Category: Uncategorized

November 30, 2016

Early on in my boating life, I discovered why a high water alarm might be a good idea. I was on a friend’s boat, sailing (well, motorsailing) from San Diego to Catalina Island. It was an overnight trip and all was fine on board. The four of us were in the sitting in the cockpit late at night, talking and laughing when the engine quit. I went below to investigate and stepped into water – water about six inches above the floorboards.

We got busy with the emergency hand bilge pump and formed a bucket brigade. We made fast work of the water. The cause of the water, and the engine quitting: the prop shaft gland had started to leak when the packing material shredded and extruded from the gland, and the shredded packing plugged up the automatic bilge pump, and the high water actually floated the huge, metal fuel tank up and off it’s mounts, and the fuel feed line broke. No disaster, just a middle of the night, pitching and rolling boat repair project.

The point of this? If we’d had some warning that the water level was too high, we would have had smaller problems. The solution: a high water alarm.

I’ve carried this memory for years and while browsing through a home improvement store, found my solution. They make small, really inexpensive alarms designed to detect water heater leaks. (Yes, I’m sure there are alarms designed for boats, or for that matter, I could have used a bilge pump float-switch and an alarm buzzer, but you saw the “inexpensive” part above, right?)

This is what I used the first time, at less than $10 each, and they lasted about three years. I say “about” because I’m not sure how long it was actually functional during the last year. I change the battery anually and last time, I found that the battery wires had corroded off of the circuit board. A quick solder job and it was functional again.

To make these work on our boat, I soldered wires to the pc board to extend the sensor. I stripped the two loose ends of the wire and fastened them about 6 inches above the highest water level I ever expected to see.

I bought one like this to replace our original alarm. It has a remote sensor wire so no modifications are necessary. I bought this from Amazon as they are unheard of in NZ and Oz.

They run on a 9 volt transistor battery that lasts at least a full year. When activated, they sound a very loud alarm that would be hard to miss. No more worries about stepping down onto floating floorboards! We also use a bilge pump counter, but that was the subject of another post . -Rich

November 22, 2016

Plans change; especially with those ADD people on Legacy. We’d decided to skip staying in Sydney this visit, but we needed to do some stuff there and wanted access to it. Our solution was to stay in Broken Bay, just north of Sydney. Then we changed our minds: we’ll just do a quick visit to Broken Bay and instead stay in a marina in Cronulla, south of Sydney. So where did we end up? Sydney, of course. It was a spur of the moment decision, and I’m not even quite sure why we made it.

We liked the area around Manly beach last time we were here; so we figured we’d anchor there and take the ferry to downtown Sydney. What we didn’t count on were all the other boaters who like Manly, too. Scratch that plan. What to do? We’d enjoyed our previous stay in Cammeray Marina, but we hoped for easier access to the city this time around.

Rich did some research (Cruisers Wiki) and discovered an intriguing place: SailCorp Marina in Lavender Bay (or Lavender Bay Marina). We called, a mooring was available, and here we are.

SailCorp “marina” is actually an area of moorings tucked into a bay near the north side of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. On the west side of the bay, houses cling to the hillsides. At the head of the bay are two beautiful parks, thick with trees, while the east side has tall buildings, the bridge, and an old-style amusement park by the water. To the south is a spectacular view of the bridge, the opera house, and downtown Sydney. The train station is only a 10-minute walk from the marina, and the train delivers us downtown quickly and cheaply.

What’s downtown? Culinary wonderland! Especially Asian food. There are a greater variety and number of Asian restaurants than I’ve seen in any other city, including Hong Kong! We are eating very, very well. So well, in fact, that we decided to add another week to our time here so we can at least scratch the surface of some of the places we want to eat. (There’s also an electronics district; which is high entertainment for Rich.)

Our routine is simple: Mornings on the boat, lunch and afternoons in the city, and evenings back on the boat where we have a drink in the cockpit and marvel at the incredible view of the city. We end the day with TV shows and reading. Life is simple and enjoyable right now, and it’s been nice to have a time-out from thinking about weather, winds, anchorages, sightseeing, etc. In a few weeks, we’ll be worrying about how to get across the Bass Strait with our lives and boat intact. For now, we just worry about what to have for lunch: Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Korean, Thai, Taiwanese, Fusion, or Mexican. It’s going to be hard to pry ourselves away from this place. Below, a few photos of our new neighborhood (click to enlarge/scroll).

OK, now that we’re not on the go, I’m going to try to finish our Able Tasman posts. –Cyndi

(Note from Rich: this “marina” is wonderful but not for those that mind a lot of boat rocking and rolling. The motion is pretty much constant during the days and sometimes pretty extreme, but mostly still at night. It’s from the multitude of tour boats and ferries passing under the bridge. There’s a free shore boat that hauls us to and from the dock for our lunch excursions. There are free plastic dinghies available to use after shore boat hours. There’s no water or electricity and it’s short on what one might call standard marina facilities. All that said, I really like it here.)

Here’s where we are…

November 19, 2016

Thank you Sydney! -Rich

November 19, 2016

We set out from Port Stephens yesterday morning, bound for Broken Bay. We missed it by about 20 miles! The conditions were so good, including almost two knots of current with us, that we just kept going and arrived in Sydney Harbor, with our anchor set by about five o’clock.

It was kind of tricky finding a place to moor/anchor. There are free, courtesy moorings around the bay. If there were a thousand times as many, they’d still be in short supply. All full. Anchor? OK. We found a place that’s pretty good but as soon as it started to get dark, a big power boat anchored way, way, way too close to us. (I fixed him. I told him that we’d be leaving at 5 AM and he’d have to be up so we could get our anchor out from under his boat. It’s almost 8 AM now and here we still sit. Take that!)

We were going to try to anchor or moor while in Sydney this time. Already, I see that this plan probably won’t work out. Plan B is to try to get a berth at a marina. Stay tuned for more on this, or plan C. -Rich

Update: View from our cockpit this morning…

November 16, 2016

I’m interrupting the Able Tasman cruising posts to give a little update on how we’re currently doing in Australia. While I haven’t yet gotten to posting about our previous trip to Australia (Rich has done a few), those who know us personally know we had some issues.

It started with the disastrous decision to clear into in Bundaberg just before Christmas 2014. We should have known better, and had we applied any thought to the matter we could have seen it was too far north for that time of year. But we didn’t apply thought, instead listening to someone’s bad advice…

“It’s not hot,” he said.

“What bugs? Those? Well they never bite me!”

We were soon to discover that summertime in Queensland is hotter than an elephant’s butt! I won’t go into all the issues now, but the end result: we got out of Bundaberg quickly and ended up in Mooloolaba, where we saved ourselves by buying an air conditioner.

Able to stay cool enough to survive, renting air-conditioned cars, and enjoying one national park and beach after another, I quickly got past the trauma and so enjoyed the amazing flora, fauna, and wildlife. Rich, in spite of the fantastic scenery, staying at the world’s best boatyard (The Boat Works) and nicest marina (Soldiers Point Marina), never fully recovered from that initial period, and it threw a shadow over the remainder of our time in Australia. When we departed months later, we had no plans to return.

Fast forward: In May, we took a trip to Melbourne for a few days (it was the cheapest place to go) so we could extend our New Zealand visas. To our surprise, we fell head over heels for that city. This was a lucky happenstance–we ended up waiting so long in New Zealand for a suitable weather window that we could not return this season. It was Australia or the Marshall Islands, and our love for Melbourne made it an easy choice.

In deciding where to clear into Australia, we thought Brisbane or New Castle, or maybe Coffs in the middle. I loved Brisbane and the Gold Coast and we both looked forward to revisiting some of our favorite eateries. But after pondering this awhile, I realized we should do everything in our power not to have a repeat of last time. If we could avoid all things Queensland, we should. It’s not that Rich didn’t enjoy many things there, but Queensland has the blistering heat and the bitey bugs that got us off to a bad start last time.

New South Wales, on the other hand, gave us relief from those issues. Not having to run an air conditioner 24/7, we were able to untie from the marinas and do some cruising. Coffs Harbour, Port Stephens, New Castle and Broken Bay were all places we’d enjoyed; so I pushed for going south even if it meant going through a trough (a day of rough weather). We were able to make it as far south as Coffs Harbour.

I remembered reading a note from Lisa on Lisa Kay, saying something to this effect after they landed in Coffs Harbour in 2014: “This place is fantastic, the food is fabulous, the people are wonderful, you must come to Australia!” I hoped so much that if we did it right this time, Rich and I could feel that way, too.

Now that we’ve returned here, the answer is affirmative. We landed in Coffs Harbour, and even without being able to stay in the marina (closed after severe storm damage), we very much enjoyed our stay there. The people were so nice, the food terrific, the temperatures comfortable, and the surroundings very pleasant.

Our next stop was an overnight trip to an area called Port Stephens, which is quite beautiful. We just finished a stay at Soldiers Point Marina, the world’s greatest marina. We were impressed with the area last time, and are even more so this time after doing more sightseeing. Being back here feels a little like being home, and we’ve met a lot of terrific people. We can both now echo what Lisa said: “Australia is beautiful, the food is fabulous, and the people are wonderful.”

In the end, while I can’t say I regret the previous season here because of the incredible things we did in Queensland (and someday I will get to bogging about those things), I will say that had we started in New South Wales, Oz would have been a very, very different experience for Rich. Sometimes life does give you a second chance. It’s such a pleasure to add Australia to the list of places that we call home.

*Note: For those wondering about this year’s rally in Bundaberg, I want to stress that in 2014, we went at the end of December – in summer. The rally took place early in November, which is spring. From what we hear, the weather hasn’t been too hot, no bitey bugs, and everyone had a great time. We did like the Bundaberg Port Marina (especially the introductory seafood feast) and would recommend it in any time other than summer. For those crazy heat-loving types, even summer might be good if you can tolerate bug bites (some people just don’t seem bothered).

We’ve only been in Oz for a week and a half, but we’ve already enjoyed a couple of beautiful walks, wildlife encounters, and great food. Below, a gallery of a few photos (click to enlarge/scroll).–Cyndi