder’s excellent “Boat Owner’s Mechanical and Electrical Manual”, and found that the limiting factor was whether or not the unit could build up enough water pressure on the osmotic membrane. Since the unit doesn’t have a pressure gauge, there’s no way to tell whether it has or not. Mr Calder opined that there is a direct correlation between the amp-hours in the house batteries and the pressure in the unit, but unfortunately the distinction between ‘the batteries are charged enough’ and ‘the batteries are not charged enough’ is too subtle to be picked up by our boat’s instrumentation.
Before installing the unit I had done the math and knew that I would need to run the tow generator at the same time as the water-maker in order to get enough power, which is what I had been doing. On paper it looked fine, but perhaps the reality was different.
I experimented some more, and after considerable frustration and more than one occasion when I announced that I was chucking the whole thing over the side, I settled on first running the tow generator alone for an hour or two to make sure that there was enough reserve in our (apparently already fully charged) batteries, and only then firing up the water-maker.
IT’S WORKING!
Finally, the Katadyn makes water. We can now reliably make five litres an hour. If the sun is high over the solar panels and we’re pulling the tow generator at over five knots, then we can run the unit for three or four hours without unduly stressing the system. Since we can get by on about 15 litres of water a day, we are now borderline self-sufficient in fresh water. Hurrah!
Weipa is a Rio Tinto company town of 3500 souls (a third of them children!) that exists to service the largest bauxite mine in the world. Many of those bulk carriers that we encountered in our journey up the reef were carrying bauxite ore to the smelters that we visited in Gladstone, so we were interested to see this end of the process as well.
From the chart we could see that there are two rivers that flow past Weipa, Mission to the north and Embley to the south. The Embley River is the shipping channel and well provided with navigation markers. The Mission River is much, much closer to town but has no markers and nobody in the literature seems to mention it as a potential anchorage. We went with the herd and put our anchor down in Embley across from the ore loader, in a large natural harbour ringed with beaches and mangroves.
We could see some houseboat moorings against the north shore, and there seemed to be a couple of other yachts anchored over there, but they were close to the ore loaders and we decided instead to shelter under the lee of the southern shore. The anchorage was calm, comfortable and quiet, except at the bottom of the tide when there was a 4.5 knot rip but it only rocked the boat for an hour or so in the morning. Occasionally a Panamax-class bulk carrier came by, but the harbour is big enough that we didn’t really notice, except when they eclipsed the sun.
The only way to shore is by Evans Landing, a public jetty that gives access to Steve the houseboat guy’s premises and little else apart from a telephone box, which you will need because the only realistic way into town from there is to call a taxi. Evans Landing was a mile away across the bay from our anchorage, but not a problem for our little 3 horsepower dinghy as long as we avoided low tide.
AN ANCHORAGE FAR, FAR AWAY. CAN YOU SEE OUR MAST?
Naturally the first thing that we did when we got to shore was to hunt down the pub, in which we were stymied because there is no pub, or indeed any real town centre. Since Weipa was originally just housing for the mine, it hasn’t grown up around a traditional centre, and has more the feel of a bunch of haphazard suburbs.
SPQ (SINGLE PERSONS’ QUARTERS)
CHURCH, ALSO USED AS CYCLONE SHELTER
There are, however, two clubs. Several people told us that the reason that Weipa has a Golf Club and a Lawn Bowls Club is because these are the two sports that you can perform while drinking.
We randomly chose the Bowls Club, and had a great time and met (and drank with) a large number of interesting and colourful characters.
CRAZY WEIPA LASS
BRONWYN AND MOIRA
We also managed to eat some local prawns. This may not sound much of a feat, but all the way up the Queensland coast we have been trying to eat local seafood, only to find that all their catch is frozen and sent to the city. When the local restaurants need fish, they have to import it frozen from the usual sources.
The Weipa Bowls Club had Banana Prawns straight from the Gulf of Carpentaria. They were excellent.
A couple of days later, we got on a tour bus and went to the mine. It was another fascinating trip, not least because it is a far cry from your traditional open-cast mine. Bauxite is near as dammit just lying around on the surface, so all the miners really have to do is come along with a scoop and pick it up. Of course, it is slightly more complicated than that, and they get to use some very big scoops…
TOO SMALL FOR BAUXITE. THIS LITTLE CHAP IS FOR MOVING TOPSOIL
BELLY LOADER PASSING BY WITH 170 TONNES OF ORE
BRONWYN BEFRIENDS THE TRAIN DRIVER
Tomorrow we’re heading out on an extended passage across the sea to Gove. Since the Bureau of Meteorology clearly has no idea about the weather in the Gulf, we haven’t read the weather but we have downloaded some GRIB files which tell us that we will have decent winds during the day but nothing but motoring at night.
There are a number of channels out from the Horn Island anchorage, each leading in a different direction between different islands. There are two that are potentially useful for a south-westerly exit toward the Gulf of Carpentaria, and each has its own collection of interesting tides and currents. There was quite a bit of detailed discussion about them amongst the yachties anchored behind Horn, including a fair bit of third hand local knowledge.
To us it seemed fairly simple. Option One was to fight the notorious Boat Channel with its 6 knot currents and shoals, then to double back through Endeavour Strait with its rocks and shifting sandbanks. Option Two was to slip out of Normanby Passage on a rising tide and to cross into the Gulf using the shipping lane at Booby Island. It didn’t seem like much of a contest.
Low tide was at dawn, but by the time we’d had breakfast and cleared the boat for sea it was closer to eight o’clock and already approaching the top of the tide (the tides are pretty strange around Thursday Island). This suited our planned relaxed start and we accepted the 3.5 knot boost down Normanby and ran gently over to Booby Island, from whence it is a hundred mile straight run down the Gulf to the company mining town of Weipa.
For a while we marvelled at the feeling of travelling southward, a first for this trip. Then we sat back with Harriet at the helm and admired the pale blue skies and azure seas sparkling in the sunshine.
The marine weather forecast had been unusually precise, with 15-20 knots from the southeast and no change expected for the next three days. As we came abeam of the exit to the Endeavour Strait, I noticed a few wispy mare’s tails high in the sky. These are rarely a good sign and, thinking about the very shallow waters in the strait to the east of us, I commented that this would be pretty nasty place to get caught in a storm. Bronwyn replied with something like, “When was the last time that we saw any rain? I can’t remember.”
It was Bronwyn’s watch so I went below to get some rest. After a while I became aware that the bunk was shuddering as if we were travelling at high speed, so I looked out of the saloon window and noticed that we were heeled over so far that the deck rail was in the water.
Up on deck, I found Harriet steering perfectly and Bronwyn looking in some bemusement at the huge squall that was spewing out of the Endeavour Strait and rolling towards us. Hurriedly we shortened sail and Bronwyn got into her life vest and harness while I hid in the companionway under the shelter of the dodger.
THANKYOU, ENDEAVOUR STRAIT
It was quite the squall, with driving rain and 35 knot winds. Bronwyn grinned at me through the water pouring down her face as we hit 8 knots. “At last,” she said, “I’m finally washing off all that sea salt.”
Then a big wave reared up and landed on her head.
EIGHT-KNOT BRONWYN
When we emerged from the other side of the squall, we found that while we we’d been in it, the outside world had gone grey and there were more squalls and storms on every quarter.
I quickly went below to check that everything was battened down and then lay down on the bunk. Bronwyn had waterproofs, safety gear and the helm and by far the safest place for me to be if the boat was going to get a thrashing, was in bed.
Night fell, and the worst of it was over. Bronwyn came below to scrape off the salt, and I went on deck for my watch. The storm had left a legacy of 25 knot winds and lumpy beam seas which made everything a bit uncomfortable. The rain had stopped, but I spent most of my watch under the dodger watching the helmsman’s position disappearing under spray as confused waves slammed into the boat. I was very glad that the wind vane was doing all the hard work.
The sun came up, and we were out of sight of land and becalmed under a motionless blue sky. Flying fish scattered across the surface like little jewelled helicopters, frightened by an enormous swordfish that swiped at them with its bill. A hammerhead shark cruised by, cocking its curious head sideways to see if we were worth eating. Up above, petrels and terns wheeled and dived, taking inordinate interest in the rigging.
WISH I HAD A BIRD BOOK WITH ME
It was all very beautiful, but it wasn’t getting us any closer to Weipa. We fired up the engine and motor-sailed.
Rather than take our little 3 horsepower tender across the rather unpredictable channel between Horn Island and Thursday Island, we caught the ferry.
TI (as it is known locally) is less than a square mile of tropical island, and very pleasant. The people that we met could be divided into the ones that were working in the shops, who were either grumpy or apparently bemused that we wanted to buy anything, and the people who were not working in shops, who were universally happy and smiling and having a good time. Certainly the pubs were doing a roaring trade. I was particularly taken by the sign outside the Royal Hotel, which as well as offering “the loudest music in town”, issued the stern declaration that it would refuse to serve anybody “with visual armpit hair”.
We visited the very pretty catholic church, and also the island’s graveyard which contains a great many memorials to islanders who died far too young while diving for pearl and trochus shells. There was also a section for Japanese fisherman who had died chasing the same dream.
One other curious feature of the graveyard was the popularity of the grave markers as scaffolding for termite nests.
Australian Customs regards TI very much as their front line against not only immigrants but also pests and diseases. Their big launch was continually running up and down the channel, checking out the boats and boarding incoming yachts and confiscating their fresh food supplies.
We had heard that, even though we were not arriving from abroad, we would still need to get a certificate of authenticity from the supermarkets which would allow us to keep our fresh food if we were stopped on the way back to the mainland. There was a colourful but uninformative sign on the ferry dock which seemed to back this up, but when we asked at the supermarket they said that all we needed to do was to keep the receipt. We kept our purchases to an absolute minimum just in case, and then ran into a uniformed AQIS (quarantine) guy at the dock. He told us that we didn’t even need the receipt, but then admitted that he’d only been on the job for a week and really had no idea…
There is a cluster of islands a few hours north of Cape York, out in the Torres Strait and on the way to Papua New Guinea. Although they are part of Australia, most of them have been placed off limits to visitors by the Torres Strait Islanders who live there. In the middle of the group, though, are two islands that we can get to.
Thursday Island is well known in the yachting community because it is a convenient place to stop and rest if you are following the trades from the Pacific to destinations westward. In some ways this is a bit odd, because TI (as it is known) offers few facilities to yachts, and the anchorage is poor holding in a vicious current.
We chose to anchor a mile away across the channel by Horn Island, which boasts a calm and comfortable anchorage and a regular ferry to TI.
After sleeping for most of the day, we ventured out onto Horn Island to look around. It comprises only a couple of streets and seems to exist mainly to service the local airstrip (TI itself is far too small to land planes on).
HORN ISLAND FERRY TERMINAL
We naturally gravitated to the only pub, the Wongai Hotel, for a cold beer. Before long we were chatting to Charlotte the barmaid, and then to Matt the off duty duty manager, and then before not too many more beers we seemed to know everybody in the pub.
As the night wore on we switched from beer to wine, then from wine to spirits. The pub closed, Bob the landlord invited us all back to his pool for skinny-dipping and more beers, and then there was an increasingly blurred round of house visits until finally we found ourselves back on Pindimara mixing cocktails as the party continued.
A great pub, a great night, and I really don’t know how I managed to wake up and ferry Matt and Lucy back to the dock in the tender in the morning. Certainly the crew of the ferry said later that it had been very funny to watch. I didn’t even see any darn ferry.
We had embarked on a four-day passage up through the Great Barrier Reef and out into the Torres Strait. The trade winds were blowing fairly consistently and the weather forecast was good. It was also stinking hot, and we discovered that some of our eggs had cooked themselves inside their shells.
The Great Barrier Reef is much more than the outer ribbon reef that protects the eastern coastline from the open ocean. Inside the enclosed lagoon are tens of thousands of square miles of shallow water dotted by uncountable reefs and islands, many of them still uncharted. The reefs are mostly invisible and lurk just below the surface, so the only way that you can know where they are is to pay diligent attention to the charts.
LIZARD ISLAND TO CAPE YORK
I really have to take my hat off to Captain Cook who sailed these waters with no idea what lay beneath. It is a wonder that the Endeavour only suffered one serious accident here. Bligh also passed through in his open boat after having been set adrift by the mutineers on the Bounty. We passed a few of the islands that he stopped at on his epic journey from Tahiti to Indonesia, a feat that he achieved by navigating entirely from memory.
Those men were giants.
One thing that Bligh and Cook didn’t have to contend with were the ore freighters which continually forge their way up and down the coast. With a good chart, it is possible to thread a large vessel through the reefs in any number of ways, but the maritime authorities have now designated a few specific routes and have made it illegal for commercial vessels to stray from them. On the one hand, this guarantees safe passage for the ships without fear of encountering an unmarked reef, and it means that we always know where they are likely to be, and where they will be heading. On the other hand, the designated channel is often the only reasonable route through, creating pinch points where all vessels, commercial and private, must come together. This is especially exciting at night when you are tired and alone on deck and find that your fragile cockleshell is suddenly the focal point of three enormous cargo ships.
SHIPS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT
We planned a route that largely avoided the shipping channels in the daytime, but which used them at night when we could take advantage of their navigation beacons.
The days passed and we settled into shipboard routine. The sailing was generally easy, although the trades tended to blow harder at night. In the day, they sometimes died right off, or we’d be hit by a squall, but we made good time and rounded Cape York at around three in the morning of the fourth day.
ROUNDING THE CAPE
Cape York is the northenmost tip of mainland Australia, and a milestone on our trip. It gave us an immense sense of achievement to have made it all the way up the east coast. We had now turned the corner, and from now on would be sailing into the sunset.
Coming abeam of Watson Island (where Mrs Watson’s body was found, see our previous blog), Bronwyn tossed out the trolling line to see if she could catch us a fish supper. Within half an hour or so, something struck hard. It fought mightily in the distance, but eventually Bronwyn managed to haul it in hand over hand so that we could get a look at it.
We realised that instead of catching dinner, we had hooked well over a metre of something that looked very much like a shark. It was muscular with a flattened body, brown above and white below, a wide mouth like a catfish, and big dorsal and pectoral fins. It wasn’t in any of our fish books, but it certainly didn’t look like anything that we wanted to share our cockpit with, so we decided to let it go.
The only problem was that it had swallowed our one and only trolling spoon, and we needed it back. For almost an hour, Bronwyn played the enormous beast back and forth, trying to tire it enough to get it close to the boat so that I could pull out the hook and let it go. We got so engrossed in the task that I forgot to look where we were going, and got a real shock when I checked our course over my shoulder and found that we were about to T-bone a sand island.
At that precise moment, the wind increased to 30 knots and stayed there, leaving me with only a tiny slot between the edge of the island and a 7-knot gybe. At the same time, the fish was experiencing a whole extra knot of speed, and Bronwyn’s shoulders were aching with the effort of keeping it with us.
NOT SUPPER
A few minutes later, with disaster averted, we pointed the boat into the (suddenly well-behaved) wind and then cursed as the big fish made a sprint under the boat. If it got the line wrapped around the propeller, we would never get it back. However, it seemed to know what it was doing, because the line went slack and the fish swam off, leaving our tackle behind and apparently only slightly exerted by several miles of hard fighting.
We woke behind Cape Flattery to a weather forecast telling us to expect 30 knot winds again in the evening and all of the next day. We could have stayed there, but it was pretty dull and not very well insulated from the swell. Lizard Island beckoned from less than 20 miles away, giving us ample time to get there and hide before the blow started again.
When we poked our nose out from behind Cape Flattery, we found a reasonable 20-25 knots which took us to Lizard in no time at all.
We’d heard good reports of the island and were keen to stay for a while to explore. When we arrived at the Mrs Watsons Bay anchorage, we were a little surprised to find more than a dozen cruising boats packed in among the coral heads, as well as a fair sized but inconspicuous resort on the shore.
ROOM FOR ONE MORE?
PINDIMARA AT THE EDGE OF THE REEF
The bay is named after the eponymous wife of a beche-de-mere fisherman who was attacked there by aboriginals while her husband was out fishing. She and a servant and her newborn child escaped to sea in a cast iron boiling tub, and eventually washed up on what is now called Watson Island, where all three of them perished.
The water was blue and crystal clear; we could actually see the anchor on the bottom. The island gave good protection from the developing swell, but very little from the actual wind, so we put out all 70 metres of chain in preparation for the night ahead.
It did indeed blow that night, 30 knots or more, and all the boats got a good thrashing. I kept being awoken by strange sounds that had me running up on deck, but the anchor held. We were a bit tired the next morning, and simply stayed below all day as the wind continued to howl.
The next night was a little calmer, and by lunchtime the waves had died down enough that we were finally able to lower to outboard into the tender and go ashore.
We found a trail leading across the island and through the Pandanus swamps that fill the level ground between the rocky hills.
OFF INTO THE MANGROVES
PANDANUS SWAMP
LOCAL BEACHCOMBER
The trail led to the ‘Blue Lagoon’, an unusual geological formation in that coral lagoons are usually features of reef rather than of continental islands. In the case of Lizard Island it also provides yacht anchorage in calm weather, but those conditions certainly didn’t apply today and nobody had tried it.
THE BLUE LAGOON
There were, however, a few kite-surfers playing around, having sailed around the island from the resort.
JUST PASSING THROUGH
Lizard Island is also famous for having a peak that was climbed by Captain Cook when he was trying to find a vantage point from which he could plan a way out of the Great Barrier Reef. We set off on his trail on the following morning. It was a pleasant clamber over enormous granite boulders, shaded here and there by gums, and the views down into the reefs of Mrs Watsons Bay were spectacular.
BRONWYN AND MRS WATSON
THE WAY TO COOKS LOOK
From the top of the hill, we could faintly make out in the distance the dark blue of lurking ribbon reef, and the lighter blue of safe passages. If Cook hadn’t successfully spotted the gap, then he might not have made it back to England and Australians today might all be speaking French. It was very satisfying to stand there on a hilltop on an island in the far Great Barrier Reef, staring out to sea and feeling the connection to the history of our adopted country. Bien sûr.
Back at shore level, we went for a welcome swim in the gloriously clear water, and used the coral sand to scrub away the weeks of sun tan lotion and grime before returning to Pindimara for a rare and welcome freshwater shower.
We’ll definitely be coming back to Lizard Island again. It has genuinely beautiful white coral beaches, a very pretty landscape, some serious rocks, and a warm and easily accessible reef. Wonderful.
But now, it’s time to move on. The Torres Strait beckons.
For all that we’ve technically been sailing inside the Great Barrier Reef for several weeks, the reef itself has always been invisibly far out to sea. From here northward, though, the Barrier comes close inshore and is a navigational force to be reckoned with, comprising hundreds of scattered reefs lurking invisibly just below the waves. There is a well-charted and waymarked shipping channel to ease navigation, but it is full of large ships moving ore and containers up and down the coast.
THE NEXT HUNDRED MILES OF REEF
After weeks of dead calm, we’d been wishing for a breeze. Dusk fell, a humpback whale treated us to an aerial display in our wake, and – wonder of wonders – the wind picked up to the low twenties. Our speed increased to 6-7 knots under full sail as we entered the channel. Harriet was doing a fine job of sailing, so while Bronwyn went below to rest, I was free to sit in comfort and idly formulate an elaborate metaphor for the process of sailing through the reef at night.
Imagine getting into your car to drive to the next town. First, however, you spray-paint the windows black so that you can’t see out. Then you tape your mobile phone to the dashboard and log on to Google Maps. You start the engine and put it into gear, and from now on you are completely at the mercy of the accuracy of the map and where your phone says that you are.
You can be reasonably certain that all the streets and intersections are marked, as well as the more obvious light poles and roadside furniture, but you just have to deal with curbs, speed humps, rubbish bins, dogs and cats as you feel your wheels bump over them.
Thankfully there is little other traffic, but you know that if you leave these twisting side-roads and venture onto the highway, you will be sharing the road with fully laden trucks. You also know that they can’t see you either, and that in any case all their brake lines have been disconnected.
As I lay in the cockpit spinning this tale and watching meteorites blaze across the milky brilliance of the starry sky, Pindimara ploughing blindly into pitch darkness at close to hull speed, I thought happily that I wouldn’t trade places with anybody.
The hours passed, and the wind crept up to the mid twenties. Pindimara was now quite overpowered, but there were few gusts and the swells were predictable, so I left the sails up. Harriet the Hydrovane was coping superbly, and tracking better than ever before; I was really coming to appreciate the Hydrovane slogan ‘survive your dream’.
In the early hours of the morning, deep inside the shipping lane with bulk carriers and trawlers passing on either side, the wind crept up into the high twenties and our speed to over seven knots. It was getting decidedly bouncy, so I reckoned that enough was enough and called all hands on deck to reduce sail. To say that the crew tumbled eagerly out of their bunks would be an overstatement, and when Bronwyn did clamber painfully out, she commented that her ‘rest period’ in the bucking bunk seemed to have consisted mainly of two hours of strenuous but inadvertent Pilates exercise.
We quickly reduced sail and got back onto course. As is our usual practice on night passages, we’d gone straight for the main’s third reef, but Harriet soon picked up the pace to a respectable 4-5 knots. I was pretty tired by now so I gratefully put my head down while Bronwyn took a watch.
At a little after 4am I took over again, and immediately got my feet wet as a wave curled over the stern. The swell was now well over 2 metres, and the wind was touching 30 knots. It had also swung around onto the beam, and even with the third reef in, we were overpowered for a reach. The wind was howling in the rigging, and the hull was thrumming and making odd little banging sounds under my feet. We were stll four hours from the safe harbour at Lizard Island, and I seriously considered replacing the main with our storm trysail for the final leg. Instead I chose discretion, and put our tail between our legs and ran for nearby Cape Flattery, which at 260 metres high looked to be big enough to hide behind.
The wind was easier to manage with it behind us, but the wind speed continued to increase and of course we were now surfing down 3 metre swells in the darkness. As the Cape loomed out of the gathering dawn light, I once again roused Bronwyn who navigated us in to shelter between the Cape itself and the chart position of a sunken wreck.
Anchoring for once in the light, we immediately fell into bed and slept until lunch time. Although we were snug in our bay, the 30-knot wind continues to howl over our heads.
We were motoring out of Cairns with no wind and glassy seas. As evening fell it was clear that the situation was not going to improve, an opinion which was backed by the GRIB data that I downloaded which did, however, intimate that things might be better on the morrow.
Rather than burn fuel all night, we checked the chart for likely anchorages and settled on the Low Islets, which are really just a mangrove swamp sticking out of the sea. Naturally we arrived in full dark, to find a good sprinkling of yachts already there – including a large number of unlit tourist punts, which our Lucas cruising guide had warned us about – and found some swinging room at the back in about 12 metres of water on a sand and coral bottom.
Bronwyn magically produced a full roast lamb dinner with all the trimmings. I don’t know how she does that.
LOW ISLETS. PRETTY LOW, HUH?
LOW ISLETS LIGHTHOUSE AND RESORT
In the morning, there still wasn’t any wind, so we idled away the early morning on little chores, grumbling in a mild sort of way about a whole week of still days and dull motoring.
By ten o’clock the promised trade winds arrived as a gentle breeze. We cleared up below and prepared for sea. While hoisting the anchor, we noticed a very large fish taking an inordinate amount of interest in our hull, over a metre long and very powerfully built. Even when we started to motor out of the bay, it kept station with us, and we noticed a big propeller scar just behind the dorsal fin. Perhaps it was used to being fed by tourists.
And tourists there certainly were, in plentiful supply. As we left, they began to arrive in droves on large commercial sail boats of all descriptions, including an enormous cat ketch and a pseudo-oriental junk. All these people were decanted either onto the beach by the lighthouse, or into one of the many fishing punts and jet skis that littered the shore.
Already far from the madding crowd, gentle winds pushed us northward. To our left, the Great Dividing Range marched impressively along the shore line, cloud-shrouded thousand-metre peaks rejoicing in such names as Mount Sorrow, Mount Surprise, and Mount Unbelievable. Captain Cook had a bad time along here, hence also Cape Tribulation, Struck Island, Weary Bay, plus of course Endeavour Reef where he grounded and only got off with quite serious damage which had to be repaired ashore in what later became Cooktown.
We’ve stayed in Cairns before and found it be simply a tourist conduit for the Great Barrier Reef, so we only popped in to run some errands and to buy some fuel.
OBLIGATORY BEACH PHOTO
We also needed to do quite a bit of printing for our schoolwork, so rather than anchor in the ‘duck pond’ in the main river we booked a berth at Marlin Marina where we could access shore power. The marina was OK, but not particularly friendly and surprisingly – and annoyingly – lacked any kind of chandlery.
What did amaze us was the shorefront development that has sprung up since our last visit. We had previously found Cairns’ night life to be somewhat dull (always excepting the excellent Kanis seafood restaurant), but now the waterfront is ablaze with interesting pubs, restaurants and cafes and local people having a good time.
BRONWYN AT KANIS
We had a great time at the bar there and met a lot of interesting people, but our chores were done and there was no reason to stay so we cast off and motored back out of the river. Unbeknownst to us, the Alana Rose, which has been a week or two ahead of us all the way up the coast, had returned to Cairns to repair some electronics, so we must have passed within a hundred metres of them on our way out without noticing. That was a shame, because we’ve only ever spoken to Nancy and John via email and it would have been great to meet them in the flesh.
Out in the channel, we discovered that yes, there was still no wind at all. We really wanted to make some northing, so we resigned ourselves to a day of motoring in the stifling heat.
As well as a few whales, which surfaced to breathe but which otherwise didn’t show themselves, we came across another of those yellow swimming snakes, which decided after a while that it didn’t like the look of us and dived vertically downwards.
Rested and content after our sojourn on Hinchinbrook Island, it was time to put in some northerly miles. We were experiencing no wind at all, but we assumed that it was still blowing out to sea. A few hours later, we poked our nose out around the northernmost tip of the island and picked up a lovely nor’easter that had us flying along towards the next set of islands, the Family Group.
As dusk fell, we came abeam of the resort island of Dunk. We passed into its wind shadow, and never came out. The wind had died completely. I downloaded some GRIB files and found that the forecast was for no wind at all for the next few days. We considered anchoring at Dunk, but felt that we hadn’t really made any progress – Hinchinbrook was still in sight – so we decided to motor for a few more hours and anchor off the Barnard Group instead.
We arrived at the North Barnard Islands after dusk but before moonrise. It was very dark indeed. We slipped into our usual anchoring routine of one of us on deck steering with night-accustomed vision and the other down below watching the GPS and chart and calling up course adjustments. We knew from the chart that we were rounding Kent Island at a distance of a few tens of metres, but we could barely make it out as we slipped between it and an equally invisible breaking rock.
When we got into the reef between Kent and neighbouring Jessie Island, we found another yacht already there, thankfully with anchor lights correctly lit, but there was room enough for both of us.
A mild but continual beam swell made for a restless night, but the morning brought no wind so we took it easy. While standing on deck admiring the scenery, I spotted a derelict old dugout canoe floating towards us. I got out the binoculars (a bird-watching present from my parents when I was about ten; who’d have thought then that one day I’d be using them on a yacht in the Pacific?) to have a closer look, but there didn’t seem to be anybody aboard.
ABANDONED CANOE?
As I watched, the canoe vanished and then reappeared, and I suddenly realised that it wasn’t a boat at all but the tail flukes of a whale hanging head-down in the water. It was pretty shallow, so I can only assume that it was resting with its head on the bottom.
There was still no wind. I attempted to update the blog, but found that I only had one bar of signal. This was an excellent chance to test out the antenna that we’d bought in Townsville. We hadn’t been able to source either a mount or a patch cable to attach it to the modem, but I’d knocked something up using copper wire, aluminium foil, gaffer tape and string. It all worked perfectly, first time, with four bars of broadband. Not a bad upgrade for $100.
While washing up after a leisurely brunch, we felt a faint zephyr of a breeze and realised that there was a distant rain squall marching across the horizon. Guessing that we were on the edge of a small weather system, we quickly cleared the boat for sea and set up the sails for the anticipated sou’wester.
JESSIE ISLAND. NOT MUCH TO HIDE BEHIND
It did come, but it came slowly, drifting us along at only a couple of knots. For the rest of the day the squall stayed stubbornly on the horizon and refused to come closer, so that in order to make any headway we had to sail wing-on-wing in the light breeze. This entails keeping the main sail hovering on the edge of a gybe and flying the jib on the wrong side, which takes a bit of concentration when you don’t have a pole to stop the jib from collapsing. In the end we pulled in the foresail and let Harriet bimble us along at 3 knots on the main alone.
As evening drew in, even that little breeze dropped and we started the motor. We were a little low on fuel, and dislike motoring at night, so we decided to hide behind nearby Normandy Island, one of the Franklin Group. The last dying rays of dusk allowed us to spot a couple of other yachts and some other mysterious floating objects through the binoculars before we arrived in full dark, which was just as well because when we arrived they were largely unlit.
One yacht was showing an anchor light, but a large cat which really should have known better had only hung out a handful of dim little garden solar lanterns. There were also two vessels belonging to the Cruise Franklin company, one with a single solar lantern that ran down its batteries and went out as we watched, and the other completely dark and which we were lucky not to run down.
We had hoped to get some shelter from the SE swell, but in the event it parted around the island into two streams which hit us simultaneously at 90 degrees to each other, rolling and pitching at the same time. We made the best of it until 3 am when it all died down and we were able to get some proper sleep.
The next morning brought the lightest of winds again, and in the end we motor-sailed the last stretch into Cairns. Where are the famed continuous trade winds when you need them?
According to the official charts, the bar at Hinchinbrook Island is too shallow for us to cross. However, there is an active three-mile long sugar loader with leading lights across the shoals to a jetty, showing that the channel is regularly used. In addition, we’d emailed Nancy and John on Alana Rose who had recently crossed the bar, and they told us that they’d had good depths at high tide.
BRONWYN AND THE SUGAR LOADER
We had no problems getting across. The leads and navigation buoys took us so close to the sugar loader and the old molasses jetty that it was possible to chat quietly to the fishermen as we glided past.
FISHING OFF THE MOLASSES JETTY
There was still very little wind, so we motor-sailed up the passage (or ‘did a Bob’ as we call it, in honour of another blogger who circumnavigated Australia in a Bavaria with, as far as we can tell, his engine running most of the time). Hinchinbrook Channel is about twenty miles long and allows you to squeeze between the mountains of Hinchinbrook Island to the east, and the coast-hugging Cardwell Range to the west. The Channel is lined with mangroves which provide a vivid bright green contrast to the darker green gums behind, while the stark rock of the mountains looms impressively in the background.
HINCHINBROOK MOUNTAIN FROM THE CHANNEL
After a very scenic day, we pulled off the main channel into Gayundah Creek, one of the many drainage creeks that cut down from the mountains and through the mangroves. The breathless quiet was broken only by the occasional call of a bird or splash of a fish in the shallows. In the background we could hear sporadic ‘clunk’ noises that sounded vaguely like a branch snapping, or somebody slapping the water. We guessed that they were either made by frogs or by air bubbling up from the swamp mud, although we never did get to the bottom of it.
MORNING MIST IN GAYUNDAH CREEK
The many secluded and winding tributary channels just cried out to be explored, so we unshipped the dinghy and spent a happy afternoon alternately motoring and paddling in the shallows.
CREEK, PADDLE
The creeks were teeming with life, from rays and bait fish in the water, to crabs and white herons on the mud, to scintillating kingfishers flashing through the air.
Paddling gently back home, we got a clear view of our stern. One way of spotting a proper cruising boat is to see how much junk is hanging off the back.
We rode a nice nor’easter out of Townsville and back past Magnetic Island, where the evening weather made a mockery of our plans for a night cruise and left us bobbing in a perfect millpond sea without a breath of a breeze. We went below and cooked dinner before submitting to the inevitable and starting the engine.
It was extraordinarily dark, but after a while a red moon rose and drowned out most of the stars, revealing the scattered islands of the Palm Group as we threaded our way between them.
Bronwyn had gone below for a nap, and in order to counteract the mind-numbing tedium of motoring, I had loaded some Spanish lessons onto the new ipod that we’d bought in Townsville. It was a pleasant way of passing the time, and nobody was around to hear me declaiming loudly about my requirement for an explanation of the precise route to Santiago railway station.
A little later, my lessons done, I searched through the music files that I had randomly downloaded from my computer onto the ipod, looking for something that would suit motoring by moonlight through a crowded island group in the middle of the night. After a few false starts, I rediscovered some old live Whitesnake recordings, and spent the next few hours cheerfully navigating to the strains of Micky Moody on guitar.
We were heading for the passage behind Hinchinbrook Island, and in order to cross the bar we needed to wait for both sunlight and the tide. There are a couple of islands to the north of the Palm Group that provide convenient anchorages, and we dropped our pick in a mirror-smooth bay behind Fantome Island.
We had a great night’s sleep. In fact, the weather was so still that we could probably have slept floating on the open sea. In the morning we woke easily to the alarm and began motoring the final few hours to the southern entrance to Hinchinbrook Passage.
We spent several days enjoying the cafes and pubs of Townsville. The Palmer Street restaurant district is just behind the TMBYC marina, and from there it is but a short stroll to the Flinders Street East pub and club circuit. We didn’t have a single bad drink or indifferent meal in Townsville. We became regulars at the Townsville Brewery, situated in the impressive old General Post Office building and home to seven or eight enormously impressive boutique beers, and Cactus Jack’s which offers excellent margaritas in its rooftop bar with views out over the town.
TOWNSVILLE BREWERY
The other big draw is The Strand, which is the area backing Townsville’s long beachfront. The town planners have done a marvellous job here in creating something akin to La Rambla in Montevideo and many other latin countries. The beach remains pristine, but is now backed by a wide boulevard dotted with palm trees, sculptures, memorials, and playgrounds for young and old alike.
THE STRAND
One of these playgrounds is a fountain designed for playing in, complete with water cannons and a big bucket which periodically soaks everybody in the area.
WATER PARK
The Strand is delightfully uncommercial. Some low-rise hotels sit unobtrusively far back across the road, and the occasional cafes and restaurants are tucked away in secluded corners so as not to detract from the sweep of the bay. Bronwyn’s favourite was Juliette’s, a gelateria that makes its own gelato on the spot and which does cracking business well into the night.
BRONWYN AND PATRICIA AT JULIETTE’S
As well as the beach itself, sections of which are protected by stinger nets to guard against jellyfish, The Strand also boasts a pool at each end. The Tobruk pool was used for training by Australia’s olympic swimmers in the sixties (the entrance hall alone is well worth a visit for its collection of photos from that period), and the Kissing Point Rock Pool is an artificial swimming lagoon designed to provide safe swimming in the stinger season.
KISSING POINT ROCK POOL
We get the feeling that Townsville is destined for good things. It has not escaped the world’s current financial problems; for instance, the central mall was closed down and scheduled for major prestigious redevelopment, but this project has been put on hold so that a large part of the centre now sits idle and locals have to travel to the suburbs to do their shopping. All around, premium apartments have been built – neither too high nor too offensive, more kudos to the town planners – but we understood that hundreds of them stand empty awaiting buyers who never came. On the other hand, the town’s prosperity was never derived from tourism, and the constant flow of mineral, agricultural and livestock wealth continues to flow from the North Queensland interior to the various loaders and refineries to the south of the town.
Day followed perfect day, and we began to think that we would never get around to leaving. It was nice to be stuck somewhere because we wanted to be, instead of – as has happened so often on this trip – being trapped by storms. In the end, though, we realised that if we were going to get around the northern coast of Australia before the advent of the cyclone season, then we needed to get moving.
After picking up Patricia from Townsville airport, we sailed across to nearby Magnetic Island for the weekend. Captain Cook named it “Magnetical” because he believed that it was affecting his compass, but it seems that he was mistaken. This can happen to the best of us; see for instance this harrowing tale from the extremely experienced crew of our friends on Pelagic.
The island may lack magnetic anomalies, but it does have some beautiful bays and walking tracks. The best anchorage is in Horseshoe Bay to the north, offering good protection from the SE trade winds, so we dropped anchor there for a few days while we explored. Although it was a busy bay, there was plenty of room for all, and there was no appreciable swell despite continuing strong trade winds.
HORSESHOE BAY
A couple of thousand permanent residents are scattered around a number of small settlements connected by a circular bus route. Apart from one notable exception (a younger chap presumably new to the job), the bus drivers tried to make the route more interesting by keeping the accelerator pedal firmly to the metal at all times. They would maintain power until a few metres short of a bus stop, whereupon they would stamp heavily on the brake. Passengers quickly learned that it was necessary to wait for the bus to stop bouncing on its springs before daring to stand up to get off.
The other mode of transport on the island is the Mini Moke. I had no idea that there were so many of them left in the world, but this may be because they are all now collected in this one spot. Most are for hire, fulfilling the function of the golf cart on Hamilton Island, being usually piloted by slightly inebriated tourists making their way home from the pub.
WHERE THE MOKES WENT
Tourism is the only industry here, but Magnetic (‘Maggie’ to its friends) has escaped the resort frenzy that has claimed Hamilton. Most of the accommodation is low key and comprises individual houses or cabins rather than hotels. The ferry to the mainland is the island’s lifeline and the key to its prosperity, as can clearly be seen in Picnic Bay which used to be a thriving commercial quarter but which is now largely a ghost town because the ferry terminal moved around the corner to Nelly Bay.
There are no such problems at Horseshoe Bay, which is the jewel in the crown and whose few but excellent beachside bars are presumably adequately serviced by visiting yachties. The Barefoot cafe and art gallery is particularly relaxing, and an honourable mention must go to the ‘Noodies’ Mexican restaurant next door for the opportunity to sit margarita in hand while watching dugongs in the surf and people messing about on the beach.
MESSING ABOUT ON THE BEACH
The island also boasts a number of easy walking trails. Perhaps the most spectacular is the Forts Walk which hits you with a triple whammy. Firstly, the views of the surrounding shorelines are superb. Secondly, the path takes you up to a historically interesting WWII gun emplacement, and lastly the trail is lined with koalas.
LOOKING DOWN
LOOKING UP
LOOKING IN
LOOKING OUT
We were sad to leave Horseshoe Bay when it was time to take Patricia back to the mainland, but the weather co-operated to give us perfect sailing conditions back down around West Point to complete our circumnavigation of the island.
SIX-KNOT READING
PATRICIA TAKES COMMAND
The Breakwater marina notwithstanding, we had thoroughly enjoyed our initial impression of Townsville itself, and wanted to stay on a bit longer when when we brought Patricia back to town. We decided to try out the Townsville Motor Boat and Yacht Club marina, which is down Ross Creek in the centre of town. Access is via the commercial harbour shipping channel, so we nipped in ahead of an incoming bulk carrier and found good depths all the way.
After the usual hunt for our berth, we tied up to a warm welcome by Mark, the marina manager, who called a taxi for Patricia and went out of his way to make our stay as enjoyable as possible. The pontoons were all sturdy and new, the club’s facilities were being completely refurbished, there was a lively bar on site, the other marina residents were universally friendly and interesting, and to top it all the berths were considerably cheaper than at Breakwater.
Leaving Pindimara in safe hands, we happily set off to explore the town.
We had never intended to stop in Townsville. However, our friend Patricia had flown out to join us for our exploration of nearby Magnetic Island, and we needed to pick her up and take her back to the airport afterwards.
Townsville has several marinas, and on our first arrival we randomly chose The Breakwater which seemed at first glance to give easiest access to the sea. The chart showed dredged depths of 1.1m which should have allowed us in at most points of the tide, but luckily we rang ahead and found that in fact the channel was really only 50cm deep.
We’d arrived only a few hours before high tide, so we hung around hove-to until it was deep enough and then motored in. In retrospect this was a wise decision, because when the tall ship Joshua C followed us in a few days later, they found themselves dredging their own channel with their keel.
It seems to be a point of honour among marinas that they never adequately signpost their berths, and Breakwater was no different. We endured the usual stress of searching up and down the narrow and crowded channels of an unfamiliar marina, until eventually we located our assigned berth. Because of the combined effects of wind, tide and surrounding boats, you usually only get one chance of getting cleanly in to a berth, so Bronwyn swung the bow round in a fast turn while I stood on the foredeck with a handful of pre-prepared lines. As the little slot twisted into view, I jumped onto the pontoon and prepared to tie off and help warp her in, only to find that the wood was so rotten that all the cleats had fallen out. Looking around for any sort of projection that I could use, I shouted “It’s up to you!” to Bronwyn, who executed a flawless parallel park while I hunted around for something to tie up to.
Most of Breakwater Marina was like that. The pontoons were all falling apart, the staff were distinctly strange, and the fee structure was impenetrable and changed from one day to the next, not only in terms of dollar amount but also with the tax charged. After a few days, we went to the office clutching a handful of mis-matched invoices and asking for clarification. We were told that although we had requested a 10m berth, “none were available” and so they had “put us in a 12m berth” and charged us accordingly. This is gibberish, because the berths are largely all the same and it is the length of your boat that should determine the fee. It wasn’t just us; we heard later that the Joshua C was also charged randomly changing amounts with each passing day. The marina also tried very hard to keep our key deposit when we left, by conveniently “forgetting” to keep a note of our card details so that they were unable to credit our account.
Patricia arrived, and we gratefully left to explore Magnetic Island.
Cape Bowling Green is, presumably, so named because it is as flat as. It’s not really a cape at all, more of a long sand spit enclosing a shallow bay. We had no intention of stopping there, because it’s so flat that it is little use as protection, and because a number of people had warned us that it is a pretty uncomfortable anchorage.
ROUNDING THE “CAPE”
Nevertheless, after a nice day’s sailing before 10-20 knot winds, we found ourselves coming abeam of the Cape with gusts in the mid-thirties and swell that was big enough that we were surfing down it. Clearly last night’s gale was coming back to blow again, and we decided that we really didn’t want to be out in it.
The wind itself wasn’t too much of a problem, as even in 30 knots we were comfortably cruising at 6-8 knots under full sail, but controlling gybes while surfing is tricky enough in daylight, and we didn’t fancy tiring ourselves out at night, especially if the developing swell was going to get any bigger.
We tucked around the end of the sand spit and anchored in 4 metres with plenty of rode and an anchor alarm (we’re learning…). There was nobody else in the enormous bay apart from a couple of humpback whales who were gently cruising around in the shallows. I guess they like to get out of the swell as much as the next mammal.
The wind went straight up over 30 knots and stayed there. Although we were sheltered from the big sea swells, we were still far enough downwind from the sand spit to experience some pretty big waves as they built up across the shallows, and Pindimara began to do a passable imitation of a nodding dog. Still, it was all on the bow and pitching is nowhere near as bad as rolling. We didn’t exactly sleep the sleep of the just, but by the morning the wind had died down enough to move on. The sailing conditions were just about perfect, and we had a wonderful cruise into Townsville.
We’ve just had some pictures through from our agent of our property in Montevideo. It’s almost complete. The builders have put in the stairwell, the carpenters have sanded and finished the wooden floors, and the heating engineers have put in the cast-iron wood-burner. The carpenter has also added a few kitchen cabinets, but generally when Uruguayans move into an apartment, they bring everything with them, not only appliances but even the boiler.
View from the lounge of the staircase and wood stove, looking toward the kitchen (right) and balcony (left).
Apart from the upstairs bathroom and the stairway to the roof, the mezzanine level is completely empty. On the original plans, there were two bedrooms and a small hallway here. We asked the architect to skip all the internal walls and just leave the mezzanine open-plan. He looked worried. “But,” he argued, “you’ve paid for a two-bedroom house, and you’ll only have a one-bedroom house. And Uruguayans don’t want their bedrooms to be so big!” After we pointed out that we didn’t care about either of those arguments, a big grin spread over his face, and he agreed that it would look much, much better the way that we wanted it.
The mezzanine level
The roof-top terrazza is almost finished, it just needs some cleaning up and some plants and furniture to make it liveable.
The rooftop terrazza. Stairway to mezzanine to the right. Parilla on the left.
Although this was never intended to be an investment property, we do recognise that it will be some years before we are in a position to move in, and we don’t want to leave it empty. The apartment is (sadly) almost ready to rent.
With the dawn came the promised gale. We wrote off the morning and did some advance passage planning instead. At around lunch time, a few yachts crawled into the bay and dropped anchor, much closer to shore than us. They seemed to be much more scared of the wind than of the shallows. Presumably it was a bit rough out there.
The wind died to a more reasonable 20-25 knots over lunch, but leaving then wouldn’t have got us anywhere useful in daylight hours, and we were pretty convinced from our detailed poring over the GRIB files that the night was going to get gnarly. Still, we had bread to bake and schoolwork to do, and a new batch of novels that we’d picked up in Bowen, so Townsville could wait.
The afternoon died in a sky of lowering maroon clouds shot through with fiery red flashes. With sunset came the real winds. They came up over Cape Upstart and slammed down onto the boat at over 30 knots. Pindimara reeled with the punches. Like any keeler she is designed to point into wind, but the sheer force caught her on the bows and lifted her up and over, first to one side and then to the other, whipping her almost broadside on before the anchor chain hauled her back so that the wind could slam into the other side. This continued on relentlessly, time after time, two or three times a minute, for hours on end. The anchor chain stretched out, but looked as if it would hold.
The view from deck was somewhat alarming, but down below it was surprisingly calm, if you ignored the demon howl of the wind in the rigging and the frenzied hum of halyards vibrating like violin strings above.
We thought it prudent to consult the Bureau of Meteorology website, but (in common with many of our Queensland anchorages) the only internet connection that we could get involved standing on deck and balancing the laptop on either the dodger or the targa frame. With the boat thrashing from side to side and the laptop threatening to tear itself out of my hands and fly away, this was not the easiest task, especially when we started to get waves over the bow. I saw enough of the forecast to tell me that conditions would probably improve overnight, and went below.
With nearly 40 metres of chain out, we would usually expect Pindimara to swing through a wide arc, and could set our new anchor alarm accordingly. In this strong wind, however, she was dancing on the end of her stretched-out chain and not swinging at all, so we set the anchor alarm for a much smaller radius. After a couple of trips around the deck attempting to identify and tie down all the more obvious bangs and rattles, we went to bed. The gale continued to rage, but our bodies were quite tired from endlessly rebalancing our bodies and so we fell quickly asleep.
In the middle of the night, the anchor alarm went off. I was instantly awake and ran onto deck, but then started laughing; the wind had gone, and we were still firmly anchored but drifting aimlessly around the chain. We reset the alarm radius and went back to bed.
The anti-swell kedge-anchor worked! We had a beautiful undisturbed nights sleep, while the other yachts in the bay were obviously rolling badly.
Strong winds were forecast for the next few days, but they looked like reliable trades and we thought that we could quickly run the hundred mile trip to Townsville in a night and a day. We set off optimistically in light morning breezes, expecting things to pick up later. The sou’easter stubbornly refused to materialise, and we spent a couple of hours drifting along marvelling at the orange bloom on the turquoise sea.
ORANGE TIDE
CLOSE UP AND PERSONAL
According to some news reports (thanks, Virginia) these particular blooms are caused by Trichodesium and Townsville is waiting in some trepidation for their arrival, as it seems that they wash up on the beaches and start to rot.
Eventually our speed tailed off to less than three knots, which is our usual sign to reluctantly start the motor. After this, we made good time until late afternoon, when the wind finally started to blow, and we hoisted the sails and were screaming along at 6-7 knots. Thinking idly about dinner, I unwrapped our brand new trolling line (replacing the old one that mysteriously snapped) and began to unwind it overboard to see if we could snare our second ever fish. The spoon had barely hit the water when the reel was nearly snatched out of my hand, and before very long we’d landed another mackerel.
By the time we’d filleted, cooked and eaten it (yum) the wind had died again and we were becalmed. The promised gale was clearly somewhere else entirely, and we didn’t have enough fuel left to motor all the way to Townsville, so rather than bob around in the dark we dropped the anchor in four metres of water in Shark Bay, under the lee of Cape Upstart.
With seven times rode out and an anchor alarm, we settled down to some schoolwork before being distracted by some loud splashing outside. Shoals of Long Toms were leaping out of the water around the boat, and we found that we could trigger mass flights by shining the spotlight onto them.
Tired out from all this excitement, and hoping for wind on the morrow, we went to bed and drifted off to sleep.
We had a terrible night on the Bowen mooring although just for a change it was not the fault of the mooring itself, which behaved impeccably. Following last night’s grounding, we kept waking up at the slightest sound or movement and running up on deck to check the surrounding anchor and navigation lights. Even in our dreams we were still listening out for the ‘thump’ of a grounding keel.
At dawn we gave it up as a bad job and began clearing away the debris of the rescue attempt. The decks at this point were cluttered with ropes, chains and bridles, and liberally spattered with bottom mud. The interior looked as if a bomb had hit it after the boat was purposely knocked down to free the keel.
The wind continued to blow, and we realised that we weren’t going to get peace of mind until we went somewhere else where the memories weren’t as fresh. Fortunately Queens Bay was only around the corner, which had the advantage of being spacious and uncrowded but the disadvantage of being renowned for its beam swell.
At anchor again and with most of the afternoon still ahead of us, we worked out a few modifications to our nightly routine. Although our ship-board GPS comes with an anchor alarm which warns you if you stray too far from a pre-set position, we have only rarely used it because the only way of powering up the GPS is to turn on all the navigation systems at once, which unnecessarily uses up a lot of valuable power. I rewired our GPS onto its own circuit so that we can fire it up on its own for use as an anchor alarm. It is on now.
Secondly, we had time and space to try an idea that we have been discussing for some time. The problem with swell is that it doesn’t always come from windward, so that the boat (which always tries to face into wind) takes the waves on the quarter or on the beam, which produces an uncomfortable rolling action. We reasoned that we could hold our bow into wind by putting out a kedging anchor at the stern and hauling it in until we were angled into the swell.
We’ve never seen this idea discussed anywhere in the literature. However, given our success with the kedging anchor during our grounding, we applied our newly honed skills and tried it out. Our new tactics worked perfectly, and while we can see that all the other boats in the bay are being thrashed abominably, we are pointing directly into the swell and are only experiencing a pleasant rocking motion. Hopefully we’ll be able to get a good night’s sleep, our first in three days.
Overnight the wind changed, putting us on a lee shore, blowing over 20 knots with a following 3 metre swell. Obviously we should have noticed and changed anchorage, but we were sleeping the sleep of the just and didn’t notice that our anchor was dragging. The first we knew about it was the sound of our keel impacting the ground , not something that I ever want to hear again, although I was to hear it many times that night.
I tried to reset the dragging anchor, but found that it was wrapped in a blue nylon and rubber sheet, presumably somebody’s discarded wet weather gear which had caused it to slip. We were by now wedged on the muddy bottom alarmingly close to shore. After running uselessly at full throttle – we weren’t going anywhere – the engine overheated and had to be shut down. A quick check revealed that the seawater coolant tubes were dry, presumably mud had clogged the sail-drive intakes. The night was pitch black. The depth sounder was reading 0m under the keel. The GPS showed that we were 600m from where we had originally anchored.
I started to kedge, which means that I carried our spare anchor out in our dinghy, with waves breaking over my head, dropped it somewhere vaguely close to where I wanted us to be, and then climbed back on the yacht to haul us along the anchor rope by hand. Then repeat. It’s back-breaking work, and after moving the yacht a little over ten metres, we stuck fast and I could not move us further. I left the kedge anchor in place because it was stopping us from drifting further inshore.
I called for assistance on the emergency Channel 16, but none of the relevant authorities were listening, which was not surprising given that it was the middle of the night. Eventually I was answered by Reef Watch, a commercial organisation related to the coal industry, who passed on our message to Townsville Water Police who passed us on to Voluntary Marine Rescue Bowen. A sleepy VMR crew arrived on a small catamaran shortly after dawn and tried to tow us off, but failed because we were completely stuck.
We agreed to wait for the now thankfully rising tide. Pindimara was bobbing, but seriously listing to one side and slamming into the ground with every wave. Tony from neighbouring yacht Loyalty arrived and coordinated the second rescue attempt, using his own dinghy attached to our masthead spinnaker halyard to drag us even further over until our gunwales were in the water, thus releasing the keel from the mud. Alarmingly for him, his outboard kept cutting out, which meant that Pindimara would stand up and lift both him and his dinghy vertically out of the water until he could get it started again. Meanwhile Matt from VMR and myself worked on the increasingly wet and sloping foredeck to kedge us out on our two anchors while the little VMR rescue boat attempted to tow us out on a line. Eventually we came unstuck, and since our engine was disabled and the local harbour was too shallow for our 2m draft I requested that we be towed to one of the many private mooring buoys in the area.
Through all this time, Bronwyn had been staying out of the way below in the heaving, canted saloon. When I came below with our rescuers to dispense coffee and whisky, we were astonished to discover that she had baked fresh bed for everyone.
Once secure, with the assistance of Tony from Loyalty we cleared our blocked intakes and started our engine. We could engage forward gear but not reverse, so I guessed that we had a problem with our propeller and dived on it to remove several metres of chewed-up rope which was jamming our propulsion.
STRING, STRING, WONDERFUL STRING
Finally, we seemed to be in the clear. It had been a long morning.
During the process we’d met the crew of not only one, but two nearby schooners, Tony on Loyalty, and Annie and Robyn on Joshua C .
JOSHUA C AND LOYALTY
HELPING TO BRING LOYALTY TO ANCHOR
It seemed reasonable to spend the evening celebrating.
It was very shallow squeezing between Gloucester Island and the mainland – only a metre under the keel – but we got through just before some nasty looking weather. There were some moorhttp://www.virtualreinhard.com/wp/bowen/ing buoys bobbing around close in to the shore where we intended to anchor. They said ‘Eco Resort’ on them but there was no phone number and the resort didn’t respond to VHF, so we picked one up. As it happened, the squall passed us by, but the bay remained calm so even though it was only lunchtime, we decided to hang around until the next morning.
What a lovely calm mooring it was! The buoy was well behaved and didn’t bang against the boat at all – or if it did, it was made of nice soft plastic and we probably wouldn’t have noticed. Mooring makers, take note! It is possible to make your buoy out of something soft and squishy instead of something hard and sharp that rings like a bell on impact.
GOOD BUOY
There was little swell and we scotched our plans of an early start and had a luxurious long lie-in instead.
It was a long slow calm trip over turquoise calm seas to Bowen, where we dropped anchor and took the dinghy in through the astonishingly shallow channel (we didn’t dare try it in the yacht) to get some provisions. On the way there, we’d noticed a catamaran with ‘Jailhouse Steak House, Launceston’ on the side, which we’d seen at almost every marina on the way up, so on the way back to Pindimara, loaded to the gunwhales with provisions, we chugged over and said ‘Hi’.
Don, who had built his yacht in Tasmania and is sailing her up to Darwin (Her actual name is Cisco; the steak house had once sponsored him in a race), was glad to see us and we spent a lovely evening drinking wine and shooting the breeze, after which he kindly illuminated our yacht with his spotlight so that we could get home, because we couldn’t see anything in the dark.
Back on board, we put on some music and tucked into some welcome fresh meat and vegetables, followed by our first gin and tonics in months. The swell blew up a bit, but it was all on the nose and so just made the yacht buck a little, and didn’t disturb our sleep.
GLOUCESTER ISLAND, FROM BOWEN
We decided to stay for another day so that we could explore Bowen itself. The town is small, pleasant and friendly, and adorned with striking murals on every spare wall. It seems that there is an annual mural festival, and new ones are continually being added, usually commemorating the history of the area.
MIND THE GAP
We had a very pleasant time hunting them all down, along the way acquiring a great many bags of shopping, including torches and lamps and fishing gear and an eclectic selection of books from the local charity shop.
We also checked out the local pubs and ended up at the one that seemed to hold the most promise, the Grand View. Sure enough it didn’t take too many pints before we were chatting to some prawn fishermen, and the night degenerated into a pleasant blur.
There was no wind forecast for the following day, so we pottered gently around the boat, reading our new books, having a bath in the cockpit, and generally being nice to our hangovers.
The wind got up in the afternoon, so we’ll be moving on tomorrow.
Hamilton is a resort island currently owned and run by the Oatley family corporation, and there is very little room there for independent enterprise. This gives the whole place a slightly surreal and unearthly flavour, perhaps a bit like if Disney owned the Isle of Wight. The road system is tiny, but everybody drives around in golf carts, which are provided to staff and hired by the day by tourists.
RUSH HOUR
Most of the restaurants and cafes are stamped with a lowest-common-denominator sameness, and it is slightly strange to keep meeting the same staff serving in each cafe.
There is no beach on the island, so they made one by bringing in sand from Whitehaven and dumping it on top of rocky drying mudbanks in Catseye Bay. The effect is a bit strange if you look closely, and is anyway somewhat marred by the large amount of floating pumice that has since washed ashore… you can’t mess with geology.
CATSEYE BEACH FROM A DISTANCE
WE PLAY TOURIST AT CATSEYE
On the other hand, Hamilton Island is a pleasant enough place and everybody seems to be reasonably happy. Even the nightclub bouncers are friendly. Payment of your somewhat outrageous marina fee allows you to use any of the resort facilities, which is just as well as the official marina shower blocks aren’t really up to scratch.
We were also lucky enough to be introduced to residents Pam and Bill (thank you, Nicky) who made us very welcome indeed and showed us some sides of island life that we would not have otherwise seen. And we drank a lot of wine with them. Oh yes.
We had only really intended to stay on the island for a couple of nights while we did some chores at the post office and laundry, cleaned the salt off the boat, and overhauled the toilet system (hopefully for the last time). However, we had such a grand night at the steak house, pub and nightclub that we overstayed the third morning, and anyway Pam and Bill had invited us over to dinner, so…
We woke after a comfortable night under Shaw Island to find turtles browsing the reef, and a whole school of 40 cm batfish cleaning the bottom of the boat.
BATFISH
After breakfast it was time to close our circumnavigation of the Whitsundays Group and return to Hamilton Island.
Good things and bad things happened on our trip up through the Whitsunday Passage. There was a fair wind, but a quartering swell. We didn’t get any bites on the trolling line, but we did get a spectacular aerial display from a young humpback whale and her calf. Then, as we were admiring the picturesque lighthouse on Dent Island, something enormous must have sneaked up and eaten not only our hook and spoon, but also half of the metal trace line. All we got back was a few frayed metal ends.
The forecast was for southerlies, but we were getting northerlies, so we decided to drop anchor in the protection of Refuge Bay in Nara Inlet. It was a little crowded but we found room to squeeze in and anchored in millpond conditions as the wind raged overhead.
We woke up at 4 am to give Mikayla a taste of night sailing. The southerly was finally blustering through as we raised sail under the stars, and Mikayla took us up to seven knots toward South Molle Island as the first touches of dawn tinged the sky, topping it off by baking a bread loaf that was crusty perfection itself.
SEVEN-KNOT NOY
DOUBLE CONE ISLAND. VERY STRANGE.
You’re not allowed to go ashore at South Molle because it is a private resort, but we anchored just off the cliffs for a leisurely brunch before tackling the fast tack across the somewhat wild strait to Hamilton Island. Dreading another night on the evil buoys, we’d booked a night in the marina, who actually had a valet waiting outside the entrance to guide us in. I suppose that is the flip side of paying nearly $100 for one night’s berth.
Then… showers! Blessed unlimited streams of piping hot water! Followed by a leisurely beer as we watched the golf carts bimble up and down the waterfront, and then an enjoyable fresh fish dinner at the rather nice Mariners restaurant. Not a bad end to a great little holiday. Next week we start cruising again.
Our next plan was to go back to Lindeman Island and to have another attempt at exploring it, after abandoning our previous attempt due to an uncomfortable swell.
Lindeman lay a few hours to the south. Mikayla did the whole of the day’s sail, from motoring off the anchor to putting up the sails, steering all the way to Lindeman Island, and then dropping the sails and the anchor when we got there.
THE CREW, HARD AT WORK
There really wasn’t much left for us to do apart from laze around on deck.
THIS IS THE LIFE!
We were running low on fresh food, so we put out the trolling line to see if we could catch our second ever fish. On the way through the fast-running Solway Channel we hooked something silver, but didn’t have too long to get excited about it, because it jumped off what turned out to be a blunt hook. We didn’t get another bite all day, and made a note to get out the sharpening file later that night.
THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY
Because the wind had come round to the north, we headed for the other side of the island from our previous visit. We wandered around on the beach there hoping to connect with the national parks trail that we’d seen on the northern tip, but the plant growth was so thick that we couldn’t get more than a few tens of metres inshore.
Giving up on walking, we explored in the dinghy, and found a pebble beach where we spent a happy afternoon looking at stones and coral.
GEOLOGIST AT WORK
Exhausted after our gruelling day, we returned to the boat, where Bronwyn knocked up a fine repast from dried and canned ingredients. No more fresh food until we get to Cairns.
The night was reasonably comfortable but the forecast gentle northerly turned into a proper storm as the promised ridge came through early. The boat got thrashed about a bit, but the swell stayed on the bow so we weren’t overly unhappy.
The ridge brought with it a southerly change, so instead of continuing our exploration of Lindeman, we decided to hop over to nearby Shaw Island where there was convenient shelter. Before we left, though, Mikayla and I went back to the pebble beach and collected enough spheroidal rocks in different colours to make up a set of boules, along with a chunk of white coral to use as a jack.
Once ashore on Shaw, we put them to the test, and had a fine boules tournament up and down the beach.
We spent a gentle day circumnavigating the northern half of Whitsunday Island, finishing up at the popular Tongue Bay. A line of yachts was wedged in against the south-eastern shore, but as we approached the pack broke up and many of them left. Quite a few of these seemed to be old J-class racing yachts, apparently being run by the tourist resorts as they each had over a dozen people aboard.
MIKAYLA BRINGS US IN TO ANCHOR
Those of us that remained suffered a mild but unusual swell for the rest of the night. I went up on deck a few times to see if I could work out what was happening, but although throughout the night the wind and tide had us facing almost every point of the compass, on every point we were getting a mild broadside swell. Very odd.
After breakfast we popped around the corner to the famous Whitehaven Beach, renowned home of the finest white sand in the world.
WHITEHAVEN BEACH
It was a glorious day. We anchored a couple of hundred metres from the shore and then swam in. The sand was almost painfully white, and the consistency of flour. We amused ourselves by following nicely defined animal tracks in the dunes, and watching the numerous sting rays foraging for food in the shallows around our feet. I’ve never seen so many rays being so bold. They weren’t bothered by us at all, and one big one was perfectly happy for me to wade alongside it as it swam slowly up the beach.
Apart from some clusters of resort folk over a mile away at each end, we had the beach pretty much to ourselves. After swimming back to the yacht for lunch, everything changed; power boats and jet boats roared up to the shore and discharged dozens of people with cool boxes, and a helicopter flew in to deposit another load. Tenders came in from two super-yachts out in the bay, one of them an astonishing mirror-finished ketch which must have been a hundred feet long. It was time to leave.
POLISH YOUR BOAT, SIR?
There was no wind at all, but the forecast was for a northerly change, so we motored over to nearby Hasleton Island and anchored up against the reef in Whites Bay. There was nobody else there, which made a nice change, although a small liveaboard showed up later. The skipper commented in passing that he’d been hoping for some peace and quiet, and then anchored so far away from us that we could barely see him in the gathering dusk.
Standing in the dark with the moon still below the horizon, we noticed intermittent flashes of light in the water. This wasn’t the usual phosphorescence of tropical plankton but something different. We spent a happy half hour or so hanging over the rail with a spotlight trying to work out which of the myriad creatures was making the light. We narrowed it down to either the millimetre swarms of zooplankton, or the yellowish thumbnail-sized fish that were feeding on them while simultaneously either laying eggs or defecating, or the finger-sized silver-blue fish that were coming up from below to feed on everything else.
Satisfied that we had in fact no idea what was going on, we settled down to a quiet evening of baking, eating, and cribbage.
Having picked up Mikayla from the airport, there was no real point in staying amongst the resort high-rises of Hamilton Island. We were all tired of being tossed about on the mooring in the continuing gale, so we headed north to see if we could find a quieter spot in Cid Harbour on Whitsunday Island.
MIKAYLA TAKES COMMAND
The availability of anchorages in the Whitsundays is to some extent ruled by the presence of bare-boat flotillas. Cid Harbour is famous for its calm anchorage, but is also very close to the charter base at Hamilton Island. We had assumed that, since it was Friday and most charters begin and end on a Saturday, Cid Harbour would be packed with holidaymakers enjoying a final night. There were about twenty boats there when we arrived, but there was still room for us to squeeze into Sawmill Bay where we had beautiful flat calm and an undisturbed night’s sleep. Thanks to John and Nancy for suggesting it.
Following on from our discovery of Alan Lucas’ misnaming and misrepresenting a bay a few days ago, we began to suspect that he hadn’t actually been to Cid Harbour either. Although it is indeed a fine anchorage, Lucas talks about showers and barbecues, and there is certainly nothing of the sort there, and no sign that there ever has been. However, turtles and dolphins siam all around the bay, and there are four coral beaches to explore.
MIKAYLA TAKES THE OLD GUY OUT FOR A SPIN
We also found a short bush trail leading from the main beach to nearby Dugong Inlet, and half way along this we noticed a minor tributary trail heading straight up the hillside. A passerby told us that this led, after one and a half hours, to the top of Whitsunday Peak (434m) from whence, he said, there were marvellous views of the the island.
Naturally I was champing at the bit to climb it. The girls were more inclined to sit on the beach, so they went for a swim at Dugong while I set off. It was quite a climb, and obviously didn’t see much traffic, but the trail was reasonably obvious and the vaguer parts had been unobtrusively marked with surveyor’s tape.
After an hour of hard climbing, I came across a scattering of dome tents hidden amongst the trees. A little later the trail improved markedly to a neat path, and I began to hear the sounds of voices and tools. Half a dozen park rangers were working on the trail, painstakingly chopping out roots, marking the edges with a border of stones, and where necessary fitting steps by half-burying large boulders and packing them with dirt. They were glad to stop for a chat, and told me that they had been there for about forty days, and were expecting to finish in another month or so. When they were finished with this particular trail, they would set up camp on another part of the island and start work there. They had been living and working in the Whitsundays for at least a year. It struck me that this would be my perfect job.
RANGERS AT WORK
A YACHT SAILS OUT TO SEA
The views from Whitsunday Peak were spectacular. I could see our anchorage in Cid Harbour on one side, and across to Hamilton Island on the other. A vast expanse of islands and coral seas stretched to and merged with the horizon. It really is a lovely piece of paradise.
VIEW FROM WHITSUNDAY PEAK
Back down at the beach, Bronwyn and Mikayla had had an enjoyable if slightly cool swim, and had attracted the attention of a hungry crow and a pair of young goannas, not to mention some members of the tourist subspecies of homo sapiens. One particular group arrived after the arduous 1100 metre trek from Cid Harbour and rang their yacht to send a tender round to pick them up. They assumed that Mikayla and Bronwyn were tired and resting up before the laborious trek home!
MIKAYLA AND FRIEND
By the time that I had clambered back down to sea level, we had the beach to ourselves and were all glad of the chance of a good wash in the clear waters.
THE NOW OBLIGATORY ‘DANIEL CRAIG’ PHOTO
Suitably refreshed, we headed back to the boat and fired up the barbecue for a nice veal roast before sleeping for a full eleven hours.
A fast run to Hamilton Island to pick up Mikayla, with whom we will spend the next week circumnavigating the Whitsundays. Conditions were a bit gnarly, with washing-machine swells and 30 knot gusts, but it meant that we got to Hamilton pretty quickly and picked up the biggest mooring rope from the biggest mooring buoy we have ever seen. The rope was so big that it wouldn’t fit around our deck cleat, so I had to quickly make an extension for it.
The moorings are on the opposite side of the channel to Hamilton airport, up against neighbouring Dent Island, and the wind was still blowing nicely. It was a bit of a wild ride across the channel in the tender.
Wandering around waiting for the plane, I was bemused by all the holidaymakers decanting from nose-to-tail flights and piling into golf carts. There were golf carts everywhere! When Mikayla had arrived and we were walking back to the marina where I had tied up the dinghy, we were passed by streams of them on their way to their hotels. We got some strange looks; it’s the Club Med set, and they obviously don’t get many pedestrians in Hamilton.
The water in the channel to Dent Island was still running pretty fast on the way back and we got a bit of spray into the dinghy, but the scariest thing was watching Pindimara bucking around and flinging from side to side in some huge surf. Now we could see why they’d over-engineered the mooring buoy. Poor Bronwyn was inside trying to cook lunch.
On the way over, we’d noticed that one of the smaller free public buoys had become available, and that the water was much calmer mid-channel, so we let go our marina buoy and motored over to the other one, not only making everything so much calmer, but also saving ourselves an overnight fee.
But… there are two ways to construct a mooring buoy.
One is to attach a rope to a heavy weight on the bottom. At the free end of the rope, you attach a small plastic floating ball. In order to moor, you pick up the floating ball and bring it aboard, tying it off, and thus attachig the yacht to the heavy weight on the bottom of the sea.
The other construction method is to attach a large floating buoy to the end of the rope, and then to attach a second rope to the top of that buoy. In order to moor, you pick up the end of the top rope and bring it aboard, but the buoy stays in the water.
The first method is simple, effective, has few parts and is trouble-free. The second method is more complicated to build, and if there is any tidal flow at all, then the big buoy will spend at least a third of any 24 hour period banging against the hull. Naturally, almost every public mooring is of this second type.
I spent much of the night at Hamilton Island fending off the buoy and creating ever more ingenious cradles of fenders and ropes as it repeatedly smashed into our soft fibreglass hull with thunderous booms. Every now and then the whole buoy vanished beneath the surface and scraped its way laboriously along the bottom of the hull before popping up on the other side and starting to bang there. Stupid thing. It is quite possible to hate an inanimate object.
We had a pleasant enough sail to Lindeman Island, and then some amusement trying to find an anchorage that would protect us from the SE wind and the persistent SW swell. Lucas’ cruising guide was a bit vague, with some clear inaccuracies on his chart, but we decided to try his recommended anchorage of Boat Point anyway.
Once there, we took the dinghy to shore and found a delightful little beach, very muddy but full of life – hermit crabs and snails underfoot, cockatoos and lorikeets above, scattered with attractive mangroves.
THE MUD FLATS AT BOAT POINT, LINDEMAN ISLAND
SOME OF THE WILDLIFE IS A LITTLE STRANGE
A National Parks trail clearly led around the island, and although we didn’t have time right then – the tide was coming in and the dinghy was quite far out on the mud flats – we thought that it would be great to come back here later in the week.
FETCH THE DINGHY, WOMAN, AND BE QUICK ABOUT IT
PINDIMARA SUNSET
The anchor set well and the land gave us protection from the wind, but the SW swell continued to roll in and throw us around. It wasn’t very pleasant. We took to sleeping crosswise across the cabin, which was much more comfortable but not ideal as there is only just enough width.
Early next morning we motored round to the other side of the island to try to get out of the swell. We found a suitable bay to eat breakfast – toasted bagels and cream cheese, fresh avocados – but the sea was still disturbed even though not overtly swelly. Some of this was likely attributable to the 20+ knot winds.
We bade a leisurely goodbye to Mackay Outer Harbour, and ran gently up the coast before a light breeze. It was a beautiful day and a relaxing cruise in a turquoise millpond sea.
At one point we saw a big old turtle, drifting backwards in the current, his shell completely invisible under a waving portable reef. Bronwyn saw another snake. An enormous eagle flew out from a wooded island to see if we were edible. And those were the day’s excitements. Very serene.
THE TURTLE JUST AFTER WE STARTLED IT
We had planned a route that would take us through three island groups, all with suitable anchorages. We just kept going to see how far the wind would take us, with Harriet steering and the human crew lounging around on deck reading books.
We got as far as the Sir James Smith Group, where the cartography is delightful. Rather than the usual dull names that litter Australian charts (Black Rock, Flat Island), some unsung hero had waxed lyrical on the theme of “Smith”. Thus Goldsmith Island is flanked by the Ingot Islets, Specie Shoal, and Bullion Reef. Similarly, Blacksmith Island is accompanied by Hammer, Bellows, Forge, Pincer and Anvil Islands. Off to the south of Tinsmith Island is an islet with the name of Solder. And so on. Very cute.
SERENITY
There were only two other yachts in the main anchorage at Goldsmith Island, but there was a lot of reef lurking beneath the surface and it was hard to see if there was enough swinging room. In any case we couldn’t get our anchor to bite, so we moved around to the north west and got it down in the next cove up. We’d had sou’westers all day, and it was now blowing from the north east, but since the two arms of the cove had both of these directions covered, we thought that we’d be fine.
ALL PACKED AWAY. HOW ABOUT A SUNDOWNER?
It was quite comfortable until the middle of the night when we mysteriously got a developed swell coming in from the north west, broadside on and very uncomfortable. Shortly after dawn it got noticeably worse and the wind start to howl in the rigging, so not even stopping for coffee we quickly upped anchor and went back to the shelter of the first anchorage, where the anchor bit first time. While we were manoeuvring about, the depth sounder showed some very deep holes in the sea bed, which may have accounted for our problems on the previous night.
As we poured the coffee, a sou’easter blew up at close to 20 knots and dark storm clouds rolled in overhead. There was no internet reception, but I plugged in the satphone and got a forecast for 20-30 knots and rough seas. We changed our mind about exploring the island by dinghy and made breakfast instead.
We popped in to Mackay on the mainland to provision for our upcoming sojourn in the Whitsunday Group. The harbour is completely artificial and there isn’t anywhere to anchor, so we reluctantly rented a berth at the marina.
It has to be said that the marina is excellent. It is not unreasonably priced, and is clean and secure. It is handy for a selection of waterside restaurants and a pub, and there is a bus service into town for shopping.
After a welcome shower to rinse the thick layer of salt out of our dreadlocks, we checked out the restaurants. After some weeks of cruising, most of out fresh supplies had run out and we urgently felt the need for fresh food. There were a number of restaurants in different styles from cafe to pub steak to haute cuisine, but since all the prices were the same – $30 a main – we plumped for the best, the very highly recommended Latitude 21 restaurant underneath the Clarion Hotel. The food was excellent, the service was superb, the ambience was just what we needed to ease us back into civilisation.
We had lost track of the days, and anyway had forgotten that there are things like Sundays when the shops aren’t open, so the next morning we found ourselves on the sabbath with a day to kill. We spent most of it catching up on paperwork and then headed off to the Sails pub, where we had a very good time, met a number of interesting people, drank far too much and ate far too little.
Shopping in Mackay was a bit of a shock. It was the school holidays, and the mall was packed. Who’d have thought that there were so many people in the world? Still, nursing our hangovers over fruit juice and coffee, it gave us a chance to see what the burghers of Mackay are like, and the word that sprang to mind was: prosperous. It’s a good looking and manicured town full of good looking and manicured people. From the bus we also notice that there were a lot of infrastructure projects in full flow, so business seems to be booming. Certainly there were a great many bulk carriers outside the port waiting to get in.
PARK YOUR TANKER, SIR?
The supermarket was a real eye-opener. After the rather sad and wilted selection of fruit and vegetables at the Woolworths in Gladstone, the Mackay branch of the same store presented us with a stunning array of beautiful fresh produce. It was hard to stop ourselves from filling our trolley with more than we have room for.
We’re now provisioned up, watered up, and stuffed to the gunwales with fresh meat, fruit and vegetables. We’ve had a brief fix of night life, and even managed to hose some of the salt off the decks. Tomorrow morning we’ll refuel, and then it’s back out to sea.
We were anchored in Whites Bay, Middle Island of the Percy Isles, hiding from a surprisingly strong nor’wester. The forecast was for another change, this time from the south, blowing a healthy 15 knots directly into Whites Bay some time between 22:00 and 04:00. The dual attraction of a decent sailing wind and getting out of the bay before the swell started, saw us going to bed early with the intention of leaving as soon as the southerly change came through.
The change woke me at 03:30, and seemed to contain rather more wind than forecast, up to 20 knots inside the protection of the bay. Still, the developing swell was rapidly making it too choppy to sleep so we decided to stick to the plan. After a quick breakfast on deck to acclimatise our eyes to the darkness, we motored out of the pack of sleeping yachts and into the Percy Islands tidal race which was, for once, running with us rather than against us.
The southerly wind was working against the incoming tide to build some pretty big waves, and we had a bouncy time getting out of the group. Once out into the open sea, the wind ramped up to over 30 knots, officially gale force. With triple-reefed main and our cruising jib, we soon found ourselves creaming along at over 9 knots. The log records a maximum speed of 9.54, the fastest that we have ever gone.
Since we were moving in a straight line, we thought that we may as well throw the trolling line over the stern. This line has a long history. Several months ago, Bronwyn decided that she wanted to learn how to catch fish, and we made a deal that if she can get one on board, then I’ll kill, clean and fillet it. Since then she has been chatting up fishermen and pestering tackle shop owners in an effort to find out the easiest way of catching our supper. It was surprisingly difficult to get a straight answer. Most of them said “Ah, you just throw a line over the back and you’ll catch something. No worries”, but when you actually tried to pin them down for some specific advice, such as “What line? Which lure? How deep?” they would often as not change the subject or offer wildly divergent advice.
My theory is that since it is regarded as quintessentially Australian to be born with a fishing rod in one hand and a barbecue spatula in the other, it is not manly to admit that you’ve never done either one or the other. Certainly when I announce that I have never fished in my life, I attract pitying stares and an embarrassed shuffling of feet. Much better for a woman to do the asking.
Bronwyn did eventually manage to find a couple of guys who seemed to know what they were talking about, and by May had put together a dream kit of all the tools necessary to catch, land, and process a small tuna. Since then we’ve tossed the gear over the back whenever we thought about it, but never got a sniff of interest.
Back to the story. There we were, screaming along in excess of seven knots in gale force winds, alternately burying first the gunwales and then the bow into mountainous swell. Naturally this was the moment that I glanced back into our foaming wake and saw a large fish tail-walking at the end of our line.
We had repeatedly memorised all the necessary steps for landing our first fish. After making sure that the hook is firmly set, we were supposed to stop the boat. Yeah, right. The obvious solution was to heave-to, but in these conditions this simply meant that we were making six knots backwards instead of nine knots forwards. Still, the important thing was that while hove-to we could forget about steering for a while and concentrate on the fish.
With four pairs of hands we managed to land a rather spectacular Spanish Mackerel, some two thirds of a metre long and weighing about seven kilos. We were quite impressed!
BRONWYN’S FIRST FISH
Now we had to quickly regain control of the boat before we ended up back in the Percy Isles; in the excitement we had gone backwards for over four miles. Back on our beam reach, we shared our bucking and heavily slanted cockpit with a washing-up bowl full of salt water and a very large and slippery dead mackerel. By the time we reached the Guardfish Cluster, our feet were soaking wet with a lingering fishy smell, but our mackerel was intact and, thanks to a swaddling tea-towel, relatively cool.
As we approached the first turn inside the Cluster proper, I again glanced out of the stern and spotted a young humpback whale practising a series of launches out of our wake. Beautiful.
Once we were safely anchored between the drying shoal and the rocky reef, I hauled out our shiny new filleting knife and reduced the mackerel to four enormous fillets.
SPANISH MACKEREL FILLET
Three went in the fridge, and the fourth we had for lunch, gently heated in a little olive oil. It was sweet, succulent, and absolutely delicious.
We had intended to move on from South Percy Island the next day, but the forecast was for a light nor’wester and our route was to the north west. Tacking for hours into a light wind held no attraction, and we didn’t really have enough fuel to spare to motor it, so we decided to stay another night at South Percy. With only light winds for the previous few days, I had become a bit complacent about the weather. Although I knew that the nor’wester would blow right into our little bay, I just assumed that it would maintain the same negligible wind speed that we had become used to, and in this assumption I was supported by the GRIB file that I had downloaded (via satphone: no internet out here) that showed a predicted wind strength of a barely perceptible 3 knots.
As the evening wore on, the nor’wester began to blow a good 10-15 knots and brought with it an uncomfortable swell. By the middle of the night we were being thrashed around as Pindimara bucked like a bronco, being held side-on by the tide to an ever-fiercer north westerly swell.
We decided to wait til dawn and then run for cover in Whites Bay, a SE-facing shelter under nearby Middle Percy Island. In fact I was up well before dawn, washing up and generally tidying away, so that by the time it was light enough to see, we were ready to go. The sideways swell was getting really rough, and it wasn’t possible to stand upright without hanging on.
Whites Bay was only a few miles to the north, and we could see that there was a single yacht already at anchor there. When we were about half way across, a whole stream of yachts appeared around the south western corner of the island, all heading in our direction. We guessed that they had been caught out by the wind change while anchored on the western side of the island, which is the usual tourist destination because of the world famous “A-Frame” cruisers’ meeting place on the shore. This was later confirmed by Jace on Eveready who said that there had been a bit of a sundowner at the A-Frame the previous night, and by the time they’d all got back to their boats, the wind had already changed and nobody felt up to moving on.
VIEW TOWARD SOUTH PERCY FROM MIDDLE ISLAND
Once we had all anchored, Bronwyn and I went over to the shore for a walk. There was a dune which I inevitably climbed, and which proved to have an interesting crust a few metres from the top where the steep surface had been hardened to the consistency of concrete before being lightly sprinkled with fresh sand. Very slippery.
IT’S A LONG WAY DOWN
We didn’t explore very far into the island, though, because we intended to go to bed early and leave in the middle of the night.
There were two other yachts close in to North West Bay on South Percy Island, but we anchored farther out in our usual 10 metres, which put us a good half a kilometre off but still out of the tidal race that runs between South Percy and nearby Middle Island to the north. After a meal and a rest, we chucked the tender over the side to go take a look at the beach. We considered rowing, but were aware of the three knot tidal rip and invisible reefs, so we clamped on the outboard instead.
We spent a pleasant afternoon pottering about on the beach, after which Bronwyn sat down and sunned herself while I clambered about on the rocks and erosion gullies behind the tide line.
BEACH BABE
ROCK DUDE
BEACH DUDE
“INTERESTING” EROSION GULLY
Over breakfast next morning, we noticed the other two boats sailing out of the bay. It was only when Bronwyn said “Great! Now we have an island of our own!” that I realised that this was what I had been waiting for. Great Keppel had been nice, and I had been expecting to make use of the extensive hiking trails around it, but when it came down to it I’d been happy that we had gone snorkelling instead. Now we had the whole of South Percy Island to ourselves, and I had seen on my brief expedition the day before that there were no trails or paths at all. Perfect for exploring!
We packed some vittals and took the tender over to the headland. We landed on a different beach which showed a few footprints and signs of human passage. Behind it was a pebbled gully full of flotsam, mainly timber and empty coconuts that must have floated in from Polynesian or Indonesian vessels, although there was an interesting pile of pumice on the high tide line.
Above the gully, though, the green hills beckoned. I started the long climb to the top, and found it hard going. The tufty grass was ankle deep and crunchy, hiding rocky voids and small clumps of prickly pear cactus. This was excellent news, as it seemed to me pretty unlikely that most people would persevere, and I could continue my daydream of exploring a deserted tropical island.
PRICKLES
OUR ISLAND
As is the way with these things, the top revealed another higher peak beyond, and then a third one. From there, though, I had a great view of the surrounding ocean and islands, and of the bay far below where Pindimara sat patiently at anchor.
OUR HOME
There were no trails or any other signs of human activity. I jumped up and down and waved to the little dot of Bronwyn far below, who years ago decided that I am a loony and best left alone in the presence of climbable peaks.
Later that day we decided to explore North West Beach, which looks like a great anchorage on the chart but which is described as having a difficult-to-see reef line. We went at low tide, in the tender. The tides here are four metres, and so at that time of day we could clearly see parts of the reef that you would normally only see when snorkelling or scuba diving. It was a curious feeling to be first motoring, then rowing, and finally walking along towing the dinghy through gardens of soft coral scattered with small fish and giant clams. I had to be very careful not to put my foot on anything that might get damaged, but it was an amazing experience.
YOUR CARRIAGE, MA’AM?
O SOLE MIO
As the tide comes in over a reef, fish that have been hiding in rock pools or beneath the sand emerge and head out into deep water. We saw a few schools of fish milling around in the shallows waiting for their opportunity, and then suddenly realised that we were wading through the school of sharks that were waiting for them. We’re still not sure what species they were, but they were a metre long, brown with orange black-tipped dorsal fins, and very wide. They obviously detected that we were much bigger than them because they stayed at least five metres away, but it was still a weird experience to be paddling through a school of big and clearly very hungry sharks.
Before we left Great Keppel, Sue and Steve showed up on Tenacious D. Sue and Steve were not only our neighbours when we were preparing for our voyage back at Gibson Marina, but they were also the only long term cruisers that we really knew, and as well as being lots of fun they did a grand job of putting up with all our stupid questions during our final months of preparation. It was great to catch up. We had a bit of a yarn over a pancake breakfast and then they had a lunch date on another boat, so we hoiked up the anchor and set off to the north.
We had a long way to go, and there was very little wind forecast, but we managed to bravely leave under sail. It may have been slow, but it was peaceful. We noticed that the water was sparkling, and dipped a bucket in to see the diatoms and flagellates swimming about. We followed a lunch of chilli tuna salad on freshly baked bread with a small bottle of champagne and some lime jelly.
LIFE’S PRETTY GOOD
As the sun set prettily over the Queensland hills, we heard the dull thump of army munitions. This whole coastline is sometimes taken over for army training, and we’d heard on the grapevine that they were using it today. This meant that our intended half-way anchorage at Port Clinton was out of the question, so we were intending to travel all night to the Percy Islands.
The military zone extends quite far out to sea, so we had to arrange our course to avoid it. Pretty soon the wind died completely, and we spent the rest of the night chugging up the military boundary line under motor. Given the forecast, we felt pretty lucky to have had the sails up for as long as we did.
Bronwyn went below and I stood the first watch. Since there was very little swell, steering was pretty easy even though we were motoring, and I found that with the aid of a head torch I could steer and read a novel at the same time. The watch passed pleasantly swiftly, punctuated by the occasional yellow star shell drifting over from the military manoeuvres on shore.
Bronwyn took over from the small wee ones until pre-dawn. A sea fog threatened to roll in from the east, but it was low on the water and left the sparkling stars bright and clear above. Thankfully the fog never developed.
I was back at the helm just before dawn, which revealed another clear blue sky but still no wind. South Percy Island was in sight all morning. Most cruisers visit Middle Island rather than South, but after staring at it for so many hours we thought we decided that rather than simply steering around it, we would stop for the night.
There was quite a lot of debris in the sea, tree trunks and large branches, as well as a substantial quantity of what seemed to be an orange algal bloom. Half way up the eastern coast, and over a mile from shore, we encountered a large yellow snake swimming by. It was a metre long and looked a lot like a python rather than a sea snake, and had tied the end of its tail up in a knot, presumably for buoyancy or for balance. It stopped and regarded us with interest when we slowed and did a circuit around it, and then began once more swimming strongly out to sea. We wondered how it could see where it was going, with its head that close to the water.
JUST PASSING BY
At half past two in the afternoon, we dropped anchor in a delightful sandy bay in the north eastern corner of South Percy Island.
As the sun rose above the loading docks, we slipped quietly out of Gladstone. There are three routes out of Gladstone Harbour. The main shipping channel to the south – the way that we had come in – would be quite a dogleg for a northerly trip. The Narrows is a shortcut direct to our destination of Keppel Bay, but is dominated by a six mile drying stretch called the Cattle Crossing and you have to be absolutely sure that not only will the tide give you enough depth to get through, but that you have enough power to fight the tide all the way to the other side before the water disappears again. We chose the Northern Passage, a middle way, saving us about 20 miles on the shipping channel but with only a short drying area right by the bar.
Since the drying area is at the far end of the channel, we had to time our trip up to cross the bar at high tide. This meant that we were fighting the incoming tide all the way, but luckily it was only running at a knot or two. We were motoring up at about half tide, which was just enough to cover the sand banks and reefs. We had the somewhat surreal experience of navigating up thin unmarked winding channels that we could see on the chart, but to the naked eye we were zigzagging meaninglessly across an apparently unobstructed lake of unbroken water.
Bronwyn was steering, I was navigating down below.
“Thank goodness for GPS” I thought as we approached a particularly thin section. Just then, something crashed and we lost all our navigation systems. Great. I called course headings up to Bronwyn from memory while frantically changing batteries in the GPS and rebooting both computers, one as backup in case the main one didn’t recover. Everything came back online just as we needed to do a sharp turn to avoid another invisible sand bar. The computers behaved from then on but, thankfully, we had now entered a marked ferry channel and the leading lights took us between a couple more reefs and out into the open sea.
We were free! We grinned like maniacs and rushed to put the sails up. Gladstone wasn’t a bad place, but it had hung over us like a black cloud because we were forced to stay there. The freedom that we’d started to take for granted had disappeared, and the lack chafed our souls.
No matter. We’d done what needed to be done, and now we were on the move again.
It was one of those perfect sailing days. We were close hauled and flying along at 6-7 knots, but the sea was calm and smooth and so it wasn’t uncomfortable at all, just pure fun. We chose to steer manually all the way.
We could take advantage of the NW winds all the way up the coast, but we knew that the final westward section toward Great Keppel Island was going to be a long hard beat into wind. Halfway through the day I fired up the computer and downloaded the GRIB files for the next three days. Technology to the rescue! GRIB files are meteorological data that can be overlain onto a suitable digital map. In this case, they showed that at about four in the afternoon we could expect a westerly change, and then another one to the south-west in the evening. This was perfect! It meant that rather than taking lots of time to tack back and forth, we could just gently curve around with the wind until we arrived.
And that was exactly how it happened. After 13 hours and 58.6 miles (an average 4.5 knots, much of the latter part against an evil 1.5 knot current, so the boat was really travelling much faster than that) we dropped anchor under the Milky Way and a crescent Moon, next to Second Beach on Great Keppel Island.
After a restful sleep – how wonderful to feel the boat rocking beneath us again! – I stood on deck under the rising sun and marvelled at the blue sea, the blue sky, and the peaks, beaches and islands scattered around us. What a beautiful spot.
We had intended to spend the next day hiking over the island, but first I had to repair the electric anchor winch which had given out the night before. I quickly traced the fault to a lazy wiring job at the sharp end; I mean, if you were a marine engineer installing a wiring connection at the end of the boat that spends a lot of time immersed in sea water, wouldn’t you try to waterproof it a little? Apparently not. Luckily I had my trusty gas-powered soldering iron and spliced in a new section.
DANGER. ELECTRICIAN AT WORK
Standing on the bow, we realised that the water was so clear that we could see the anchor. This reminded us that we hadn’t been swimming in ever such a long time, so we decided to snorkel over the reef at the end of the nearby beach instead of going for a hike.
Since we’d arrived at night, we had anchored a prudent distance from the invisible shore, and daylight revealed that we were a good 600 metres out. We donned masks and fins and set off. Half way there, Bronwyn got stung in the face by a jellyfish, but after that things started to look up.
At one end of the beach is a secluded clearing marked by a rather bizarre sculpture consisting of forty or more beach-combed floats and buoys suspended with string from a large tree. Next to it is an unusual swing and an enormous hammock fashioned from a fishing net. We spent some time lazing in the hammock in the sun, chatting idly about this and that, before putting on our fins and splashing out to the reef.
It was less a reef and more a collection of rocks fallen from the island, but it was home to as relaxed and varied collection of fish as you would find on a scuba dive. We spent a happy few hours paddling around before beginning the long swim back to Pindimara. Just as we set off, we were passed by a shoal of pike barracuda each almost a metre long. Spectacular.
The tourist board brochure claims that “Gladstone is a gourmet paradise…creating flavours you will remember long after your holiday”. We are not convinced. Apart from pub food (with an honourable mention to the Queens Hotel Steak House – see previous blog entry), and a scattering of rather second rate cafes, there are only a handful of real restaurants in town, and most of those are boarded up with ‘for sale’ signs on them. The list of ‘restaurants’ in that same tourist brochure even includes the McDonalds… and mysteriously fails to mention the one diamond in the rough, the stunningly good Rock Salt in Roseberry Street. When we showed up without a reservation on a weekday evening the place was packed, although they were perfectly happy to light up a gas heater and let us sit outside on the patio. The service was cheerful, the wine list and prices acceptable, and the food very good indeed. We’re counting our pennies to see if we can justify another visit before we leave.
We found a self-guided pamphlet tour of the town, which was only two kilometres long and took in all the historical attractions. Unfortunately, most of it reminded us of a similar tour that we once did in Shanghai, where we would find ourselves looking at a car park and admiring a small plinth stating “Here stands the former site of the former Korean embassy”. The main highlight is the climb of 111 steps alongside the Rotary Club artificial waterfall to the top of Auckland Hill (“Spectacular… multicoloured vistas of the city… magnificently preserved buildings from times gone by”), from which vantage point you get a good view of the mineral loader, the coal loader, the power station, both bauxite refineries and the smelter.
GRAIN SILOS FUEL AND HYDROXIDE
This encouraged us to take a number of the free ‘Industry Tours’, in which we were ferried every day by bus to a different plant site. The Queensland Alumina refinery was an interesting nest of pipework and towers, stained either bauxite red or alumina white depending on which part of the process was in progress. We weren’t allowed out of the bus or to take photos, but we did get to see behind the scenes that are not normally visible to the public. Bronwyn was particularly struck by the large quantities of junk lying around everywhere, and we couldn’t help noticing the phenomenal amount of welding and repair work that was going on. When there are hundreds of thousands of kilometres of pipework carrying hot caustic soda, I imagine that equipment doesn’t last very long. On the way in, a sign proudly proclaimed “Days since last serious injury: 2”
We also visited the Boyne Smelter, where the alumina is reduced using astonishing amounts of electricity to make aluminium ingots, bars and billets for export mainly to Asia. Once turned on, it’s a bad idea to turn the smelter off because the molten metal will set irreversibly in the crucibles, so there was a continual tale of keeping up the supply of electricity and making sure that they’ve made enough anodes to replace the ones that burn out every few days.
Another local industry is the RG Tanna coal loader that is the source of the black dust all over our deck. They take coal from bottom-dumping train cars, blend it, and then load it into bulk carriers at a rather amazing 6000 tonnes per hour. Our bus driver took us right out along the loading pier, where coal was pouring into ships from a conveyor moving at five metres per second… a barrage of statistics, but an interesting and enjoyable tour.
PASSING A CALCITE STORE ON THE WAY TO THE COAL LOADER
And now the week is over. I have sent in my final assignment, and Bronwyn has completed her final exam. We are free to go! There are nice SW winds forecast for the weekend. We’re fuelled up, watered up, provisioned up. I’ve hosed the coal dust off the deck (again). We’ve washed and polished and vacuumed, charged all our rechargeable stuff using shore power, finished colour coding the anchor chain, and reinstalled our tow generator. I’ve even – I think – fixed the ventilation problem in the head.
Usually when we need to stay at a marina, we rent a swing mooring and commute to land by dinghy. A mooring is usually cheaper and more private than a berth, but still allows you access to the marina’s showers, laundry and other facilities. It lacks a fresh water tap and shore power, but those are not things that we regard as at all important, being largely self-sufficient with our large water tanks and wind and solar generators.
On this occasion, though, our greatest concern is revising for and taking our exams. Mine are conducted online, so I use my computer at the local library, but Bronwyn has had to arrange for an invigilator at the nearby campus of the University of Central Queensland. To make it all easier, and to ensure that we have the necessary power for late night study, we have committed ourselves to three weeks plugged in to a marina berth.
PINDIMARA SULKS ON A BERTH
Gladstone Marina is operated by the Port Authority, whose main job is to handle the freighter traffic servicing the local coal loader, smelter and gas plant. The marina is overshadowed by the coal loader which continually lays down a thick layer of black dust while beeping loudly to let you know that, even though you might have gone to bed, they are still working. The marina is also in the middle of a refit, so there are labourers disassembling and reassembling the pontoons to the sound of power tools and local radio, backed by a loud and smoky dredger running at all hours of the day and night.
THE MARINA AND COAL LOADER
Where there is a marina, there is usually a sailing club. On the whole, we’ve been completely unimpressed with all the sailing clubs that we’ve visited so far, but we persevered with the nearby Port Curtis Sailing Club. In their favour, they poured Guinness in pint dimple jugs. Actually, that’s probably the only thing in their favour. The beer was poor and overpriced, the interior lacked any kind of atmosphere, and we didn’t manage to engage anybody in conversation at all. The food was… perhaps I should merely draw your attention to the sign in the gents lavatory. While extolling the advantages of paying your club membership fees, this poster tantalisingly exhorts: “Your membership entitles you to discounts at our infamous restaurant”. Enough said, I think.
We had a far better time at some of the local pubs, particularly at The Grand Hotel, which is always friendly and welcoming. One night we found ourselves drinking there with some coral trout fishermen celebrating their return from a four-week stint, who later took us to The Queens, which we had previously avoided because of its unprepossessing exterior but which turned out to be a lively and fun local haunt, full of interesting characters. I was also served one of the best steaks that I have eaten in Australia. It actually came ‘blue’ as ordered, and I could cut it with a fork. Superb.
I joined the locals that night in their tipple of choice, Bundaberg rum and coke, after which it all got a bit messy. Much, much later, Bronwyn and I set off on the kilometre or so walk back to the marina, and somehow got completely lost, even though the town is only a few minutes across. Luckily Bronwyn flagged down the driver of a passing petrol tanker, who took pity on us and drove us home.
Most of the boats here at the marina are long-term liveaboards. This doesn’t mean that there are lots of cruising sailors to talk to; on the contrary, it’s more like living in a waterborne trailer park. Most of the denizens seem to live on enormous self-built trimarans, all trailing great strands of coral and mussels testament to their complete and permanent immobility.
PERHAPS THEY ARE STARTING A CLAM FARM?
I’D BE FASCINATED TO SEE HOW THIS RUNS
While hosing off a couple of weeks of coal dust from Pindimara’s deck this afternoon, I noticed that even our neighbour’s inflatable dinghy had nearly a metre of coral beard hanging from its underside.
While waiting for service at the sailing club, I idled away some time by reading their notice board, even perusing the race standings (it was a very long wait). I have now seen most of the boats listed, including all those with high handicaps, and almost all of them are trailing festoons of coral and shellfish. I’m not sure exactly who is kidding whom.
THIS YACHT IS HIGH IN THE CLUB STANDINGS
We’re here in Gladstone for a very specific reason, but I must admit that life at the marina is slowly driving me stir crazy. The rhythm of our day has all changed. Because we have permanent electrical power, we no longer go to bed at dusk and wake at dawn. Instead, we laze around in the evening watching videos and reading books, and wake up whenever our neighbours start to make too much noise in the morning. I’ve also lost touch with the weather. Usually I feel in tune with the boat, waking reliably whenever the tide changes or whenever there’s a change in the wind. At sea, at anchor, or on a mooring, the boat feels restless when there’s a change in the air. Here at the marina berth, I have no idea what is happening out there. The wind gusts or the sun comes out with no warning, and I feel disconnected. Hah, listen to me. We’ve only been at sea for three months, and already I sound like a hoary old sea dog.
But the exams are going well. Only one more week to go.
We were living on our yacht and had recently arrived in Gladstone, Queensland, when I needed to get to a field course in Kalgoorlie, Perth, clear across the other side of Australia. Since both Gladstone and Kalgoorlie are mining towns, we reasoned that I would be able to get a reasonable connection. We looked into buses, trains, and cars as well as aeroplanes, but flying was by far the cheapest option, and when I boarded the planes they were awash with fluoro shirts of mine workers changing shifts. We arrived at dawn, and I got a good look at the landscape. I had expected it to be completely flat and red, and indeed it was, but I was surprised to note that it was lush with free-standing gum trees, marching in green rows to the horizon.
Red earth, green plants on the Eastern Goldfields
As we came in for landing, we flew over a number of open-cast pits. We didn’t fly over the Super-Pit, because overflying that enormous cavity was banned after the updraft caused an airliner to crash a few years ago.
KCGM Superpit. For scale, the tiny yellow truck on the far right is about 10 metres wide
Since I only had about twenty kilos of luggage, mainly text books, I decided to hike in rather than catch a taxi. I like to approach a new town slowly so that I can get a better feel for it, and I certainly needed to kill some time before anything opened, so I set off. It was strange to wear shoes again after all these months, and in addition they were brand new steel-toe work boots that I had been trying to break in on the beach, which must have looked quite amusing.
Made for walking
It was a very pleasant walk, and I was amused to see that most of the horizon at ground level is taken up by the artificially straight lines of mine tailings. I passed some pricey-looking new residences with expensive cars outside, and a number of scrubby little trailer parks, some of them glorying under names like “your golden nugget holiday home”. When I finally arrived at my hostel, the Kalgoorlie Backpackers, I found it to be clean and presentable, and after a brief snooze on a sofa I was shown to my room for the week. Most of the days and indeed the evenings were taken up with field trips, study and revision, but I did get out to see the town once in a while.
WA School of Mines
Caution!
Most of the buildings date from the late 1800s, and the town is very well preserved. Clearly the mine companies bring in a lot of money. The schools look nice, too, although all of the shops had stickers in the window announcing that they would not serve children during school hours. There are enough shops and small restaurants to make it interesting, as well as a good number of pubs.
The York Hotel
The streets are very wide indeed, apparently a hangover from the days of horse-driven road-trains, and the council has recently gone to the effort of replanting all the central reservations and borders with native flora. The only problem with native grasses is that they aren’t good to walk on, so where pedestrians might be expected to pass, they had laid down astroturf instead of concrete. This might sound a bit strange, but it provided a nice contrast with the red mud and somehow didn’t look out of place at all. When I’d been searching the internet for a hotel, I had noticed that several of them offered “brothel tours” as a standard service. I wasn’t entirely sure whether they were referring to historical museums or to working girls, but I was soon to find that on the other side of the street to my hostel was ‘Questa Casa’, claiming inevitably to be Australia’s oldest brothel, but which offered tourist visits by day and more traditional services by night.
Questa Casa, oldest brothel in Australia
On our final night, a few of us went out for a meal at a Thai BYO (bring your own alcohol) restaurant one night, and it fell upon me to go out and find some wine. The first place that I tried was the Exchange Hotel, one of the three main central pubs. There were the usual dress code signs on the door, including an embargo on steel toe caps after 9pm. Since I was wearing mine, I wasn’t sure if they would let me in, but as it turned out the bouncer was leaning on the juke box having a chat with some mates rather than paying full attention to the door, so I presume that they don’t get a lot of trouble. That was a pleasant start; I have a deep and abiding hatred for officious door staff. I ambled around a bit, peering between the guys at the bar to see if I could spot any bottles of wine amongst the racks of beer and coke, and suddenly realised that there were a couple of semi-naked girls bouncing up and down trying to get my attention. The barmaids were all wearing lingerie and little else, and a pleasant bubbly blonde laughed when I asked after wine and sent me to the Irish pub next door. I guess it isn’t a wine sort of place. Paddy’s had a selection of two red wines, so I picked one and ambled back to the restaurant. Some of the guys had been to Kalgoorlie before and they laughed when I mentioned the barmaids; apparently they’re called “skimpies” and work every night at the Exchange. It seems that they used to be quite ribald but there was a crackdown recently and now they’re much tamer. The Thai meal was nicely presented and very tasty, although of course (being Australia) very mild. At the end, the chef came out to see if we’d enjoyed it, and seemed on the point of apologising for using too much chilli before she took in our effusive thanks. Having eaten and drunk everything in sight, we decided to go on to the Exchange where they were happy to serve us unlimited pints of lager and stout, but no spirits, not even over ice. I asked one of the lasses about it and she said that this was a specific rule at the Exchange; you could only drink spirits with mixers.
The Exchange Hotel
The pub had a pleasant blokey atmosphere. Most of the patrons were wearing fluoro shirts and boots from a day at the mines, and some were drunk enough to be dancing on the pool table and using the chalk to write on the ceiling. The skimpies came out often to chat to the drinkers and panhandle for tips (“If we get enough tips we might take some more clothes off”), and it was all very friendly and nobody hassled them. There were only two female customers, two young girls who seemed to be regulars and went everywhere together, although nobody seemed to pay them much attention, even though they weren’t wearing very much either. The two of us who were still standing at two in the morning did try to make it to one of the other pubs, but it seems (thankfully… we had an exam next day) that everything closes at the same time, and we staggered back to our hotels. As I sat on the plane home, trying to ignore the pain in my head and looking forward to a week of exams in Gladstone, I reflected that Kalgoorlie would not be a bad place to live at all.
The anchor made a few dragging noises in the night, but when I ran up on deck it clearly hadn’t moved at all, so we put it down to the chain clattering over some underground rock shelf as we swung.
In the morning we got a clearer view of our anchorage. The starboard beacon about twenty metres away marked a very active shoal ground, whose frothing waves we had seen glistening in the moonlight when we arrived.
HERE BE DRAGONS
The white iso beacon on the other side of us marked a rocky outcrop projecting into the channel. There was room to get past this rock at high tide and into the inner bay and beach where we could see a number of other boats at anchor, but we were happy with our privacy and with our ability to leave quickly without worrying about either daylight or tide, so we stayed where we were.
Pancake Creek turned out to be our favourite anchorage so far, and we stayed for a couple of days. One afternoon we pumped up our inflatable kayak and went exploring.
There were many miles of secluded little beaches, some showing signs of repeated return visits in the form of home-made swings, tables, firepits and the occasional beach chair. We paddled past a few of them and then dragged the kayak up over the water line while we went ashore, where we soon found an old boardwalk. The boards themselves were almost completely rotted, but the path was still a reasonably clear and ran in a dead straight line up through the woods of the peninsula.
OUR GUMOTEX KAYAK
A WALK IN THE WOODS
THE BEACH ROCKS
Although there weren’t many visible flowers, the forest was delicately perfumed and alive with butterflies and birds. We passed banksia trees heavily laden with pods, and grasses bearing tall rushes several metres high.
REINHARD’S TICKLE STICK
The track eventually led out onto the dunes and finally up to Burnett Head itself, where we found a lovingly restored lighthouse with pristine white out-buildings. We met the caretaker, who was part of the voluntary group that maintain it and who was doing his one-month live-in stint for the year. He claimed that the fully automated light, which we had seen at a distance of 20 miles, is powered by only a 100 watt bulb. He also told us that our boardwalk was the original mule track that was used to ferry supplies up from Pancake Creek, but that now they came by “Larc”, which is an amphibious tourist bus that regularly visits the seaward side of Bustard Head.
We strolled out a little way along the Larc track which gave us a tremendous view across Pancake Creek’s (non-navigable) rear entrance and inner waterways. It looks like a tempting cruising ground for a shallow-draft dinghy or perhaps even a trailer-sailer, and we’d love to come back and spend some more time there.
VIEW SOUTHWARD FROM BUSTARD HEAD
Back in Pancake Creek we stopped for a refreshing sunset bathe on the beach before paddling back to the boat where we played cribbage and drank wine while our yorkshire pudding baked in the oven.
It’s a great spot, but since it’s out of range of both telephone and internet, we couldn’t stay for too long because it was time for both of us to do our exams. I needed to fly to Kalgoorlie for a field course, and Bronwyn needed to find a university that would provide her with an invigilator; nearby Gladstone seemed ideal because it had a marina, an airport, and a university. We set sail and had a very pleasant trip, arriving in the late afternoon.
The port was curiously quiet. We sailed along the wide commercial shipping channel, surrounded by enormous gravel loaders and industrial plant, all of which were shut down and silent. Just when I was beginning to entertain fanciful theories about a worldwide plague virus that had struck everybody down while we were away, a bulk carrier emerged from behind a headland and thundered gently by.
Motoring out of Port Bundaberg, we gave way to a couple of fishing trawlers coming in after a night’s work. They were accompanied by the usual flocks of seagulls eager to catch the guts and scraps thrown overboard as the fishermen cleaned their catch, but in addition they were accompanied by at least half a dozen sea eagles also vying for the same thing.
GOT ANY FISH?
We must have missed a good party, too, because somebody had driven their ute into the river.
DRIVEN TO DRINK
Once out into the open sea and running at a useful six knots, I fired up the engine and idled it to play with the water maker, which was now running through a shiny new circuit breaker. It worked beautifully, generating ten litres of water in three hours. Not exactly enough for a bath, but sufficient to maintain our independence from marina water. My next task is to see if I can power it using the tow generator rather than the engine, but the tow generator is out of service at the moment because I have cannibalised some of it’s parts to fix something else.
Although the weather was beautiful, we could see the occasional squall moving past in the distance. We’ve noticed that they do usually march past either out to sea or inland of us, leaving the strip just offshore generally free from rain. Later that afternoon, though, an almost invisible squall came out of a double rainbow in a cloudless sky and hit us broadside. The rain was so perfectly horizontal that one side of the cockpit stayed completely dry while the other ran with storm water, soaking us instantly. After a minute or so the squall moved on, leaving behind it a much improved wind direction that enabled us to put the swell behind us as night fell and we headed for the reefs of Bustard Head’s innovatively named Inner, Middle and Outer rocks.
It was now quite dark and we were navigating by GPS again, aided by the two lighthouses on the shore. Just as we arrived at the gap between Outer and Middle Rocks, another squall came through to the south of us and eclipsed the lights; quite a feat in the case of Bustard Head which is rated at 19 mile visibility and we were only a couple of miles away. A big swell picked us up and we surfed through in complete darkness, very exhilarating.
We were heading for Pancake Creek, a sheltered patch of water under the double peninsular of Bustard Head and Clews Point. We had a number of charts which disagreed on the navigation markers that we might find. Popping up and down between cockpit and chart table, I quickly realised that the reality was different from any of them. I was getting very nervous; the admiralty charts showed us approaching shoals and rocks, in the dark and carried along by the tide. Bronwyn, however, was at the helm and had been watching the instruments. She was confident that the depths were looking OK, so we ran the gap and stopped only a few boat lengths away from a port marker on a rock, a starboard marker on a roaring shoal, and a dimly seen iso marker on a rock ridge. The anchor bounced a few times on rock and then caught solidly in the fast-flowing current. A few minutes were enough to convince us that we weren’t drifting anywhere, so we put out a little more chain to counter the rising tide – but not too much to allow us to swing and hit any of the three navigation lights – and went to sleep.
We were anchored in what was technically Bundaberg Port rather than in the town itself, which is a few miles upstream. It is theoretically possible to take a keel boat all the way up to Bundaberg itself, but there was a shallow section that would only be passable on a good tide and we were happy where we were, so we unlimbered the tender and prepared ourselves for a little expedition.
This whole outboard motor thing is still new to us, so we didn’t know how long it would take us to motor the six miles into town and back, with or against the tides and with or against the prevailing winds. We packed a variety of clothes and some spare fuel, and set off.
The river is very wide and, as we found when I flamboyantly decided to cut a corner, quite shallow enough in places to beach an eight-foot dinghy. One bank seems to be mainly mangroves, while the other is taken up with a sugar cane plantation. A little way along, we chugged past what is presumably the cane farmer’s house, very nice indeed with a large ketch moored at the bottom of the garden.
This was the only boat that we saw on the river, and we were once again surprised at how quiet it is here. We have come to expect that waterways are always packed with fishermen in tinnies and people in runabouts, but there had been nothing moving at the port and there was nobody around here. Only when we reached the outskirts of the town did we see one or two men with rods standing on the shore.
Mind you, we were grateful for the peace. The headwind was opposing the incoming tide and we had to contend with some pretty large waves without the additional excitement from the wakes of full-bore fishing tinnies.
It’s almost six miles from the Cane Ferry to Bundaberg, and we discovered that the Walker Bay with its 3hp outboard will run for five miles before it runs out of fuel. The whole journey took about an hour an a half. So now we know.
Bundaberg itself was small and compact, and contained the kinds of stores that suggested that people come in from the country to get supplies. The most interesting architecture was (as usual) to be seen in the pubs, which stood on every corner.
THE OLD BUNDY TAVERN. PERHAPS WE SHOULD HAVE DRUNK HERE INSTEAD?
Since we were standing at the centre of the mighty Bundaberg rum empire, I expected to see a great many rum-related motifs and interesting rum products for sale, but this wasn’t the case at all. Even the pubs didn’t carry anything more elaborate than the usual Bundy-and-coke in a can.
We had intended to visit the distillery, but by the time we got there it had closed for the day. We had heard, though, that the tasting room does not present the usual display of grand old vintages that you might expect, but instead focusses on all the different mixers that you can put into your Bundy to make it taste better. This seems reasonable to me, because – grand old Australian institution as it may be – it does taste pretty nasty on its own.
We had with us a fairly esoteric shopping list, but the town managed to come up trumps with the whole thing; Croc boat shoes, a circuit breaker, a European pillow case, an adjustable wrench, a computer fan and a cribbage board. We even found somebody to make us a three metre steel leash for the tender.
Spotting an Indian restaurant, we decided to splash out on a celebratory meal. It wasn’t open yet, so we waited over indifferent beer outside an indifferent pub, counting the teenage mothers as they strutted past in the gathering dusk.
The restaurant itself occupied a fine old corner building, possibly an old bank or post office, and had been rather lovingly restored with hardwood dado rails and original brass electrical fittings overlain by the usual Indian restaurant colour scheme but executed with rather more taste than usual. We asked for the wine list but they turned out to be BYO, so Bronwyn popped out to find some wine while I ordered a vindaloo and a jalfrezi.
INSIDE ‘SPICES PLUS’ RESTAURANT
Some time later, Bronwyn had still not returned. I drank my third glass of water and grinned helplessly at the waitress who was hovering uncertainly in the wings. Another two couples arrived and ordered, and then finally the door opened and Bronwyn arrived triumphantly brandishing a bottle of white. There were, it seems, only two places in town where you could buy wine. The RSL wouldn’t serve her unless she was a member, and she couldn’t become a member without a driving licence, although they were happy for her to drink at the bar. The off-sales counter at the neighbouring pub was happy to sell her a bottle until they discovered that they had run out of brown paper bags. Apparently this was a big deal, because they refused to sell her wine without a bag. Eventually they came to an agreement where she paid the more expensive pub price, and then they “forgot” to open it and Bronwyn smuggled it out under her jacket. I’m sure that there is some logic in that somewhere.
Finally we were all set to enjoy our meal. I had deliberately ordered both dishes “hot” because the Australian taste is for very bland food and we fancied a bit of spice. In the event, I suspect that the chef merely wafted a couple of chillies over the pan before putting them away for the next mad Englishman, because even the vindaloo was exceptionally mild. Still, the dishes were well made and the staff friendly, and we had a lovely evening. It made a nice change for somebody else to do the cooking and the washing up.
It was full dark by the time we left the restaurant and made our way down to the river to our tender, but the river was smooth and calm and the clouds drew back to reveal a crescent moon. We motored back along past the fields of sugar cane, with the moonlight glinting off the water and the Milky Way shining above. It was absolutely glorious.
We left on the dawn tide, more or less, pausing only for a leisurely breakfast and a few household chores. The top end of the Great Sandy Strait isn’t particularly shallow, so we weren’t in fact concerned about the state of the tide, and simply followed the navigation markers to the north west. Even so, the proliferation of sandbanks and channels was a little confusing, and we were glad to find an old large-scale map in our collection which showed a lot more detail than our supposedly up to date GPS chart, which was missing most of the cardinals and channel markers.
By lunchtime we were out of the Strait and into Hervey Bay itself, sailing before the wind at a respectable 5 knots. I started up the engine and let it idle so that I could experiment some more with the water maker, reasoning that (a) it probably needed the electrical boost from the alternator, and (b) it probably needed the hydrostatic boost of the engine’s water pump. In the event, I think that both assumptions were correct, because after about five minutes we got our first few spoonfuls of fresh water. Hurrah!
A couple of seconds later, the fuse blew. Ah well, back to the drawing board.
There wasn’t too much swell, but we’ve obviously been at anchor for too long, because we both started to feel a bit nauseous. We kept up a steady stream of snacks and hot drinks, which seems to be the only reliable way of keeping it under control.
We weren’t helped by the fact that there was absolutely nothing to look at. Even though Hervey Bay is more or less enclosed, the surrounding land is so flat that we had a virtually undisturbed 360 degree horizon. As far as the eye could see, we were the only thing moving. It was Sunday lunchtime, typically a busy time out on the water, but today there were no boats of any kind, not even a solitary fisherman in his tinnie. No planes passed overhead. Neither were there any birds, turtles, fish, dolphins, or dugongs. It was almost boring.
Thankfully the wind got a bit more exciting in the afternoon, and soon we were flying along at over seven knots with a large following swell. Wheeeee!
As night fell we came into sight of the commercial shipping lane into Bundaberg, lines of green and red flashing lights marching arrow-straight across the sea. It seemed to take a very long time to get into the channel itself, and through that whole time we didn’t see a single other vessel. Once into the lane we dropped the sails, and discovered that although the lane was very long it was pretty narrow. It was also disconcerting that all the lights had been programmed to switch on and off simultaneously, which meant that for three seconds in every four it was pitch black and we couldn’t see a thing. Then we got a single second of bright colours all the way to the horizon, and by the time we’d worked out what we were looking at it had all gone dark again.
With the help of some large-scale charts of the Burnett River entrance and the GPS we worked it out and made our way upriver past a few marinas, past the molasses plant (yum, great smell) and dropped our anchor in a few metres of water just before the cane sugar cable ferry. We’d come in at low water and were close to the edge of the river, so we had to be certain that we’d paid out enough chain to cope with the 2.5 metre tide without giving us too much swinging room for the size of the channel. We had dinner and a welcome glass of wine and did some route planning with – oh go on then – just another glass of wine and it all seemed to be working splendidly, so we went gratefully to bed for a calm and undisturbed nights rest.
Of course that’s complete rubbish. What we actually did was have a leisurely breakfast before motoring gently out of the creek some time during the mid morning. But we did make very sure that the tide was still rising, because the Great Sandy Strait is far too shallow for us to navigate otherwise.
Large sea turtles poked their heads out to watch us go. They were very nervous, only popping their noses up long enough for a quick snort of air; by the time you’d turned your head to see them, they had gone, leaving only a spreading circular ripple. Some of the heads didn’t look quite the same, and we realised after a while that some of them were dugongs rather than turtles.
There wasn’t any wind, but we were happy to motor along in the sunshine, navigating from channel marker to channel marker. There were plenty of markers, but there were also plenty of sand banks and channels, and often it wasn’t exactly clear whether the marker that you could see was in your channel or in an adjacent one. I wouldn’t have liked to do it in the dark, or even on a cloudy day.
We only had a few hours to get through the really shallow portion of the Strait, but the 2.4 metre high tide carried us through with little cause for alarm. We did pass over a few places where we had less than a metre under the keel, confirming that we would never have gotten through at low tide.
When we reached the North White Cliffs which mark the end of the shallow portion of the passage, we plonked down our anchor for a few days of relaxation.
CLIFFS, WHITE, NORTHERLY.
The beach is only a few tens of metres away, consisting of sand eroded from the overhanging cliffs overlying some exposed coal measures.
BARBECUE, ANYONE?
From here it is but a gentle stroll to the Mackenzie Jetty where steam trains used to haul milled timber out to waiting barges. The mill and the associated houses have all gone, but most of the jetty still stands and there’s some abandoned hardware on the beach, including an old locomotive boiler.
REINHARD PLAYS TRAINS
REINHARD PLAYS TRACTORS
A little inland is the site of the wartime headquarters of Australia’s secret Z Squadron, from where they launched training limpet-mine missions against presumably good-humoured local boats and businesses, and real and very dangerous missions into Asia and the Pacific. Most of the base has rusted away, but the history and photographs were interesting. I was bemused to see that the old tyres from their abandoned vehicles are still practically useable after over fifty years of lying in the bush. No wonder tyres aren’t welcome in landfill sites.
We’re also on the edge of Kingfisher Bay where there is a small resort. We had formed high hopes of sundowner cocktails at the beach bar, but it turned out to be just a standard schnitzel-and-cheap-lager joint, so we gave it a miss. The resort itself seemed pleasant enough, but had an aura of neurosis about it, being completely surrounded by a tall dingo fence behung with pictures of slavering hounds and dire warnings about letting children play unattended. We were exhorted to “attack vigorously” if approached by angry dogs. Instead, we had a champagne picnic.
We found ourselves at the mouth of Tin Can Bay at the southern end of the Great Sandy Strait. The Strait is an area of low-lying islands and shoaling sand banks that separates the four hundred square miles of Fraser Island from the mainland. The official chart doesn’t show very much detail, but the depths shown suggest that it is practically un-navigable. In reality the Great Sandy Strait is a very popular cruising ground provided you remain vigilant about the state of the tides. Our plan was to overnight in Tin Can Bay and then ride the flood tide up to Garrys Anchorage, sleep there and then ride the next tide up to North White Cliffs.
THE SOUTHERN PART OF THE GREAT SANDY STRAIT
We did start to head for Tin Can Bay, but then realised that we were so pumped with adrenalin from crossing the Mad Mile that we might as well make use of the rest of the tide and get to Garrys Anchorage a day early.
The southern part of the Strait was wide, deep and placid. Because of the high tide, we weren’t able to see the sand banks which lurked in the shallows, but they were well marked with navigation beacons.
The rest of the morning was an absolute delight. The sun shone down, birds soared overhead, and we chugged in perfect solitude between endless mangrove-fringed sandy islands.
ENJOYING THE CALM
Garrys Anchorage proved easy enough to find, a calm and shallow strip of water between Fraser Island itself and the small Stewart Island. It was by now late morning. We consulted the tide tables, anchored in five metres of water, and went straight to bed.
We awoke in the afternoon. I went for a quick swim to have a look at the bottom of the boat, which was in good condition and completely free of marine growth. We lazed about and enjoyed the utter peace.
When we’d anchored at high water, we were sitting in a large and placid lake. As the tide fell, muddy banks rose eerily from the water with a damp crackling sound. It was slightly alarming to find ourselves dropping steadily into a muddy canyon, but our calculations were sound and we remained safely in the narrow channel.
WHERE DID ALL THAT LAND COME FROM?
It was blissfully quiet after the continual traffic of the Mooloolaba canal. We could see one other yacht in the distance, joined later in the evening by a second one, but the only sound was the piping of the oyster catchers, the slurping of the sand bars, and the gentle crackling of crustaceans underneath the hull.
Once clear of the Mooloolaba bar there was only a metre or two of swell, which was far less than we’d expected after a week of storms. Even more conveniently, the swell was coming from the same direction as the wind, so although the breeze was light we still managed to get up to a reasonable cruising speed.
I’d re-plumbed the water maker in Mooloolaba, so as soon as we got into open water I popped down below to play with it. It was much improved, but still didn’t seem to be building up enough of a hydrostatic head to get a good flow. I messed about with it for a while, but then the combination of close work and a quartering swell got me feeling somewhat green, and I went back up on deck for a lie down.
By the time I’d recovered, Bronwyn was also feeling the effects of the swell – obviously our sea legs had regressed during our long stay – so she went below to rest and I took the helm.
Very soon I was very hungry. Having eaten all the snack food in the cockpit, I went hunting below. I had to rush up and down in fits and bursts, as I was hand-steering because the wind was too variable to trust that Harriet would steer a close compass course, but eventually I found a large helping of ravioli that Bronwyn had prepared before we left, bless her, although she was herself still ill and dead to the world.
It was a moonless and cloudy night, very dark indeed, and “keeping a lookout” really meant glancing around in the pitch black every now and again to see if there were any lights out there. The rest of the time was spent either staring at the compass and trying to hold a reasonable course, or marvelling at the bright luminosity of our phosphorescent bow wave.
At one point I became rather confused by a fast-moving fishing boat that was displaying no navigation lights at all. I had to get close enough to see its deck lights reflecting in its wake before I could figure out which way it was heading, and take evasive action. I’m not sure that he ever saw me.
On a separate occasion, I noticed what I took to be the masthead lights of a stationary trawler, so I gently eased over to one side to give him a wide berth. I was quite shocked when the apparently distant vessel suddenly turned into a man in oilskins standing on a metal raft only a few boat-lengths away, holding a lantern and peering into the water. It’s funny what you see, out there on the ocean.
Eventually the wind died and I started the motor. This meant that steering became much more of a chore, because I couldn’t just balance the sails and let her run, I had to fight her every moment because the prop really wanted to turn to put the quartering swell behind us. At around midnight I realised that I was very, very tired, and although I felt guilty about it I dragged Bronwyn up for a stint while I napped on the floor of the saloon.
A couple of hours later, I was back in the saddle. Bronwyn wasn’t looking good at all, a combination of sea-sickness and the tail end of a nasty cold, and she was very glad to crawl back into bed. Luckily I was feeling quite chipper after my break, and especially so when the stars came out and the wind returned, and I found myself gliding silently beneath the Milky Way. A few hours later, Venus rose brighter than I have ever seen. It actually cast shadows on the boat and laid a Venus-beam across the water. Gorgeous.
As dawn broke we were coming abeam of Double Island Point, a common roadstead anchorage. We’d had half an idea to rest there for a few hours before risking the nearby Wide Bay Bar which was bound to be hairy after all the recent weather, but I spoke to the Tin Can Bay Coastguard on the radio and he said that it was “a bit rolly, but not too bad” before giving me the latest waypoints around the shifting shoals. Bronwyn appeared on deck feeling much improved, and was able to spell me for an hour or so across Wide Bay while I took a nap, so we decided that since we were on a perfect rising tide we might as well go for it.
Wide Bay is (don’t you love Australian cartographers?) about ten miles across, and much of the north western corner is continually breaking shoals. There are leading lights on the shore, but the bay is so big that you can’t really see them until it’s too late, so the coastguard maintains a set of coordinates that you can follow to keep you out of trouble. We dropped the sails and got to the first waypoint easily enough, but just had to trust the course to the next one, because it looked from our vantage point as if we were motoring into a wall of breaking waves. I think that the cat behind us didn’t have the coordinates, because it chickened out of the leading line three times before committing to following our trail. I don’t really blame them as it did look very intimidating ahead.
Just before the second waypoint, a gap magically appeared in the wall of white water and we chugged through. It reminded me of the time I paddled out of a lagoon break in Samoa, with huge walls of water towering on either side and my kayak slipping unharmed in between.
Bronwyn called up the course to the third waypoint from her position below at the chart table. I turned to the west and we entered the zone known locally as “The Mad Mile”.
It was completely crazy. I could just make out some leading lights in the distance, but without the waypoint course I wouldn’t have believed it possible. Enormous rolling surf surged across our path, breaking into curving rollers to the left and to the right. Huge mountains of water lifted up and dropped away, sending thundering walls of water across our route. Despite my best efforts, Pindimara began to roll violently. The gunwhales were almost in the water, and we shipped some green ones across the deck. Down through the hatchway, I could see Bronwyn’s knuckles tightening on the companionway banister as she tried to keep herself in her seat. The computer is held down by a velcro strap, but the GPS and cabling is not, and I could hear vague crashings and tinklings from below over the roar of the waves. Bronwyn says that she saw all of our coffee mugs leap off the shelf and then magically set back down into their positions. On deck, the binoculars leapt from their usually safe shelf under the dodger, spiralled through the air and landed unharmed on the other side.
I spied another yacht coming towards us, obviously using the same waypoints to get out to sea. He was about our size, and on several occasions I saw clear air under at least half of his hull; presumably we looked exactly the same to him. I would have loved to fire up the video camera, but I was fully occupied with staying at the helm and keeping the bow out of the water. It was all I could do to give him a cheerfully nonchalant wave as he flashed past in a welter of foam.
And then… the sun shone on the placid waters of Wide Bay Harbour, and the quiet sandy shores of Fraser Island stretched out to the north. A low-sided landing craft chugged across in front of us, laden with tourists. I looked over my shoulder. Behind us, the seas still raged, but it all looked out of focus and unreal. We had arrived.
On our ninth day trapped in Mooloolaba, we became convinced that the morrow would finally bring an end to the inclement weather. We really, really wanted to get out as soon as possible, but we had to ensure that we reached our destination, the Wide Bay Bar, in the daylight and on the rising tide, while simultaneously managing to cross the Mooloolaba bar in a reasonable depth of water. The numbers worked out to a dusk departure on the following day.
We’d already discovered that there weren’t any quality drinking establishments around (the Sunshine Coast Brewery is good, but sadly out of town), so we decided to celebrate in the Wharf Tavern, which we had judged to be the roughest of the local hostelries. Our radar seemed to be on the nose, for after requesting change for the pool table, we discovered that not only was the table broken, but the barmaid had given us some New Zealand dollar coins which wouldn’t have fitted anyway.
After a few beers in a fishing town, Bronwyn always likes to mix with the trawlermen. For instance, long term readers of these annals will remember Wattie the tuna man in Lakes Entrance, who became a memorable part of our honeymoon when we discovered that the reason that the bar staff were so nervous about him drinking with us was that he had just been released from prison for stabbing the previous landlord. Here in Mooloolaba, Bronwyn was soon deep in conversation with Dave the prawn fisher, who popped off half way through to shoot up some speed, and then began calling up his mates to “sort out” a harmless young student who he had suddenly decided was a gay predator. All very charming. On the other hand, I got chatting to a lovely lass who was celebrating her engagement while simultaneously plotting a career that would get her out of town. More power to your elbow, Emma! Hope to see you again soon, further up the road.
We had all day to recover from our cheap beer hangovers, and lots of time to ferry back and forth with fuel and supplies while preparing the boat for sea. After so long at anchor, it takes quite a while to get everything cleaned up and squirrelled away, but we got it all done and as the sun sank below the horizon we chugged gently past the trawlers and out into the main channel. On the way out, we narrowly missed a bunch of unlit outrigger canoes which were invisible in the darkness, but then we were out in the ocean and free. Goodbye, Mooloolaba.
We’ve been hiding from the storms that are currently destroying property all down the southern Queensland coast. Gale force winds, monstrous seas, and biblical rainfall have already claimed at least one life, and that was on land. Even if we were crazy enough to go out to sea, there’s nowhere to go because the bars up and down the coast are all effectively closed to traffic.
There are a several cruising yachts packed into this little basin. Every day or so, one crew or another climbs up to the Caloundra lighthouse to see what the conditions are like out to sea, and then return shaking their heads.
SURF’S UP
One evening we noticed a harbour fisheries vessel going from yacht to yacht. Each visit seemed to involve a lot of discussion, and we assumed that they wanted to discuss fishing quotas or check our documentation, so we were a bit surprised when they arrived at our stern and began threatening us with fines and legal action for outstaying our welcome in Mooloolaba. In actual fact we were still within the ten days which local rules allow when hiding from inclement weather, but this didn’t slow them down at all. With vague threats of heavy penalties, they advised us to abandon our yacht and move into a hotel.
They spent a particularly long time on one of the larger yachts which has apparently been here for quite a bit longer than us. There seemed to be lot of paperwork being passed back and forth, and next morning when I was just thinking about puttering over to ask the skipper what it had all been about, we noticed that he must have left on the dawn tide. We can’t imagine where he went, and hope that he found some safe harbour before the next 55-knot gale hit.
Days passed. Endless rain hammered on the deck. Wind howled in the rigging. Flood waters surged by, battering the hull from side to side. The mud-laden river was packed with wreckage from upstream, and sometimes one of the larger pieces of debris would bump up against our hull and scrape past on its way down to the sea.
On another evening we were down below, catching up on some paperwork, when we heard a soft thump from outside. We weren’t overly concerned, as it didn’t sound particularly alarming and was probably just something bouncing off the deck in the storm. A little later there was another one: thump.
The rain slackened off for a moment, and I got up to open the bathroom window because we had been getting the occasional whiff of an unpleasant smell and I thought perhaps that we should let some ventilation into the head. While I was up, I stuck my head out of the hatch to look at the weather and was greeted by a loud thump-thump on the deck and a strong smell of stale fish.
I turned on the torch and started laughing. There were two gannets roosting in the top set of mast spreaders. Every time they let fly with some droppings, the wind whipped them back at a sixty degree angle to impact just aft of the dodger. They can’t have been there for more than a few hours, but the sheer volume of guano was astounding. The floor of the cockpit, both lockers, and both solar panels were liberally coated in up to a centimetre of foul-smelling paste.
GANNET GUANO
I waved my torch at the birds and they sulkily left to find another boat, but not before one of them scored a direct and very wet hit on the padlock for the locker containing the cleaning equipment.
All this week, south-eastern Queensland has been getting a pasting from the weather gods. We’re still anchored in Mooloolaba, waiting for the deluge to stop, for the wind to ease, and for the 5 metre swells to die down. The rain’s been astonishing. Sometimes I put my hand out of the companionway hatch and it feels like I’ve stuck it under a bath tap. We hear stories of power lines down and major roads out of commission, with 150 mm or more of rain falling in just 12 hours.
The winds have been exciting, too. They were forecasting 45 and 55 knots (+/- 40%) out to sea. I haven’t been monitoring our local wind speed (the indicator is on deck, in the rain) but during the nights the anchor chain has been groaning under the strain and at times Pindimara was bucking like a bronco. All around us, yachts have been dragging their anchors, which is not too great when you consider that we’re packed like sardines into a canal lined with millionaire mansions. One guy on a 42 metre yacht woke up to find himself 50 metres downstream and practically inside somebody’s lounge room. He wasn’t the only one, and we’ve seen a few people motoring nervously about trying to find some extra swinging room. Our anchor has set just fine, and it hasn’t moved at all… although with all the pressure on it I imagine it’s pretty well dug in by now, and I’m not looking forward to trying to hoist it when we leave.
The canal water is thick and brown and full of flotsam from upstream. In a brief moment of calm I climbed the mast to fit a new anchor light, and from my vantage point I could see that the whole surface of the canal is slick with oil washed down the storm drains from the roads. There’s a whole lot of water out there; the canal is running so fast that the tide didn’t get a chance to come in, and Pindimara remained pointed upstream all day.
One day we went ashore to do the laundry. When we returned to the dinghy it was full of rain water, and I actually wore out my bailer trying to get rid of it. At one point, with the bailer splintered down to half its original size and a new cloudburst sweeping in from the sea, I found that I couldn’t empty the boat faster than the rain was filling it. Thank goodness that all our nice clean laundry was sealed into dry-bags.
The yacht’s usually pretty waterproof, but on one occasion we must have left one of the three locks on the head window ever so slightly loose. Usually this might have resulted in a few dribbles on the floor of the shower, but a couple of hours of this current downpour filled the bathroom with several inches of water, and when we got back the water was lapping at the lip of the bulkhead into the lounge. That would have been messy.
One good thing is that when the dinghy fills up overnight, we can pump the nice fresh rain water straight into our tanks, although this morning I did wonder if it would sink before I could get started.
NO WATER SHORTAGE TODAY
Apart from the gale warnings, the weather forecasts are quite vague, peppered with “depending on movement” and “maybe lower”. I downloaded some GRIB files and quite frankly I don’t blame the forecasters. It’s anybody’s guess what’ll happen next.
Just for fun, here’s a graphic representation of the wind strength data earlier today. Red arrows indicate Force 8 to 9. See that confused bit where all the different coloured arrows are stacked up on top of each other? That’s where we are.
WIND SPEED GRIB DATA FOR MAY 20 2009
Since we had so much fresh water, and since the canal is not really suitable for swimming, we decided to have a bath. We have a kid’s inflatable paddling pool that exactly fits inside the cockpit. Add a dinghy-full of rain water and a few pans hot from the stove, and Robert is your mother’s brother.
Mooloolaba is a very curious place. From the road it looks just like a standard eastern seaboard town, with malls and surf shops and miles of perfect beach. Arriving by yacht gives you a different perspective, because the best place to drop an anchor is in the sea canal at the end of the harbour, which is an extensive network of artificial sandy channels lined with millionaires’ mansions, each with one or two yachts parked at the bottom of the garden. It’s like a cross between Venice and Florida.
MOOLOOLABA CANALS FROM THE TOP OF OUR MAST
We have stopped here for a while to do a little maintenance. Nothing major, but the masthead anchor light needs replacing, the water maker has a suction problem, and we are still badly in need of a replacement joker valve for the toilet. This latter has been annoying to us for quite some time, because we’d previously bought a cheap unbranded valve from Whitworths (ten dollars instead of near eighty for a full Jabsco service kit that contains lots of other parts that we don’t need) and have regretted it ever since, because the inferior quality of the valve meant that old sewage slowly gets backwashed into the toilet bowl until it fills up. You can imagine what then happens when the toilet bowl gets sloshed around in a seaway.
There are quite a few chandleries in the Mooloolaba area, and we’ve managed to source all of these bits and pieces (including a genuine $35 Jabsco joker valve! Hurrah!) as well as some new toys, such as running lights for the tender. I even managed to source a couple of oil filters for the engine, which have been mysteriously like gold dust all the way up this coast.
REPLACING THE MASTHEAD LIGHT
The shops and services are widely spread around the canal system, and I’ve been really grateful to have the new outboard motor because it would otherwise have taken me half a day to row from one end to the other and back. It also gives us a chance to gawp at all the mansions and yachts as we trundle back and forth.
After a few days of working on the boat and on schoolwork, we got a little stir-crazy and looked around for something a bit different. As luck would have it, we happened on an advert for the Sunshine Coast Brewery, which is tucked away on an out-of-town industrial estate. A local bus driver took pity on us, and made a little diversion and dropped us off at the entrance to the park, which was a lovely thing to do and typical of the people who we meet every day here on the Queensland coast.
The brewery produces a great selection of European-style beers (we were particularly stunned by the Rye ESB and the Hefeweissen), plus some interesting variations on alcoholic ginger beer. We got chatting to Greg, the owner, and had a grand afternoon tasting all his excellent ales, after which he joined us in one for the road and took us back to town. A top man with a top brewery.
BRONWYN CORNERS FIVE BEERS AT ONCE
After we’d manhandled our case of beers out to the yacht, Bronwyn decided that she was still thirsty, so we took the dinghy back to shore and made our way to one of the local pubs where the beers were far inferior but we had an entertaining time drinking with some locals and watching people falling over and being bounced by the door staff.
The next morning I was feeling just a touch under the weather, so we made our way to the beach and took it easy.
THE MASTER BUILDER AT WORK
Mooloolaba beach was very pleasant, and the water was calm and shallow and we were very glad to finally do some swimming. We’ve been conserving fresh water on the boat and haven’t fancied a dip in the murky canal water, so we’ve been feeling pretty dirty and it was good to get clean.
We’d been in two minds about going into Mooloolaba, which was the next stop before Fraser Island. We were keen to see it, but the official charts said that it was too shallow for us to reach the area marked off for anchorage, and we preferred not to pay for a marina berth. Our cruising guide stated that depths were good, but the accompanying printed chart told a different story. We knew that Pelagic had been there before so we checked with them. Not only did they say that it was plenty deep enough, but in fact they were anchored there right now, having made a fast 33-hour trip up from Iluka while we were in Brisbane.
The forecast for the next day was for very little wind, and since we wanted to arrive in Mooloolaba before sunset we worked out our passage plan for an average speed of 4 knots. This entailed a dawn start, but in the event we lazily emerged blinking into the sunlight after a long, comfortable sleep and finally hoisted the anchor at around half past eight.
Stretching before us were the hundred square miles of shoals and sand banks that had caused us so much stress on the way in. The dangers were, of course, completely invisible, lurking just below the surface of the innocently sparkling blue sea. In the pleasant sunshine, they seemed to taunt us.
Armed once more with our slightly unreliable chart, we took up the challenge. Rather than mix it with the large ships that were streaming out of the Brisbane docks and up the dredged channel, we chose to take an older, unmarked portion of the Main Channel for as long as possible, before joining them on the marked shipping route out to sea. Although requiring some more blind navigation, this had the advantage of giving us a fast beam reach in what turned out to be a rather decent southerly. Before long we were creaming along at 8 knots between the lurking sand banks and briefly considered reefing the main, but “damn the torpedoes!” we put up with a bit of weather helm because we’d probably need every inch of sail when we turned into the northerly-running shipping channel.
During the morning, we saw a number of large tankers and freighters rumbling by ahead of us, but when we actually made the final turn there was only one left in sight, and that one far ahead of us in the haze. Despite our concerns, we had the channel to ourselves for the rest of the morning.
By early afternoon, we were almost out of the clutches of Moreton Bay. Rather than follow the final couple of doglegs in the marked channel, we cut the last corner across some 6 metre deep sand banks, which made life very interesting for a while because the shallow water amplified the swell on the beam and gave us an entertaining but very rocky ride. I believe that it was at this point that the coffee thermos emptied itself over Bronwyn’s school books.
The wind was forecast to drop in the afternoon, but if anything it got a little stronger, and when we finally made it into the open sea and pointed our nose at Mooloolaba, we were running at 7-8 knots before 20-30 knots of breeze. Despite the late start, we dropped the sails and crossed the Mooloolaba bar just as the sun was setting. The bar itself presented no problems, but the school of fledgling outrigger-paddlers who straggled unheedingly across the entrance in front of us did cause us a few heart-in-mouth moments. In the end they sorted themselves out and got out of our way in good time, which was just as well because by then we were nigh-on unstoppable, lined up with the channel leads and being sucked in by the tide.
We chugged our way gently through the deepening dusk, and dropped our anchor in a few metres of water just a few boat-lengths away from Pelagic.
We were intending to head back to our old anchorage by the Sandhills dunes, but in order to get there we had to first round Mud Island, a long flat sandbank close to the Brisbane River shipping channel. As we came out of the lee of the island we got into some swell that had been building up as the wind crossed the bay from the other side.
The Sandhills anchorage is very picturesque, but it is rather exposed and does suffer rather from swell, particularly when the tide changes. Not only was Mud Island acting as a buffer for the south easterly swell, but it was also closer to the Main Channel that we would be taking in the morning, so we tucked in behind it and dropped the anchor.
The dinghy was absolutely filthy from its continual dunkings in the swamp mud at the Botanical Gardens, so I took advantage of our early stop to haul it up on a halyard and scrub it out.
CLEANING THE SWAMP OUT OF THE DINGHY
The shallow anchorage also meant that most of our chain was still in the anchor locker. I’d been waiting for a chance to work on it, so I sat on the bow and hauled it out onto the deck. Pindimara’s original chain had been marked every 5 metres by coloured spray-paint, but this had quietly eaten away the galvanisation on the chain and suddenly, one day, it rusted into a big knot and we’d had to replace the whole thing.
THE EFFECT OF SPRAY PAINT ON A GALVANISED CHAIN
Not wanting to destroy our new chain with the same problem, we had marked the lengths with cable ties instead of spray paint, but were finding that these interfered with the smooth progress of the chain over the winch. In fact, while anchoring in the Brisbane River, the chain jumped completely off the gypsy and the whole seventy metres plummeted uncontrollably to the bottom. This was pretty alarming. Not only is there a lot of metal moving very fast alongside your feet, but the total stationary weight is about 100 kg and when it reaches the end, it can tear the D-ring right out so that you lose anchor, chain, and possibly quite a lot of hull. Only a couple of weeks previously I’d taken the precaution of adding a loop of tripled springy silver rope to the end of our chain, so all I could do was stand there and keep my toes clear and wait to see whether it would bounce or snap.
Luckily it held, but it was time to get rid of the cable ties. To this end I obtained some water-based acrylic paint, reasoning that it might not contain quite as many noxious chemicals as the spray variety. As the sun set behind and the moon rose over Mud Island in front, I sat on the fore-deck and painstakingly brushed on two coats of primer and two coats of colour, while trying very hard not to spill any paint. This started to get quite difficult when a surprise wind blew up, thrashing the boat around and splashing me with spray. I clumsily tied down the wet and sticky chain so that it wouldn’t fall over the side, and went below for dinner.
JACKSON POLLOCK, EAT YOUR HEART OUT
The sea started to get pretty sloppy. As we climbed into bed later that night, we were very glad that we were not in the open water on the other side of the bay.
It was nice to catch up with friends, but the attractions of the bright lights wore off pretty quickly. I hadn’t really noticed before, but it’s hard to buy anything useful inside a city. I needed some plumbing parts and miscellaneous chandlery. Bronwyn wanted a shower and a laundry. We found some inexpensive toilet rolls, a haircut and some discounted novels, but otherwise there was precious little of value to the visiting cruiser.
It’s been less than two months since we quit our careers and started sailing, but I was surprised to find how hard it was to relate to urban life. I was being bombarded with solutions that I didn’t need to problems that I didn’t have. Even the process of going out for a meal or a beer seemed needlessly over-complicated, and it was always a relief to return to the boat where she bobbed quietly on the edge of the swamp at the Botanical Gardens.
We’d been in Brisbane for a week, and we’d seen everybody who wanted to visit us, so it was time to move on. Unfortunately we were almost completely out of both fuel and water, and we hadn’t found anywhere where we could obtain either of those two essentials. Luckily we remembered that we’d seen a fuel bowser downriver at the city limits, so hoping that (a) it was open on Sunday, and (b) that it had drinking water, we hauled up the anchor and set off. We figured that we had enough fuel to make it that far, and if it was closed, then we’d tie up and go to sleep until it opened on Monday.
It was great to be moving again. The sun was shining and we got to see a lot of details that we’d missed on our arrival, when we’d been more concerned about lining up the leading lights in the gathering dusk. The great wool stores from the early 1900s were particularly impressive, enormous blocky brick buildings that seemed to run for miles. Presumably these used to be dockside facilities, but a great many slender modern houses have been squeezed onto what must be a new, reclaimed waterline, each with its own personal dock, although the docks were usually empty.
The fuel dock under the Gateway Bridge not only had water, but also very cheap diesel, which was quite a surprise especially when the attendant confirmed that this was now the only fuel dock left in the Brisbane area. On our travels we’ve come across dockside diesel that is almost twice the price of its roadside equivalent. I began to relax, and spent a happy half hour chatting to the attendant while Bronwyn filled the water tanks.
Fuelled and watered, we let the tide suck us down the shipping channel and out into Moreton Bay. The heat of the sun, the direction of the wind, the depth of the water, the course of the yacht ahead of us; these were important, these were reality. I felt the gritty crowded feel of the city slip away, and danced a little jig at the helm while Bronwyn rustled up some fresh home-made won-ton soup in the galley. When she brought the steaming aromatic bowls up into the cockpit, she remarked that this was the first time that she’d seen me properly smiling all week. I don’t think that she was joking.
We remained anchored in Moreton Bay for a few more days until all the weekend visitors had gone, and then hoisted our sails and headed across to the mouth of the Brisbane River. We had a nice beam reach at a consistent eight knots. Pindimara never used to go this fast. Either the boat’s changed, or we have.
We’d been keeping half an eye on some distant rain clouds which were scudding past out to sea, and about half way across the bay we noticed a twister dropping down from the cloud base. We double-checked and it was definitely passing by outside the bay, but it was quite a fascinating sight. Neither of us had ever seen one before.
TWISTER!
We have been following the blogged exploits of another cruiser, Bob on Capricorn, who is also circumnavigating in a Bavaria but quite a few months ahead of us. In fact he had been coming up the NSW coast behind us, and when the waterspout formed, he was unlucky enough to be on the other side of Moreton Island and directly beneath it. His furler jammed and he got very wet, but luckily survived the experience without injury.
We arrived at the main Brisbane shipping channel and dropped sails for the long motor up the river to the city centre. We were sharing the relatively narrow lane with some seriously large commercial shipping, although they were travelling slowly to minimise their bow waves and some had time to wave cheerfully from the flying bridge.
Much of the first part of the Brisbane River is taken up by LPG tanker facilities, and the smell of leaking gas was pretty strong. On the other hand, there was lots to see and the depths and leading lights were uniformly excellent. Several hours later we found ourselves chugging underneath the girders of Story Bridge and into the heart of Brisbane itself.
PINDIMARA ARRIVES AT BRISBANE CBD
Many cruising guides mention the cheap pile berths by the Botanical Gardens, but we were aware of a lot of discussion in blogs and fora that suggested that they were permanently clogged with old hulks. We telephoned the Port Authority who run the pile berths, and they were quite definite that not only were the berths only for short term transient cruisers, but that there were currently a number of berths free, and gave us a list of berth numbers.
On our arrival, though, it was quite clear that not only were there no free berths, but that quite a number of boats didn’t look like they had been capable of moving for some years.
OBVIOUSLY SEAWORTHY
We dropped anchor around the bend and found good holding close to some mangroves, and when we later investigated the pile berths on foot, we found a large sign stating that the berths were available for a monthly rate, directly contradicting our Port Authority spokesperson.
It’s all worked out well because we’re very happy with our anchorage, which is only a short row from a Botanical Gardens piling where, with a little acrobatic effort at low tide, we can tie up our dinghy in safety and stroll into town, where we’ve been meeting up with various friends, and have drunk far too much expensive Belgian beer for our budget.
PINDIMARA OFF GARDEN POINT
The city’s been a bit of a shock to the system. Each morning the joggers sprint past as fast as they can with a desperate look in their eyes and headphones jacked into their ears. In the streets, everybody is hurrying around without paying any attention to anything. When we sit down in a cafe, waitresses rush up before we have a chance to get comfortable, and we find that we are infringing rules about who can sit where and when. We’re finding it all a bit manic, even Bronwyn who is a self-avowed city kid and was looking forward to some bright lights. It is strange to think that only a few short months ago we were part of this same madding crowd, but already that whole life seems impossibly remote.
Anchored just off the ‘Sandhills’ dunes of Moreton Island, we grabbed our boogie boards and decided to try our hand at sand-surfing.
THE SCENE: KOUNUNGAI, MORETON ISLAND
After a great deal of hilarity, Bronwyn reckoned that I finally made the transition from computer geek to surfer boy, and posted this video of my biggest ride: VIDEO: SAND SURFING (3.2 Mb)
The official Hydrographic chart of Moreton Bay shows two beaconed channels that lead from the sea and through the shifting sand shoals to the bay itself. The biggest is the North West Channel, which is dredged to at least 15 metres and carries large cargo and cruise liner traffic to Brisbane. This can only be accessed from the far north of the entrance, some five hours away from our current position as we bobbed around in the rain, swell and darkness. Much closer to us was the North East Channel, and connecting us to it were two unmarked but still navigable channels known as the Inner and Outer Freeman. The Inner Freeman was far too shallow and had a notorious bar, but the Outer Freeman seemed to offer us good depths all the way across, apart from a bit at the far end where it dropped to six metres of shifting sands at either of two spurs that lead onto the North East Passage. With our 2 metre keel, this still gave us at least 4 metres of clear water even at the lowest tide.
The downside of this plan, of course, was that it was pitch dark and pouring with rain, and we were tired and had never been here before. On the other hand, our chart was only a month old and we had practised navigating with GPS at close quarters in the Solitary Islands. We really needed to get out of the swell, which was making us sick. We decided to go for it.
Navigating Pindimara by instruments requires co-ordinated teamwork and perfect trust. At the helm, Bronwyn was driving completely blind, focussed on steering a course by compass alone. This is very difficult. Usually you pick a distant object on the required bearing and aim for it, but Moreton Bay at night is a very confusing place. The shoaling area alone covers over a hundred square miles and is criss-crossed with channel markers and scattered with warning beacons both far and near, providing the helm with a shifting landscape of colour with few stable markers. Bronwyn’s only option was to stare eagle-eyed at the red glow of the compass and to try to compensate for drift and windage.
Down below, my whole world consisted of a small blinking cursor that represented our GPS position on the chart, and the shouted depth soundings from the helm. I had to judge from the cursor’s continually updated orientation and position how we were being affected by any currents or rips, and to call up course amendments as required, as well as trying to interpret Bronwyn’s depth soundings in the light of the chart contours in front of me. Every few minutes I would pop my head out of the companionway and take a compass bearing on one of the few static lighthouses as backup; electronics can fail, and charts can be wrong.
At first (after a short break when I had to run up on deck and lose my dinner over the side) it all went well, with the depth soundings corresponding well to the chart. We successfully negotiated a couple of unseen shoals, and were approaching the zone of 6 metre shifting sands. It was time to decide whether to take the relatively wide northerly passage, or the more southerly gutter. The latter was two miles long and only 500 metres wide, but would cut an hour off our journey time. It was already midnight. The currents were manageable. We headed south.
The bottom rose rapidly as the sides of the gutter closed in. Just as we passed the 6 metre contour, Bronwyn called out “four”, which was perfect because the sounder measures depth from the bottom of our 2 metre keel. I breathed a sigh of relief. The gutter was where it was supposed to be.
A following current began to push us along. Bronwyn called out “Three” and then “Two”. I stared at the chart, which showed us perfectly centred in the six-metre gutter. The sand must have shifted. We had a hasty discussion and agreed that if we came too close to bottoming out – or indeed hit – then Bronwyn would turn sharply to port and try to retrace her course, although this was going to be increasingly difficult as the current continued to sweep us along. We knew that on either side of us, invisible in the darkness, were the two large and impenetrable Venus Banks. Presumably either one or both had been leaking or drifting into the gutter. Bronwyn called out “One point eight!”
We were one mile in, with another mile to go. If we made it through, then we would emerge right on top of a flashing red channel marker delineating the edge of the North East Channel. I called up the bearing, and Bronwyn said that she couldn’t see the light. I ran up on deck with a couple of check bearings on surrounding lighthouses, but we seemed to be exactly where we were supposed to be, albeit in scarily shallow water. Perhaps the red beacon was somehow hidden behind a sand bank. Perhaps.
How deep were we now? One point six metres. This wasn’t so good. We were running blind deep in a maze of continually shifting channels, in the pitch dark in the middle of the night; our gutter was steadily disappearing from under us and the channel that we were heading for had gone missing.
I know how scary it is to be driving blind when you know that you’re lost, so summoning my best confident voice I called up course corrections to port and to starboard to see if by some miracle I could find deeper water. Bronwyn, on the other hand, knows how scary it is to be sitting there extemporising when your tools have failed and everything depends on you, so she omitted to mention that we now only had 60 centimetres under the keel. The minutes passed as we quested back and forth, sometimes a bit deeper and sometimes a bit shallower, never quite hitting the bottom but never quite gaining any depth. Then at about 1 am Bronwyn called “Two metres! Three!” and we were through.
There was still no sign of the beacon, even though it was supposed to be only 500 metres away, so I called a course change that would bring us out right on top of it. We arrived, and there was nothing there. Where was the channel?
We put the motor into neutral and drifted under our triple-reefed main in what the chart said was the middle of the North East Channel. There should have been a line of coloured beacons stretching out to the north, but although the far horizon sparkled with other lights, our channel was nowhere to be seen. The Port Authority must have removed the markers without informing the Hydrographic Survey, because our chart had only been updated a month before.
THREADING THE NEEDLE AT MORETON BAY
Here and there in the darkness we could make out the riding lights of tinnies and small fishing boats, and occasionally one would shine a torch at us in apparent disbelief. What on earth is that great big yacht doing out here?
We couldn’t drift forever in these conflicting currents, so we went back to our instruments. Luckily the southernmost end of the North Eastern Channel was originally marked not by a navigation marker but by a westerly danger light, which was still in place. This gave us a friendly flashing point to aim for, and within half an hour we had squeezed between the danger marker and Moreton Island and were within clear sight of the main, North Western Channel.
The main channel was packed with seriously large container ships and cruise liners, edging slowly through the darkness and probably terrified of running down a fisherman. We chose to stay well away, and went looking for somewhere to anchor.
The obvious places were along the edge of Moreton Island, but first we needed to pass over a dumping ground for unexploded military ordinance. After that we tried for Sholl Bank at Tangalooma, but the anchor bounced off impenetrable gravel. At least it gave us a chance to drop the mainsail. It was three o’clock in the morning and we were very, very tired.
We pored over the chart, and settled on a remote and fairly sheltered bay about eight miles away. We worked our way through the last of the shoals and into Moreton Bay proper, where we found ourselves bashing into enormous head-on swells. We were so tired now that we were motoring in thirty-minute shifts, grabbing alternate naps in the cockpit in between.
The first tinges of dawn touched the horizon ahead, and I simultaneously spotted the shore-based navigation light at Kounungai which marked our chosen anchorage. This piece of Moreton Island was supposed to be uninhabited, so what were all those extra white lights along the shore?
The dawn light grew stronger and I started to laugh out loud. They were the mast-head anchor lights of other boats! Obviously the holding was good. We dropped the pick in ten metres and, ignoring the bouncing swell, fell into a long, deep and exhausted sleep.
I just love that expression. It sounds like something out of an old pirate movie. In actual fact, with the tide turning at dawn, and wanting to wait for at least the third hour of flood before crossing the bar, what it really meant is that we had a leisurely breakfast, prepared the boat for sea, and were lifting anchor at about ten o’clock. But “leaving on the dawn tide” sounds so much more impressive.
We had no problems going out of the Gold Coast Seaway, apart from… “…are those people in the water?”. A quick check with the binoculars revealed that there were indeed a number of surfers swimming across the bar entrance, in amongst the continual trawler, fishing and yacht traffic. Crazy. But a passing police launch manoeuvred politely around one pair who were doggedly paddling down the main channel, so I suppose that this must be normal Surfers Paradise behaviour.
Despite our careful timing of the tide, there was still a bit of an incoming rip, presumably due to some kind of tidal overrun. Bronwyn kept the power on hard coming out of the bar (no smoke! A change of oil and cleaning the air filter seemed to have fixed that one) while I went down into the saloon to check on the location of the nearby shoaling reefs. Once out on the open sea, Bronwyn kept powering directly into incoming the swell, running up each wave and launching off the top to drop into the face of the next one. Down below, I was trying to stay on the chart table seat while juggling a pile of eIectronics and paperwork, and I had some idea of what it must be like to go over the Niagara Falls in a barrel.
I was feeling a bit battered when I emerged blinking into the sunlight, as we rounded the shoals and set off northward, heading for Moreton Bay and Brisbane. It was a beautiful day and we had a perfect light following wind. We experimented for a bit with flying the jib only, just to see what it was like, but quickly switched to the main and found ourselves running at six to eight knots. The only slight difficulty was a quartering swell which made steering quite an energetic task. When the swell approaches the boat on a diagonal, you have to corkscrew up and down each face as it passes under the boat. Still, we were fresh and rested and I enjoyed the exercise for a while before turning control over to the tireless Harriet.
Being used to the NSW forecasts which only try to predict swell heights to within the nearest metre or so and are often wildly inaccurate (eg “Swell: SE 1 to 2 metres” may well turn out to be more than 3), we were quite amused to see that the Queensland forecast was a bit more precise; apparently we could expect to be sailing in exactly 1.7 metres of swell.
There were very few marine hazards shown on the charts, so we just concentrated on sailing as straight a line as possible. The Eastern Australian Current did have one last go at us around one headland, but after that it seemed to give up. Cashing in on this bonus, we decided to head straight across one large bay instead of hugging the coast, because that would put the swell directly behind us and to tell the truth we were getting a bit tired of the constant pounding. As we got into deeper water, a combination of fair winds and following surf got us up to eight knots, and we had to revise our timetable. We had planned to sail through the night so that we would arrive at Moreton Bay in daylight to negotiate the shoals across the entrance, but it looked like we were going to arrive much earlier, in the middle of the night.
Keeping a lookout, I saw a squall racing towards us and shouted to Bronwyn, who was preparing a meal in the galley. She calmly asked me for a time check for her rice. Exactly seven minutes later we were triple-reefed and back on track, and Bronwyn went back down and took the rice off the stove just as the squall hit us with 35 knots and a flurry of rain. As soon as it had passed, dinner was served.
BRONWYN ON WATCH IN THE RAIN
The rain and the swell kept on harrying us but Pindimara was flying, and by late evening we were approaching the notorious Moreton Bay shoals in pitch darkness and zero visibility. One option would be to stand out to sea and wait for dawn, but we were feeling battered and bruised and just wanted to get out of the swell, so we hove to and got out the charts.
As well as the official marine charts produced by the Hydrographic Office, we have also been using the coastal cruising guides written by local sailor Alan Lucas. His books (Cruising the NSW Coast, Cruising the Coral Coast) are useful but frustrating, comprising impeccably detailed research and surveys combined with often opaque or downright misleading editorial and layout. Still, they are a tremendous help and typically begin where the official charts leave off, being full of details and charts of otherwise uncharted inland waters.
We were particularly interested to see that Lucas has travelled in his own yacht up inland waters from Surfers Paradise to Brisbane, and had painstakingly surveyed and charted a route that seemed to be of sufficient depth for Pindimara, as long as we were careful to travel through a couple of shallower zones at the top of the tide.
THE RIVER CHANNELS FROM SURFERS TO BRISBANE
However, Lucas’ surveys were done in 2003 in a boat with much shallower draft, and the rivers run over continually shifting sands, so we called the local Marine Rescue patrol and asked for their local advice. Often these groups are not keen to offer specific advice, but on this occasion after some muffled discussion they told me that their unanimous opinion was that our keel was too deep and that they advised against it. We were a bit disappointed, but we’ll go with the experts.
In the meantime, then, we are sitting at anchor in Surfers Paradise, a rather strange and artificial concoction of high-rise holiday homes, beaches, and amusement parks. It’s not exactly quiet due to the continual howl of high-performance engines from sea-doos, jet-boats, helicopters, float planes, and speed boats from the adjoining Sea World amusement park, but there’s certainly a lot to see while bobbing around in the sun.
The wind died in the morning, but we persevered until we were completely becalmed and then turned the motor on. It took most of the day to chug up to Queensland and the Gold Coast Seaway (an artificial channel leading into the river system), where unfortunately the tide was out across the bar. We pored over the charts and decided that there was just about enough depth for us to get in, so long as we didn’t veer from the channel. Actually sticking to the channel proved to be a little exciting because the fishing trawlers were coming out, and they were deploying their tackle inside the breakwater which made them very wide indeed.
We managed to dodge around them, although we did attract the attention of a great number of black helicopters which kept buzzing our mast. They didn’t have coastguard markings, so we ignored them. Maybe they were impressed by our outstanding seamanship.
After a couple of moments with only a metre of water under the keel (I was having kittens at the helm while Bronwyn was very calmly reading out the seconds until the next turn), we felt our way upriver and squeezed into a crowded anchorage outside Seaworld. I’m writing this at sunset with the barking of sealions in the background.
Bronwyn’s homework assignment was finished and we were champing at the bit to move on. Pindimara was even growing roots, and I spent one morning scrubbing them off. We had enjoyed our stay in Iluka and had had some fun times with local people here and there and our friends on Pelagic, but it was a relief to catch the morning tide and sail across the bar and out into the open sea. It was a bonus to do it under a clear blue sky over glassy smooth water virtually unruffled by the perfect breeze.
The day continued as fun as it started. We were close-hauled and doing 5-6 knots, even managing to hitch-hike on a couple of the mystical ‘reverse currents’ that run sporadically and unreliably up the coast here. Pods of dolphins passed by, heading south. Fighter pilots flew training circuits around the boat, and one even waggled his wings at Bronwyn when she waved. The sun shone. We smiled a lot.
As evening fell, we found ourselves sailing across a wide bay south of Ballina. The off-watch prepared food, each according to their ability. I made Bronwyn a peanut-butter sandwich. She made me a warm chicken and cous-cous spinach salad.
Bronwyn went to bed to get some rest before the night passage, and I started to put in some long tacks to get around the Ballina headland. Out there in the deeps, my old enemy the Eastern Australian Current was lurking, robbing me of two knots and making the easterly tacks pretty hard to judge. For about half an hour, I’m pretty sure that I made no progress at all.
Still, there was a lot to be happy about. I was sailing again, and I’d just finished – thanks to Bronwyn – an excellent supper of home-made meatballs with freshly baked sourdough bread, hot out of the oven. An orange sliver of crescent moon sank slowly beneath the sea. I turned down the lights on the cockpit instruments and lay back on deck to admire the stars. The sky was packed with them. Not just in the Milky Way, which was gloriously spectacular, but also from horizon to horizon I was hard pushed to find the smallest patch of empty black sky. Both of the island galaxies were there, and big fat shooting stars were dropping from the north.
There were stars in the sea, too. Phosphorescent micro-organisms were being churned up in our wake, leaving a line of bright fairy lights in the water on either side.
Before we left Sydney, somebody – we can’t remember who – predicted that we wouldn’t make it far up the Queensland coast before I got fed up with rowing everywhere and bought an outboard motor for the tender. Up to now I’ve been happy to use the oars, but these last few weeks of wind and tide have forced me to reconsider. Having had some not so wonderful experiences with an old second-hand outboard, we bit the bullet and bought a brand new Yamaha 3 horsepower 2-stroke.
It’s been a ball. We drove it straight out of the shop and over the river to an uninhabited little island near to Yamba, just because we could.
That was yesterday. Today, while Bronwyn’s been working on her CAD assignment, I’ve been running back and forth to the shore, fetching water to fill our tanks, as well as going for the odd burn around the bay just for the absolute hell of it.
And I’ve had to learn new tricks. For instance, now that our dinghy has an engine sticking out underneath, I can’t just run it up onto the shore, jump out and tie it up like I’ve been used to. Instead, I’ve bought a small anchor, and the sequence goes something like this: Approach shore, avoid weed and rocks, look for a shallow bit, slow down, lift the engine halfway out of the water, chug inshore until my nerve gives out, throw the anchor, put the engine in neutral, and step out into the sea. If it’s too deep, I haul on the anchor rope until I float over to the anchor, pull it out of the water, throw it a bit further, repeat. This manoeuvre is called “kedging” and is remarkably effective. We just hope that we never have to do it with the yacht.
The motor is brand new, but doesn’t run very well at the moment because we’re using up the old and dirty fuel in our fuel can. We’re kind of stuck with this, as there isn’t a socially acceptable way of disposing of old fuel (chuck it in the sea and set light to it?), so we just have to keep using it up until it’s gone and then we can replace it with good stuff. Shouldn’t be long now.
Meanwhile, I’ll just pop over to the breakwater with the camera to see if I can photograph any lizards.
Basking water dragonWill you stop burning up and down next to my rock?
We popped out to the heads yesterday to have a look at the bar. Even under what would normally be ideal conditions of tide, it was completely impassable. Enormous white-capped green rollers were breaking across the whole width of the channel. Great for a professional surf competition, perhaps, but not so good for our little boat. Even the fishing trawlers are staying in harbour. Looks like we’re not leaving the Clarence River any time soon.
Our Ampair wind generator started squeaking in the night. I took it down and disassembled it to reveal a worn bearing. I contacted the manufacturer in England, because it’s only nine months old and we’ve had some other problems with it before. They’re sending us a new unit, but we don’t want to have to wait for it in Iluka, so we’re getting it delivered to an address further up the coast in Brisbane (thanks, Kate) and in the meantime I’ve dropped our shaft into the local machine shop to see if they can source us a new bearing.
In other news… it’s wet, it’s windy, and it’s even a bit cold. We’re still here, but we’re getting a lot of schoolwork done. We’ve used up all our internet allowance for the month, so the last couple of blog updates have come to you via satellite. It’s nice to know that the technology is working, because we are likely to need it around the top end.
The next batch of weather has rolled in across the Tasman Sea, bringing heavy winds and rain. Although the ocean wind speeds are finally dropping to 30 knots, the gales have left a legacy of four-metre swells, so we’re staying put until either the wind or the swell dies down a bit. Since we’re now at the northern end of the Bureau of Meteorology’s New South Wales report, we have been peeking at the southern end of the Queensland report. We notice with some jealousy that the Queenslanders have perfect sailing weather; if only we could make it around that last corner!
After so long at anchor and unwilling to risk slamming up against hard fishing jetties in the high winds, we were running very low on water. We couldn’t use our water-maker because the bay is thick with eroded mud from upriver, so while Bronwyn explored the town, I spent an afternoon rowing back and forth in 25- knot squalls to the nearest caravan park, repeatedly filling our 20 litre jerry-can and emptying it into our echoing 150 litre forward tank. Pouring water from a jerry-can into a small hole in a pitching deck is exciting to say the least, especially when much of the working space is taken up by our emergency spare anchor (which is set up ready to be dropped in case the main one drags in the bad weather). Despite losing several litres here and there as the wind whipped the pouring stream over the side and into the anchor locker, I got the forward tank three quarters full before Bronwyn returned to shore with six bags of provisions and two sacks of clean washing.
Although the dinghy was quite heavily loaded, I reckoned that I’d be OK because I had the turning tide working for me, but half way back to the boat a headwind blew up and I found that I couldn’t make any progress at all. The Walker Bay doesn’t row very well with weight in the stern, so Bronwyn suggested that we row side-by-side instead. We have often done this in the sheltered bays of Pittwater, and after some hilarious circular routes we have become quite proficient at it. Usually Bronwyn takes the starboard oar and rows with both hands, while I sit with one arm around her waist and one on the port oar, both stroking and steering. We hadn’t tried it in heavy weather before, but we quickly found that with all the weight in the centre and both of us pulling hard we skimmed across the wave-tops.
The reason that we so urgently needed water and supplies was that we were entertaining our Alaskan friends Alisa and Mike with their young son Elias from the neighbouring yacht Pelagic. We made it back to Pindimara in the nick of time and were able to quickly clean up and start cooking before they arrived. After some initial excitement when Pelagic’s tender’s new outboard failed in the wind and rain just short of us, we had a great evening of laksa, wine, cake and conversation. One advantage of the continuous wind was that the wind generator kept on pumping out power and we managed to keep the cabin lights and hi-fi speakers working the whole time.
A night of rain brought the welcome sight of a dinghy full to the brim, so we nipped out in a gap between squalls and pumped all that precious sweet water into the aft tank.
The bay at Iluka is a pleasant enough anchorage, and it is but a short row to the local pub and shop. More northerly winds were forecast shortly after we arrived, and we had to catch up on some schoolwork, so we decided to stay a while.
Welcome to the office
The winds improved, but we had some more work to do both for university and on the boat, so we stayed a few days longer, and now we’re waiting out a 40-knot gale that is expected to last all weekend. Luckily the holding here is very good, because the boat is being thrown around like a child’s toy even inland behind two breakwaters.
It hasn’t been all work work work. Iluka has a very pleasant walk that leads you to the impressive sandstone bluffs via an unusual beach rain forest (“beware the shiny-leaved stinging tree”) and back via the very long beach itself. We’ve done the walk in both directions, and on one occasion came back through the rain forest at night. As our eyes became adjusted to the gloom, we realised that there were little scattered spots of fairy light both in the undergrowth and up in the trees. Thinking that they were glow-worms, we sneaked up on one with our trusty wind-up torch, and switched it on to reveal that we were actually looking at phosphorescent mushrooms. Very cool.
Iluka beach and bluffs
On the other side of the channel is the slightly bigger town of Yamba. As well as indulging in a bit of tourism, we needed to buy some items that weren’t available in Iluka, so we took the ferry over. It was possible to take the yacht, but we didn’t like the look of either the channel depths or of the anchoring options at the other end. This was the first time that I regretted not having an outboard motor for the tender. The tidal flow would have made for rather too exciting a row to Yamba and back, but we could have motored the dinghy over without any problem.
Still, the ferry was very pleasant, and we had breakfast in the excellent Pot Belly Pie Shop (the serving lass was wearing a tight little T-shirt reading “I got my pot belly in Yamba”). I also badly needed some shorts to wear, having torn all my existing ones to shreds, so we dropped into one of the many surf shops to buy some board shorts, thinking that they probably had the right durability in sea water. Once we’d made our purchases, I found that there was something hard in one of the pockets, which turned out to be a very unusual combination comb and beer bottle opener. Welcome to the surfer lifestyle!
We had a nice day clambering about on the rocks, watching the surf and the surfers, fossicking in chandleries, and yes, looking for second-hand 3 horse power outboard motors. We didn’t find a motor (apparently nobody hereabouts would be seen dead with anything less than 75 hp) but we did get enough other bits and pieces to finally allow me to add some finishing touches to the sewage tank in the head, and a replacement pump so that I can finally change the engine oil.
But not today. It’s just a little bumpy at the moment.
Since we’d spent much of the preceding evening steering by the flashing white light on South Solitary Island, we decided to go and have a look at it. Presumably the name is some sort of cartographer’s joke, because there are many islands, rocks and reefs in the “Solitary” group, and they are all close in to shore. Our cruising guide mentioned that there were moorings on most of the islands, and when – after our problems last night – we double-checked on the internet we found that the whole group was part of a marine park, that anchoring and fishing were forbidden, but that visitors were welcome to use the courtesy moorings which were rated for boats up to 13 metres. An afternoon walking about on an uninhabited island sounded like a grand plan, so we set off for South Solitary.
It was such a beautiful morning that we didn’t mind that all we had was a gentle nine-knot Northerly breeze. Petrels flocked around, and squabbled over their catch. A big black dolphin that escorted us yesterday came to say hello again, but at two knots we weren’t giving him much chance to play in the bow wave, so he didn’t hang around. The only other boat on the water was a local yawl who was also obviously heading for South Solitary, so we traded tacks with him until lunchtime, when the wind increased to the high twenties and we put in a reef. He didn’t, and forged ahead.
By the time we got to South Solitary, the wind was consistently strong and the waves were pounding on the sea cliffs. We couldn’t see any of the promised moorings, and even if we’d found one, we didn’t fancy going close enough in to pick them up. We could also see that there were some buildings attached to the lighthouse, so perhaps South Solitary was inhabited after all.
SOUTH SOLITARY ISLAND
Our old foe the Eastern Australian Current was back, making tacking progress very slow, so we decided to extend our shoreward tack and see if we could tuck behind – and maybe visit – and maybe stay on – South West Solitary Island (also known as Groper Islet), which lies less than a mile from shore. Both our Lucas guide and the Marine Parks website told us that anchoring was forbidden but that there were courtesy moorings here, too.
The northerly current was strong even close in, but we finally managed to tack along the southern, sheltered side of Groper Island, where we could quite clearly see that there were no moorings at all. Making good use of our new charting software (Passage Plus, with the Australian Hydrographic Survey digital chart pack), we threaded our way through a number of reefs, shoals, breaking rocks, hidden rocks and other hazards which littered the small space between the island and the shore, before triumphantly emerging unscathed to tack along the north side of the island. There were no moorings there, either.
Evening was coming, so we gave up on our idea of overnighting on one of the Solitary Islands and began tacking in earnest to make some northing. Several hours passed as we zig-zagged back and forth between the 20 and 30 metre lines, heading Northward into a Northerly wind against a Northerly current, and then the wind died. The current was now dragging us backwards at over a knot, so it was almost a relief to give up and to start the engine. We were going to have to head further out into the stronger current now anyway, because the shoals shoreward from the next island, North West Solitary Island, looked far too complicated to thread at night. We set our sights on the white beacon on faraway North Solitary Island, and powered into the swell. That sounds exciting, but even though we were motoring at over 5 knots, we were only making 2.5 knots over the ground. It was going to be a long night.
MOST OF THE TIME THE GPS IS OFF,
SO MOST OF THE TACKS AREN’T SHOWN
We settled into our usual night watch pattern of two and a half hours on, two and a half hours off. Pindimara is set up for single-handed cruising, which means that the helmsman doesn’t need to set foot in the cockpit proper in order to control the boat; everything can be done from the wheel. This leaves the cockpit clear, and it has become one of our favourite sleeping spots on night passages. We put down a soft mat and an inflatable cushion, and then sleep completely dressed in our sailing gear and still in harness. Being on the centreline, any rolling motion is minimised, and we are always available to leap suddenly into action if required. As a bonus, when we open our eyes we get to see the Milky Way.
I woke at around midnight when we were just coming abreast of North Solitary Island. We needed to do a bit of careful navigating to avoid a couple of nearby shoals, and then we knew that there wouldn’t be any more danger spots until half past four. Bronwyn went down to the forecabin for a proper sleep, and I motored on against the current.
Apart from the tedium, the main problem with hand-steering under motor is that your bum gets very sore from sitting on the hard wooden helmsman’s seat. Under sail, you get to move around every so often, to trim the sails or look at the view or just to stretch your legs. Properly balanced, the boat is quite capable of sailing itself for surprisingly long distances even with Harriet turned off, but under power it is much less forgiving and you need to keep a firm hand and quite an eagle eye on the compass.
I tried a few different arrangements before finding that I could lie on a soft cushion up in the aft corner, drape my arms over the targa rail, and steer using one of my feet while still being able to see the compass and the sea ahead. Much better.
NIGHT WATCH
Time passes remarkably quickly on watch. A few hours went by, and we swapped places. Usually we just sleep until we hear the sails flapping or a bad drop off a swell – a sure sign that the helmsman is getting tired – but this time I set my alarm for 4 am so that we could tackle the next shoal together. Since the tidal stream was still pushing us backwards and sideways, it was difficult to steer a course in the dark that would ensure that we stayed out of trouble, so it was much easier for one of us to steer and for the other to call out new headings from the GPS and chart computer.
Once clear of the shoal, Bronwyn headed for bed and I sat and looked forward to the dawn. It rained a little, but our ever-so-expensive targa is brilliant at keeping the helm dry, and in any case I had my sailing gear on. The hours passed, the skies cleared, and the first vestiges of dawn touched the eastern sky.
The mind plays strange tricks when you’re tired, and I find it particularly hard to judge the wind direction at the end of a watch. However, since we were still motoring along into a mild 9-knot /northerly headwind, it wasn’t terribly important. On one of my regular sweeps of the horizon I suddenly noticed a tall black sail silhouetted against the pre-dawn horizon. He was far, far out, and was not showing any running lights. Idly I wondered where he’d come from; had he tried to beat the current by going dozens of miles to seaward, or was he perhaps arriving from New Zealand? Perhaps he wasn’t showing any lights because his batteries had died overnight, or perhaps he was so far away that for him it was already dawn and he’d switched them off. In either case, this part of the coast is all wilderness and he was going to be disappointed when he found out that he’d come in ten miles short of Iluka and would have to spend the next few hours tacking up the coast.
I chugged on, hoping that the rising sun would give me a change of wind. Every ten minutes or so I checked over my shoulder, and I could still just make out the dark shape coming toward me. The next time that I looked, his profile had changed and although he was still many miles away, he was now heading north up the coast. I wondered how on earth he’d managed that, since he was now going directly into a headwind, and pondered idly on dark ghost ships passing in the night.
Suddenly I realised that, of course, that the reason that he’d turned was that the wind had changed and we suddenly had a nice beam reach all the way to Iluka. I undid the preventer on the main sail, unfurled the headsail, killed the engine and gratefully accepted a blissfully silent four knots of speed. I glanced over to my dark companion to see how he was doing. The sun had now risen in a blaze of orange and blue, giving me clear visibility from horizon to horizon, and there was no other boat in sight.
We hadn’t got a great deal of sleep, but we’d had some rest and weren’t feeling at all sea sick. We decided to start the day with half a sea-sickness tablet each and then try to finally get our sea legs. We hoisted the sail (David’s method again working a treat) and set off up the coast, determined to hug the shoreline as close as we could to stay out of the pesky Eastern Australian Current. There wasn’t much wind, but we spent a pleasant couple of hours sailing along the beach, occasionally bumping over some of the curious steps in the sea level that are common hereabouts. Presumably the edges of underwater currents or rips, they are marked by trails of spume – often yellow – and a noticeable drop of several inches.
Our first navigation point was called Fish Rock, and it did look extraordinarily like a prehistoric lobe-finned fish, crawling out of the sea on its way to evolve some lungs.
FISH ROCK
At about lunchtime, though, the wind died completely and we reluctantly started the motor. Motoring on passage is very tedious; the boat pushes through the waves rather than moving with them, and we have to hand-steer because Harriet the Hydrovane needs the wind to function. Admittedly this is rather my fault; we do have an Autohelm unit that will automatically steer us under power, but I took it apart some months ago to fix a rattle, and never got around to putting it back together again. I hereby move it closer to the top of my list of “things to do when it’s quiet”. On the other hand, Bronwyn took advantage of the gentle chugging to proof some dough and bake some bread and a pizza for lunch.
After a splendid meal, we not only got our wind back, but also hit the semi-mythical northern current, a retrograde offshoot of the Eastern Australian that allegedly and occasionally runs northward close inshore. For the first time, our speed-over-ground was higher than our speed-through-the-water. The rest of the afternoon passed with alternate sailing and motoring until dusk, when we began to think seriously about stopping for the night instead of continuing with a night passage. Although the roadstead anchorage at Hat Head had given us a break and we weren’t feeling at all sea-sick (hurrah!) we were not feeling particularly enthusiastic about losing another night’s sleep, so we decided to stop at Coffs Harbour. Our cruising guide said that although the anchor holding at Coffs was terrible, there were courtesy moorings inside the harbour.
We were really grateful for our excellent new charts. Coffs is a blaze of vari-coloured and flashing lights, not only navigation markers but also multicoloured aircraft beacons and a plethora of lights on the shore. As we approached, we slowly ticked off all the different lights on our chart until we finally sorted out the wheat from the chaff, rounded the beacon on Korfs Islet and picked up the clear lead lights into the harbour. There’s no real bar at Coffs, and we surfed gently in on a swell.
There were no courtesy moorings. We tried to drop the anchor a couple of times, but the bottom seemed to be hard and flat and we couldn’t get it to bite. We called up the local Coastal Patrol on the radio, and they confirmed that there weren’t any moorings and suggested that perhaps we could try the fishermen’s public jetty inside the marina. We had a look and then squeezed in front of a large fishing boat, hard up against some massive wooden pilings constructed for boats made of steel and twice our size. Bronwyn did a fine job of manoeuvring us in under the amused and somewhat inebriated eyes of the fishermen. After that we slammed into the jetty a few times because there was a tricky swell that alternately pushed us into the un-fendered pilings and then dragged us away. It was a bit of a juggle to get the mooring lines right, but eventually I was happy and we grabbed something to eat and went to bed.
COFFS HARBOUR
We’d come in on the top of the tide, so as usual I set the alarm for the falling tide so that I could get up and check the lines. However, this wasn’t necessary because the low was heralded by a loud “crash” as our inflatable fenders shifted away from the pilings and allowed us to slam into the battered and pitted wood. After that, I was up and down every hour or so, discovering by trial and error that the best plan was to leave the fore and aft lines alone and simply play with the springers as the level changed. Finally the tide came back in and everything calmed down. I was just drifting off into my first deep sleep of the night when we were awoken by “Oy! Is anybody aboard? This is a working jetty, you know!”. It was a fishing charter arriving early to pick up passengers. He was hoping that we could move up a bit to let him squash in behind us, but I really couldn’t see how we were all going to fit, so we just cast off, motored into the main harbour, and bobbed about while we ate breakfast and prepared the boat for sea.
At last, on Monday morning, the post that we had been waiting for arrived; a new bilge pump for the toilet and our set of digital charts from the Hydrographic Survey. We intended to leave Camden Haven on Tuesday’s dawn tide, but while checking the weather on Monday afternoon we found that Tuesday’s southerly change was going to be associated with gale-force winds. We decided to wait one more day and then follow the change up in the more well-mannered southerlies forecast for Wednesday. Since we’d already paid off and said our goodbyes at Dunbogan Marina, we went alongside the free jetty at the RSL instead.
I needed to pop into town to pick up some hose clamps for my ongoing toilet reinstallation, and Bronwyn wanted to pick up some food and medical supplies, so it was fairly inevitable that we ended up having a Guinness or two at the Laurieton Hotel. Two beers turned into eighteen (we know because the cash register was broken and the barmaid wrote them down on a post-it note) and very few of the urgent tasks were remembered that evening. We didn’t exactly make Wednesday’s dawn tide either, but we did end up being dragged down the channel in the overrun and spat out to sea before we were really ready.
In a previous blog, I commented on the tendency of our main halyard to wrap itself around everything when we try to hoist the mainsail in the slop at sea. David emailed us a suggestion, and we amended it to suit our boat and gave it a go; before leaving harbour, we attached the main halyard to the sail and then lay a length of it halfway back along the boom, tying it off there with a piece of rope (actually I achieved this balancing on the fore-deck while Bronwyn fought the tidal rip along the channel). When we got to sea, I just whipped away the rope along with the four normal sail ties. Bronwyn started the hoist from the helm, and by the time I’d nipped back to the cockpit I could take over and finish the job while Bronwyn concentrated on keeping us headed into wind. It worked a treat. Thanks, David.
I had previously decided that today was the day that I would wean myself off seasickness tablets. After all, we have to gain our sea-legs at some point. Maybe it was the Guinness, but the immediate result was that I spent most of the morning leaning over the rail and feeding the fishes. However, by ten o’clock I was feeling much more chipper, and launched the tow-generator. I reckoned that we would be needing the electricity, because we’d been stationary for a week and we now had to power one of the computers so that we could use our shiny new digital charts.
The tow line for the generator was a little kinked from our test run outside Sydney harbour, and we’d certainly never tried it at the speeds of which Pindimara was now capable, so we were a little surprised when the generator set up a noticeable but not objectionable hum. We were happy to note that at seven knots of boat speed we were getting seven amps of power, and were even more delighted when the dolphins seemed to find the spinning torpedo greatly fascinating, and spent almost half an hour playing with it.
By early afternoon, it was clear that our bold decision to head straight for the Clarence River some 160 miles away was being vetoed by the wretched East Australian Current, which was robbing us of a whole two knots however we tried to avoid it. As light fell, we were both feeling decidedly queasy and decided to call it a day at Hat Head, where we experienced our first ever ‘roadstead anchorage’, which is a grand name for hiding behind a big rock and dropping your anchor in the sea.
In retrospect, we could have dropped the pick a little farther from the beach. We arrived at high tide and the night started comfortably enough, but as the tide dropped the beach swells began to form to seaward of our position, which made the boat roll unpleasantly and had me up and down every couple of hours checking the anchor (and on one occasion resetting the snubber, which had come undone with a disconcertingly loud “bang”). Still, once the tide had come back in, we slept well enough.
PINDIMARA (second yacht from the right) AT THE
FOOT OF NORTH BROTHER (looks like rain…)
Laurieton, where we remain at anchor sheltering from the storms, is dominated by a 500-metre mountain called North Brother, but known locally as Brother or just The Mountain. The locals hold it in some affection. It breaks up the wind, they say, and is an effective weather vane; if the top is in cloud, then it is going to rain. This is perfectly reasonable because North Brother is the first high point encountered by any incoming moisture-laden sea wind, which will have to shed at least some of its load in order to rise over the top. The slopes are therefore covered with dense rain forest, and Laurieton has a healthy rainfall. One morning we pumped nearly half a tank of fresh sweet rainwater out of our dinghy and into our depleted tanks; we’d have easily filled the 150-litre tank if the bottom half of the boat hadn’t been a bit silty.
I have long held that humans are attracted to edges. If we see a lake, we go down to the edge and skip stones. If we see a beach, we go down to the sea and say that we are invigorated (and build retirement homes). If we see a cliff, we go to the edge (perhaps not too close… depending on the rubber band effect of your own personal manifestation of vertigo… but we still go) and look at the view.
This isn’t too surprising. Life is all about edges. Walk through a natural forest, and you’ll see that most of the action happens around the perimeter, where young trees can compete for resources and animals can see danger coming, and yet still hide from it. Deeper inside the forest, the number of species drops and the forest is relatively quiet (except where a glade opens up when a tree falls; but that’s another, newly created edge). At the microscopic level, almost all of our biochemistry is mediated at the surface of the catalyst molecules that we call enzymes. We evolved from the moon-ministered tidal zone at the edge of the sea. Go diving, and it is immediately obvious that most of the life is congregated either in that tidal zone, or in a reef band further out just before the bottom slopes away into the deeps. Most of the rest is underwater desert.
To a greater or lesser extent, then, we all seek edges. Our urban and social life has removed our access to the more natural ones, and so we make up our own. How far can I swim? How high can I climb? How fast can I drive my car without going out of control? How close can I get to earning my salary without working too hard? How far can I push him before he cracks?
Having sat in the same stretch of river for a week, and having fixed and maintained just about everything that could be fixed and maintained, I was becoming increasingly obsessed with the idea of climbing to the top of The Mountain. On one particular day, with yet another set of storm warnings, gale warnings, and general mayhem out to sea, I shouldered a backpack and set off.
On the way through Laurieton, I stopped to ask about a footpath. It seemed that there was one, but nobody knew quite where it was as they usually drove to the top, so I just headed uphill until I found a trail and a NSW Parks sign said that it was a hard four-hour return trip. I know from experience that NSW Parks always inflate their figures by at least 100%, although I have never been able to decide whether this is to discourage the uncertain or to challenge the determined. Be that as it may, I knew that I’d be up and back in a couple of hours, so I checked my watch. The temperature was in the high twenties, the humidity must have been in the eighties, and the sun was just reaching its zenith; perfect timing for an Englishman to go exploring. Humming Noel Coward, I set off up the hill.
The trail had been hacked directly toward the summit. It was bloody steep, and shored up here and there with tree-trunk steps. At first I leapt gazelle-like from bole to bole, thinking “Hah! Four hours my foot!”, but before very long I slowed to a more reasonable pace. Sweat began to pour down my back, so that I first rolled up my shirt and then took it off and put the soaking rag into my pack. Venerable gums towered above, with a dripping understory of ferns, cycads and ‘black boy’ grasses. Birds shrieked in sudden startlement as I passed by; from the reaction of the animals and from the deep fallen brush along the trail, I could see that not many people passed this way. The trees were mainly scribbly gums, their bark decorated by the intricate maps of burrowing beetles.
A MAP TO SHOW THE WAY? SCRIBBLY GUM ART
Every now and then, an igneous rock outcrop thrust through the soil and towered over my head, making the way slippery underfoot with loose eroded pebbles. I began to pant in the heat, and to wonder if I was going to make it, the legacy of too many months doing overtime in an office chair followed by days of sitting around doing schoolwork on the boat. I struggled on. I was glad to note that my heart wasn’t pounding and that my breathing was relatively normal, but I was sweating buckets and my legs had begun to go rubbery when I emerged blinking into a clearing that marked the top of the trail and the beginning of what was described as ‘the easy traverse’.
With sudden renewed energy I set off along the new path, which ran in a gladdeningly horizontal fashion before – horror of horrors – actually running downhill and robbing me of hard-gained altitude. Round the next corner came the punchline of the joke; the trail reverted back to the familiar vertical climb.
After an hour’s sweaty effort, I emerged suddenly onto a neatly grassed forty-five degree lawn which turned out to be a launch pad for hang gliders. Spinning around, I was presented with a view that made the whole thing worthwhile. Not just one edge, but three, if you included the distant beach and the even more distant horizon. Far below, I could just make out the shape of Pindimara bobbing on her mooring.
PINDIMARA (topmost rightmost yacht) AT THE
BOTTOM OF NORTH BROTHER, WITH LAURIETON
IN THE FOREGROUND AND THE CAMDEN HAVEN
BAR IN THE BACKGROUND
A half hour for lunch while I drank in the views. Edges are good for the soul.
Then back to the trail, initially running with sheer exuberance until my legs turned to jelly, and then a more cautious descent to sea level, which was in its own way just as much hard work as the journey up.
Back at the marina I took a shower and then stood on the dock looking at the yacht. Usually I would call Bronwyn on my mobile so that she could row over and get me, but today the Vodafone signal was unaccountably absent. As I waited to see if she would happen to appear on deck, I saw a small movement out of the corner of my eye, and crouched down to have a look. A small leech was inch-worming its way across the wooden planking, mouth parts eager and stretching at the top of each loop. I stepped back to let it go by, wondering what it was doing in such a bare and unfriendly environment. It came to the edge of a plank and then snuck down into a crack, whereupon I became aware of a lot of crimson splashing; there was fresh blood pouring down my lower leg. I couldn’t feel any pain, but when I wiped it away I could see a couple of fresh bite marks, so presumably I had been carrying more than just memories home from the rain forest.
Ah well. Salt water would fix it. I stashed my bags on the dock, and swam out to the boat.
Because of the inclement weather, we haven’t moved from Laurieton in Camden Haven. On the other hand, we would much rather be in here than out there. The news has been showing pictures of floods and mayhem; the locals are talking about boats dis-masted and abandoned, and the weather bureau reports wind speeds in excess of 60 knots and swells over 7 metres. All the while we have been bobbing more or less serenely at our mooring, although the wind did get a bit fresh now and again. One gust almost knocked us down in a flurry of flying crockery, and on another night although we couldn’t see our actual wind speed indicator (it’s on deck and we were warm and dry inside), our wind generator clocked 7 amps, which is a record and probably represents well over 40 knots.
The weather reports continued to broadcast doom and gloom, so we took a stroll down to the entrance bar to see what it looked like from the land. It was a pleasant walk past an enormous lagoon packed with oyster leases and along the causeway to the head, where we were greeted by shrieks and screams from the water. In fact it was only some kids boogie-boarding in the protection of the breakwater. They had some decent surf to play in, but the bar itself looked impassable, and the sea beyond was a maelstrom.
I usually like a wet bar, but I’ll skip this oneNice day for a sail
That night, I announced that rather than walk all the way around the bay, I would row us across the river to the pub, a distance of perhaps 300 metres. This would be the work of a moment on a flat lake or sheltered bay, but we had thus far avoided the attempt because of the fast-flowing tidal streams. It took me about an hour to row upstream to my rather well-deserved pint, and then, some hours later, about the same to row back in the dark against the now incoming tide. Not exactly a lesson learned, but certainly some calluses earned. Bronwyn will tell you with some glee that she even heard me muttering something about buying an outboard.
This is a pleasant spot to stop over. Flocks of pelicans follow the fishermen, and sea eagles float overhead. As well as the inevitable cleaning and maintenance tasks, we’ve been able to catch up and even get slightly ahead with our schoolwork, which has been particularly useful for Bronwyn because she suddenly found that in order to complete one particular assignment, she needs to learn how to use AutoCAD, which is not something you pick up in five minutes.
Oy! What are you looking at?I don’t suppose you happen to have any fish?
When the time came to go to the launderette (which is, again, across the river), we chose to take the whole yacht rather than just the dinghy, and to fill up with fuel, water and gas on the way. On that particular day, the marina was being manned by Graham, coxwain of the local Marine Rescue, and he was gracious enough to compliment us on our effortless docking in opposing wind and tide, commenting more than once that “not many yachties here could have pulled off a move like that”, which gave us a pleasant warm fuzzy feeling. Luckily we didn’t disgrace ourselves when docking at the Marine Rescue jetty opposite to offload the laundry, and we must have looked vaguely professional because Bob the radio operator invited us inside for coffee and a chat.
There was another cruising boat here, Liquid Motion, which we had seen in Port Stephens and which had arrived in Camden Haven shortly after us. We never did get to speak to the skipper, but we saw him attempt the bar shortly after we’d gone down to see it. He didn’t make it, and came back, but on the next tide he was gone, after what Bob called “a lumpy exit”. We wish him luck because he was heading straight into a nor’easter, but the word on the grapevine said that he was in a hurry to be gone.
We’re in no hurry; we’ll wait for nice friendly conditions before we leave. In fact, the weather is shaping us to give us a good start on the dawn tide on Tuesday, and we’re aiming to bypass all the urban centres such as Port Maquarrie and Coffs and go straight to Yamba, where we intend to spend a few days exploring the Clarence River.
As the hull speed dropped, we realised that there was quite a crowd of people watching us crossing the bar. They turned away looking a little disappointed, so I guess we must have made a clean entry. Now we just had to navigate the channel up to the anchorage, which we already knew was going to be very shallow. We did have a chart, but it bore the warning ‘Shifting sands change regularly. Ignore this chart and use the markers’. The channel was only a few boat lengths wide, and scattered with navigation buoys which led us a merry path back and forth with only a metre and sometimes less under the keel. One buoy took us very close to a fisherman on shore, who politely reeled in his line and then made humorous zig-zag motions with his hands.
I was simultaneously focussed on keeping the speed under 2 knots despite the following tide, and keeping an eagle eye on the depth sounder. That left Bronwyn to spot and call out the navigation buoys, a task made somewhat difficult by the fact that it was dusk and the automated switches that turned on their flashing lights were not particularly synchronised. Thus we would see two flashing port markers and a starboard, and then a minute later a previously unlit buoy which we had taken to be a sand bank marker would suddenly start flashing and change our route completely.
Eventually we fumbled our way to the end of the navigable channel in full darkness, dropped the anchor, and fell into a deep and undisturbed sleep.
The next morning I was awoken by the howl of full-bore outboards, and went on deck to see what seemed to be the whole local community going fishing, all racing their tinnies at full speed past the 4-knot speed limit signs. After the wakes had died away, I had a look around at our surroundings and found them to be very pleasant indeed. Oyster beds lined the shore, with drying sand banks here and there. To one side loomed Brother Mountain with an RSL (non Aussies – Retired Serviceman’s League, a kind of pub with cheap beer subsidised by gambling) and a fishing wharf, and to the other were a few houses and a small marina. All around were pelicans balanced comically on pilings, and a handful of other yachts, mainly apparently local and almost all much smaller than ours. No wonder we had stirred up so much interest when crossing the bar.
CAMDEN HAVEN, LOOKING UPSTREAM TO THE LAURIETON FISHING WHARF
High tide came, and with it a wicked overrun which pulled us out into mid stream and started dragging our anchor. We couldn’t get it to re-set, so we hauled it up and dropped it on the inside of a curve next to a sand bank, with only a metre of spare depth and one boat length from drying sand, so we thought it prudent to test our GPS anchor alarm. After a little experimentation and some trigonometry, we found that it worked very well indeed.
We knew that this new spot would become untenable at low tide, so we looked around for another option. There was deep water over by the RSL, but the only other visiting cruiser was already at anchor there, and he was spinning violently in circles and from side to side, apparently under control of his wind-vane, and we thought it prudent to stay clear. We phoned Michael and Judy, the owners of Dunbogan Marina, and were assured that there was deep water under their swing moorings. The price was very cheap, and they had a hot shower, so we motored in and picked one up. After staring at the blinking depth sounder for a while – there would only be 50 cm beneath us at low tide – we switched it off and resolved not to look at it again.
After setting up the wind vane and unlimbering the tender, we rowed to shore and had a long and enjoyable shower before walking to the RSL for a welcome Sunday roast and a few glasses of porter.
The forecast called for southerlies from Friday to Sunday, although there were strong wind warnings for the beginning of the change on Friday morning, along with three metre swells, abating in the afternoon. After that, it looked like we were going to get a nice 15-20 knot SE or S wind which should neatly take us to Coffs Harbour, about 140 miles up the coast.
We accordingly had a leisurely breakfast and spent the morning preparing the boat for sea. This can take a little time but is always a nice way of tidying up. On deck, we dismount the wind generator, reconfigure it as a tow generator, and stow away the fan blades and tail. Then we tie the oars to the dinghy, hoist it on board using a halyard, and tie it down to the fore-deck. Fit the jack-stays, if they aren’t already in place, take down and stow the sun shades, ensure that all the safety lines are secure, and clear the cockpit of clutter. Down below, all the washing up needs to be finished so that we can put away the washing-up bowls, and all loose items stowed somewhere where they won’t move in transit (never wholly successful!). All the hatches and stopcocks must be closed, and the correct charts, wet weather gear, life vests and safety harnesses fetched out.
We set off a little after twelve. There was quite a bit of swell coming in through the heads and we didn’t really want to have the sails up going across the bar, so we gunned the motor and took her through. It was a bit bumpy and we left a trail of smoke, which was a bit worrying; it was the second time that I’d seen engine smoke this trip. Put that on the ‘to do’ list.
Once we were clear of the bar, I went out onto the deck to attach the halyard so that we could hoist the main. This is never a pleasant chore at sea, as you get thrown around a lot and everything gets twisted. A few years back we did try attaching the main halyard early so that we could simply haul up the main from the comfort of the cockpit, but it’s a long and feisty steel cable that swings with a lot of momentum, and it really enjoys wrapping itself around everything in sight. If you leave it alone for a moment, it has a particular affinity for the light cluster half way up the forward side of the mast.
Eventually with some co-ordination between deck and cockpit we disentangled it from the light cluster, put up the sails and headed out to the 50 metre line. The 3 metre swells were definitely very much still in evidence, and not very comfortable in the shallows close to shore, but they got less confused in deeper water and we set a course for the NE and gratefully turned control over to Harriet the Hydrovane.
The wind was actually an easterly, so we were close-hauled and getting a fair bit of water over the deck and some in the cockpit. One made it into the galley while I was getting a drink. We put in the second reef and then, when we hit 9 knots (a new Pindimara record!), the third one. The standard Bavaria 34 doesn’t come with a third reef, and we are always very glad that we thought of having one put in. Far from abating, wind speeds were 25-30 knots and showing no signs of changing.
Petrels skimmed the swells around us, and dolphins showed up to say hello and to play in the bow wave. One scene will always remain in my memory. The swells had opened up, as they sometimes do, into a huge bowl-shaped depression with steep-sided waves on all sides. As Pindimara slid down one of the sides into the bowl, we realised that all the other sides were packed with dolphins, dozens of them, all surfing down into the centre with us.
As afternoon turned to evening, the wind and waves remained constant. We were feeling woozy from eating sea-sickness tablets, and very grateful that Harriet could take care of the steering, which would otherwise have been very hard work. Skandia, the maxi racing yacht and oft-times winner of the Sydney to Hobart, passed us by on the port beam. The Cunard liner Queen Victoria passed on the starboard. Apart from that, it just seemed to be us and the dolphins.
SKANDIA PASSES BY
We shook out the third reef at dusk, because the wind had eased to 20 knots and had swung around to the SE. Maybe we were finally going to get our perfect southerly? I grabbed a couple of hours sleep, and was woken by Bronwyn shouting my name from the cockpit. Rushing out onto the deck, I found her looking at a huge bulk carrier of some kind with very odd navigation lights. We couldn’t figure out which way she was heading, but she certainly didn’t seem to be at anchor. I got out the million candlepower searchlight that we keep for these occasions, and shone it first up at our sail, and then at their bridge. After a while she turned away and we realised that she was showing all white lights at the bow and sides, with red and green navigation lights on the stern. Weird, and very disconcerting. It’s customary to have them the other way around.
We were still travelling very fast, a steady 7 knots, and had cleared Seal Rocks with its associated shoals and reefs. Lightning flickered in the sky ahead, and I checked the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) website on my phone to see if there was anything up there that we should know about. The forecast was still the same; apparently we should be sitting in 15 knots with 1 metre swells, not 25 knots with 3 metre swells. Ah well, it’s not an exact science. We put the third reef back in.
I took a short video of what it’s like to be travelling in Pindimara at those speeds. Note that I had to take the video during a quiet period when I had a hand free to hold the camera.
Bronwyn was feeling somewhat the worse for wear and retired to the cabin, while I kept watch under the stars. Occasionally we hit 8 knots; not bad at all for a big fat tub, but our actual speed over ground was a knot or two less because by now we were in the East Australian Current which runs down the coast hereabouts. The usual advice is to stick close to shore to avoid it, but we had cut across a bit too far and the swells made it really uncomfortable to go back inland, so we just lived with it.
A large sailing boat came by in the dark. We did some mutual shining-the-spotlight-on-the-sails to make sure that we each understood what the other one was and where we were going. An hour or so later, another one showed up, this time on a collision course from behind. I had right of way, so I didn’t change course but lit up my sails and played my spotlight over their sails until I heard voices. They got closer and closer, and I realised that it was another maxi travelling very quickly indeed with three enormous sails up. I hovered over Harriet, ready to disengage and take evasive action and a little concerned that they hadn’t flashed me a signal back, but figured that they were professional racers and probably knew what they were doing. She passed about twenty metres off to starboard, enormous genoa eclipsing the stars above me, and as she came level and I called out some cheery greeting, I distinctly heard a voice from the cockpit say “What was that? F__k me, it’s a boat!”
The night passed, and the wind finally dropped as Bronwyn came up to take the dawn watch. It was now definitely a southerly and we furled the foresail and ran on reefed main alone. We needed to get closer to shore, but crossing the line of swell was really uncomfortable and neither of us was feeling too great. We agreed to keep on as northerly a heading as we could, because the shore curves around to the north east and we would intersect with it later.
The only entry in the ship’s log between 07:40 and 10:00 is “Sloppy as all hell. Going backwards?”.
By ten o’clock it was clear that at 25 miles offshore we were far too deep into the East Australian Current. We were travelling at 7 knots, but only making 3 over ground. The wind was a reasonable 15 knots and the swell a mere 1 metre of nothing, but the night had taken it’s toll and we plotted a course for Port Macquarie and an overnight anchorage. Under un-reefed main alone we put the now SE swell behind us, which was much more comfortable except for the odd roller that tried to climb up into the sugar scoop.
A FOLLOWING SEA
We didn’t much like the look of the description of the bar at Port Macquarie, and we’d be unlikely to be crossing it in daylight, so we looked for another option. We consulted Lucas, the definitive cruising guide for the NSW coast, and saw that he recommended an anchorage called Camden Haven, which was a bit closer and was described as having lead lights that were ‘obvious from deep water’. Lead lights are land-based markers that, when aligned, point to safe passage through a shoal or reef. As we emerged from the East Australian Current our speed over ground was picking up, and we could arrive well before sundown. We set course for Point Perpendicular beneath Brother Mountain, which was in fact already visible on the horizon, albeit twenty miles away.
A PASSING PETREL
We arrived at the bar with plenty of time to spare before dark, but unfortunately just before low tide, so we hove to and waited for the water to get a bit deeper. While we were waiting, we cruised up and down to see if we could get the lay of the land and locate the lead lights.
Obvious from deep water, my foot! We easily located the causeway on which the markers were built, but even through binoculars it was clear that the area was littered with structures of various shapes and sizes, and completely unclear which of these were the ones that we needed to line up to get our safe passage. We experimented with a few combinations, but they all seemed to either take us through the solid harbour wall or across the obvious breaking shoal. All the structures were the same colour as the background, and all were obscured by the haze of the setting sun. We went back out to sea and waited for sunset, when hopefully the “real” markers would light up blue and show us the way.
THERE’S A GAP HERE SOMEWHERE
Meanwhile we’d been watching the bar itself, which to our dismay was regularly obscured by huge green rollers with foaming caps. Obviously low tide was not a great time to pass.
Two hours past low tide, at half past six in the evening, the setting sun went behind a cloud and we could suddenly see the correct markers, which were in fact none of the ones that we had considered earlier. This was much better than waiting for them to light up and having to navigate the channel in the dark, so we started the engine (which didn’t smoke at all. Maybe it had just been clearing its throat after weeks of inactivity) and lined them up.
We’d noticed that the big rollers were coming in in twos, so we waited for two to explode over the bar and then powered ahead of the next pair. I surfed half the way on the first one, then picked up the second, dropping off the top just shy of the bar itself as the top started to curl. The wave hit the shoal just in front of us, and as it did, a whole pod of dolphins exploded out of it. They’d clearly joined us for the ride, and were going back to catch the next one. I couldn’t stop to play, though, and dropped through and into the channel, powering up to escape the next roller, and then throttling back to nothing as we came to the shallows. We were through.
The long-expected Southerly has apparently been delayed until Friday, so on Thursday we motored over to Nelson Bay to pick up a few supplies and to take our new friend Evie out for a sail. We managed to get the furler jammed when stopping for a salmon and wine lunch in Salamander Bay, and one thing led to another and (after suitable repairs) we ended up drinking the boat dry and then heading back into town for more supplies. We vaguely recollect trying to press-gang Evie into coming with us as crew. We vaguely recall that she almost agreed.
BRONWYN AND EVIE (EARLY IN THE EVENING)
Somehow we ended up anchored outside the marina at Nelson Bay, perfectly positioned for an early escape, if the wind comes.
The guys at the Noakes shipyard were able to fit us in on Monday morning, and since we’re not expecting the southerly that is our ticket out of here until Thursday, it all fits in beautifully with our plans. The holding tank was a quick and simple job. Naturally, as soon as we had Pindimara out on the hoist, it was immediately apparent that a few more things needed doing. Despite the recent antifoul paint job, we had a good inch of coral which had grown while she was sitting still back at Gibson marina, and I suddenly noticed that when the Bayview marina guys had antifouled our hull, they had neglected to paint the saildrive, which was by now down to the bare metal. Not impressed! But needless to say, Noakes sorted it out.
While all this was going on, we had popped into a local bar for a drink. Our new budget certainly doesn’t run to foreign beers, but we allowed ourselves just one premium $10 German beer on the waterfront, and then we’d head to the RSL for a coldie and a schnitzel (non-Australian readers probably should just ignore that. You don’t want to know. Trust me).
But then it magically happened to be Happy Hour, and it would have been rude not to. And then we met Evie, who had a similar story to ours, to whit she had just left her high powered job to run away to sea, and the evening just seemed to get better.
By the time the Noakes boys had fitted the head tank and attended to all the other little tasks, it was time for them to go home and we were nicely sozzled, so we just stayed tied up inside the lifting cradle and spent the night there.
PINDIMARA ON THE LIFTING CRADLE
On the morrow, I was up bright and early and motored out of the marina to find us a new anchorage, while Bronwyn slept on. I tried a few places, but there was quite a bit of swell, and eventually I just dropped the pick in a channel while we had breakfast and decided what to do next. While we chatted, a northerly blew up and our anchor started dragging, so we hauled it up and used the wind to get to Fame Cove, deeper inside the Port Stephens area.
FAME COVE AT DAWN AND DUSK
It really is a lovely spot, and we spent a couple of great days working on our schoolwork. Yes, really! I’m sure that my previous university studies would have gone much more smoothly if I’d been able to do them moored in a private little bay in the sun. Be that as it may, I also took the opportunity between swims to refit a few instruments that I have been “repairing” for the last couple of years, one of which was at the top of the mast so I got to try my snazzy new tool belt, which Bronwyn bought me to stop me from dropping my tools over the side.
HAVE TOOLBELT, WILL TRAVEL
The only down side to Fame Cove is the incredible number of house-flies. Our boat is full of them! We can’t figure out what they’re after; they ignore any food that’s laying about, they don’t seem to be interested in water. The only common theme is that whenever Bronwyn opens her MacBook, they all swarm over and sit on the screen. Very strange.
I turned on my telephone, and everybody else seems to have remembered that it was my birthday. Which is great, because I had completely forgotten.
I discovered early on in our live-aboard life that while I have the knack of sleeping through all manner of shipboard noises, if the boat once moves in an unusual fashion or there is any untoward sound, I am awake and on deck in a flash.
At three o’clock this morning I awoke standing in the cockpit in mirror-smooth conditions under a crescent moon. The Milky Way hung above in all its glory, the Greater Magellanic Cloud a splash of white high above. All seemed calm and silent and I couldn’t work out why I was there.
Then right at the edge of my hearing I detected faint music, as if somebody was playing a transistor radio muffled under a blanket. I looked around to see if there were any fishermen on the water or perhaps courting couples on the beach, but there was nothing to be seen. The few houses in the vicinity were dark and quiet.
The volume of the music swelled, and I was able to recognise a violin being played impossibly fast, like a fast Irish jig in double time. After another minute or two, although the music was still very faint, I was able to get a fix on the direction. The sound was coming from the uninhabited mangrove swamp bordering the marine sanctuary. I couldn’t make out any lights at all from the swamp, just this crazy fast dance music.
I began to suspect that I was suffering from tinnitus or the remnants of some dream, and then the music got still louder and a dog in one of the darkened houses barked uncertainly a couple of times. A roosting seabird squawked its disapproval.
I began to recall those old folk tales, where an unwary traveller stumbles upon a party of magical faerie folk, joins in and is welcomed and showered with gold, only to find that when he gets back home a hundred years has passed. I thought idly of getting in the tender and rowing over to the mangroves, which were only a couple of hundred metres away, to see if I could get a better look.
Then, from on high, a big fat white shooting star plummeted from the heavens, straight down into the mangroves and directly into the source of the music… which suddenly stopped.
After contemplating the silence for a few more minutes, I went quietly back to bed.
On the other hand, we’re completely serious about giving up our old careers. It is true that the money was great, and it has allowed us to buy and equip the boat and to purchase enough property to form a nice safety net for the future. The Information Technology industry has been good to us, and for many years we enjoyed the challenges. In recent years, though, as we went from contract to contract we have found that there are no new problems under the sun, and that usually those problems result from the clients making the same old mistakes. We realised that we were just getting frustrated and weren’t learning anything new. Being in a senior position is boring; it was time to find a new career and to start from the bottom again.
Over the three years that we planned this trip, we were also researching a number of different future career options. Among others, we considered running a cafe, running a B&B, studying medicine, teaching English, teaching SCUBA diving, and several more. In the end, we decided that although we would bear all of these options in mind, we would focus our minds on the mining industry.
Our new home, Australia, has some of the best mining opportunities in the world. The commodities market is all that stands between Australia and the worldwide recession. We foresee a boom time for Australian exploration mining, and there is also a lack of people who are willing to go out into the bush and get their hands dirty; the focus in all industries in recent years has been on the world of finance and business rather than doing the hard miles at the sharp end. In the mining industry in particular, people are rejecting the fly in / fly out remote working because it takes them away from their families and friends and cities for extended periods. We are keen to go the other way, to leave our soft office jobs and get out there into the wilderness. Our theory is that although we are older and less experienced than most career geologists, we will be valuable to employers because we are willing to go out there together and therefore won’t be stressed about leaving anybody behind.
This time, too, we’ve chosen two slightly different study paths. This isn’t just down to our differing interests; we’re very aware that for too long we’ve had all our eggs in one very small basket, and it feels good to be diversified. Bronwyn is doing a degree in Surveying Science. and I’m pursuing a post-grad diploma in Mining Geology. It’s good to be using our brains again, and we’re both enjoying our courses immensely.
PINDIMARA AT DAWN, WITH SUNSHADES AND WIND GENERATOR DEPLOYED
There’s no sign of another southerly until the middle of next week, and the guys at Noakes are not free to fit our holding tank until Monday, so we’ve settled down to relax for the remainder of the week.
This is no great hardship, because Salamander Bay is a superb and well-protected anchorage. The neighbouring marine sanctuary is packed with life, and every morning the seabirds put on a great display as the bait fish come to the surface.
I’m usually sitting in the cockpit each morning for an hour or so after dawn, catching up on email or reading a book or just sitting and thinking. Then I hear the first characteristic fizzing sound, and the surface starts to boil in a circle a few metres across as the fish begin to jump. I can only assume that they are trying to avoid some predator fish circling below.
The first gulls arrive; they seem to be able to detect the fizzing from far away. They land inside the circle and try to spear passing fish with their beaks.
Attracted by the commotion, the first terns arrive, wheeling fifteen to twenty metres above and then folding their wings to plummet into the water with a signature ‘splosh’, returning to the surface a moment later with fish grasped firmly in their bills.
If the fish stay active for more than a few minutes, then a stately pelican will drift over before landing in an unsightly flurry of wings and water, losing no time in cruising through the centre of the disturbance with enormous beak agape, scooping up fish by the litre.
Then as quickly as it began, the fish boil will stop, and all the birds relax and bob on the surface and wait for the next one.
It was a working weekday morning. Usually when we’ve been out beyond the heads it’s been a weekend or a public holiday, and so it was a slightly eerie feeling to make it all the way through Pittwater and out to sea without seeing a single other boat.
On the other hand, we had plenty of animal company. We surprised a gannet asleep on the surface with its head under its wing, and sighted some others drifting in formation high above the mast. Petrels skimmed the surface all around, scooping fish from the water, and the occasional pelican soared regally past.
Down in the water, we spotted a good number of my favourite jellyfish. I haven’t been able to find out what they’re called – or even find any reference to them in the literature – but they’re common near Pittwater. They’re a good 20cm or more long, thick and chunky and yellow, and look like something out of Star Trek. Like many jellyfish, they’re also very curious, and will come and bump on the bottom of the boat to see what you are.
A few hours further on, we were joined by a couple of pods of dolphins, who put on a display for Bronwyn as she stood in the pulpit, jostling with each other to see who could dive closest to the bow, and rolling and surfing in the swell. The scars on their backs show that they must occasionally get too close to motor boats, but they obviously enjoy it too much to stop.
The day passed in pleasant conditions. The last time we’d been here, there were more than forty bulk carriers queued up to get into the coal port at Newcastle, but it looks like the backlog has cleared because there were only half a dozen or so waiting now. As the sun set rosily over the coast, the carriers all lit up like small towns, and Bronwyn went below to rest.
Night fell, and we put in a reef and began to take watches. We don’t really keep a rigid watch system on Pindimara. One of us is awake and the other is asleep, and we switch when we’re tired or when something interesting happens that means that we both have to be on deck. For the remainder of the night, we slept turn about for two or three hours at a time.
Usually on a passage we sleep in the sea berths, which are the benches in the main cabin, but we haven’t fitted any lee-cloths yet and so there is always the feeling that you’re going to roll off onto the floor. On one of my off-watches I chose to sleep in the cockpit with the milky way wheeling above. The night was crystal clear, and there were so many stars that the familiar constellations were all but drowned out in the pointillist background. On one off-watch I decided to try sleeping in the fore-peak, which is our usual master cabin when not at sea. We had recently replaced the original hard foam cushions with blocks of latex, beautifully covered by a local sail maker. With the boat corkscrewing from side to side, I found that the latex bounced pleasantly with each swell, and I quickly fell into an easy sleep.
We enjoyed excellent although rather light winds most of the way, never attaining more than three or four knots, along with a couple of hours of intermittent motoring when the wind died completely and we were getting slopped about in the swell. When morning came, we shook out the reef and sailed up to the Port Stephens lighthouse, avoiding the reefs and aiming for the large and easy entrance to Nelson Bay to our north west. It was at this moment that the forecast nor’wester came in, blowing straight out of the heads, and so we took down the sails and motored in. Behind us, the first of the fishing trawlers followed us in with their catch, surrounded by clouds of hungry seagulls.
It was eight in the morning, and we’d been at sea for twenty-four hours. Hardly a world-beating passage, but very enjoyable and a good shakedown.
We popped into the Noakes shipyard to discuss some work that we needed doing, and then went around the corner to Salamander Bay, where we dropped anchor in pleasant surroundings at the edge of a marine reserve.
The one thing that we’d been waiting for, a delivery of rock samples for my post-grad geology course, had been lost for a week in some courier black hole. On Monday morning, with our southerly already blowing, they reported that they had tried delivery and failed, so I got them to hold the parcel at their depot. Although we’d sold the ute, we’d hung on to the motorbike for precisely this eventuality and so we took a last four-hour commute across Sydney afternoon traffic to pick it up.
With the bike now abandoned at the marina (enjoy her, Elizabeth!), there only remained the little task of preparing Pindimara for sea.
We hauled the Walker Bay dinghy up onto the fore-deck and tied her down. This is the first time that we’ve tried this without deflating the RIB. The RIB is removable, and in the past we’ve let it down or taken it off to give us more deck space, but the Walker Bay dealers have been more than a little incompetent about replacing our lost pump valve adapter (it’s been over a year now!) and we haven’t been able to source one from the internet, so we don’t want to go to the hassle of trying to borrow one at the other end so that we can pump it up again.
In any case, we’ve designated the Walker Bay to be our inshore “life raft” if things get really nasty, so it’s better if we can leave it inflated. We lashed the oars inside before tying it down, and mounted a knife inside the anchor hatch in case we need to cut the dinghy free in a hurry.
We pulled down our Ampair wind generator and converted it to tow mode, and mounted the Hydrovane rudder (which has been out of the water for antifouling) and sail (which has been stored below while we’ve been on the mooring to minimise UV damage). Finally we mounted the jack stays on either side of the deck, and went around the cabin securing all the bits and pieces so that they wouldn’t fly out and hit us on the head at sea. We were ready to go!
Except for one little thing. We were expecting it to take us 19 hours to get to the next deep-water destination, Port Stephens, and we prefer to do our in-shore and reef navigation in the light. This suggested a mid-morning departure, so we went to bed.
The following morning, we checked the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) and Tuesday was still forecast light southerlies, changing to northerlies on Wednesday and Thursday. It really was time to go.
Bronwyn cooked up a hearty oatmeal breakfast while I prepared the boat and then, coffees in hand, we motored out of Gibson Marina for the last time.
It was a strange feeling, looking back and watching the familiar shoreline recede into the distance. Almost everything we know, we learned here in Pittwater. Not only did we do our initial ‘Competent Crew’ qualification here, but over the years as we learned to sail our own boat, we have known joy and laughter, sunshine and storms, frustration and anger and even fear. We sat in silent and companionable contemplation as we chugged out towards the heads.
Passing under the Barrenjoey lighthouse, we hoisted the main and the friendly light Southerly took us out to sea. We’re off.
