Made it!

By the skin of our teeth.
Here's us, motoring up to the pile moorings, just in time for Xmas with the family.

Waterfront, inner city living.

Sailing Pandion Part Two. Kids in Charge: Captain, Rango and Jango.

All kids like challenges right?  As separate tasks, they can do the anchor, raise the sail, manage some of the helm and electrics, but can they string it all together and work as a team to get us from Awinya Creek south....

Sailing Pandion Part One: Heaving To

Hi, this is a series of films about actually sailing Pandion: sail trim, sailing moves, being on passage and so on.  A long passage for us is two days, our friends at http://thelifegalactic.blogspot.com.au/

pulled off a 40 day passage (just think about that!)  and have 'hove to' for four days at a time. Heaving to is setting the helm against the sails so that the boat sits at an angle to the wind and waves and makes very little headway.  It's meant to be very comfortable, and also very safe in terms of avoiding waves breaking over your boat.  We have been practicing. Sailing Pandion Part One is our early attempt at this old school sailing manoeuvre. 

Visitors ride the bow wave

Bewitched

Marinas are uncanny places, a bit like the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, where you start out gasping at all the different lollies (hot showers! 240 V power! washing machines!) but then realise there’s a big scary witch hiding inside who wants to roast you in her oven and eat you for dinner.

Okay, maybe they’re not that bad, but after a few days in a marina, something witchy starts to happen to us: we want to leave, we know we should leave, we’re haemorrhaging cash out our eyeballs, but we keep saying things to each other like, “maybe if we stayed for one more night we could finally get round to fixing the [insert boat part]” and fronting up to marina office with our tails between our legs and asking to pay for “just one more night.” Life in a marina is dull, it’s usually hot, it’s often noisy, but it’s easy.

Eventually the kids start to go Big Time Berko and the scales fall from our eyes (Who needs hot water? Who needs shore power? Who needs clean undies?) and we get the hell out of there.

We’re always glad we did.

Us escaping from another marina

Where we ended up

Cocktails in the cockpit

Arguably late in the piece we have discovered the joy of sunset cocktails. Some of these recipes we have invented, some we’ve stolen from classy establishments along the way. 

* The Humpy. Invented on our honeymoon, the Humpy gets its name from the island we started out on (ye duffer). We’d loaded up our two-person sea kayak way past the plimsoll line and Miles was just stowing the last item when I staggered in under the weight of a large crate of mangoes and panted, “where will we put these?” He was dismayed at the time, but grateful later that day. (For those who are interested, we bungeed them to the stern deck).
                - finely diced mango, cranberry juice, vodka, no ice

* The Middle Percy. Invented on Middle Percy Island at the sparse end of our stores. At the time we thought it was awesome and enthusiastically introduced as many fellow cruisers to the Percy as we could until we noticed that they were, to a person, leaving their Percys in out-of-the-way places, virtually untouched.
                - tawny port, in a box, warm soda water, bottled lime juice, a sprig of mint, if you can get your hands on some, no ice

* The Kaffir Lime Fizz. I know there are real recipes for kaffir lime fizz out there, but do they ingeniously use dried kaffir lime leaves from an Asian Grocery store? I think not. This one we stole from Rosslyn Bay and made our own.
                - dried kaffir lime leaves, gin, soda water, bottled lime juice, honey, no ice

* Anchors Away. Appropriated from a very nice pizza place on Hammo. We guessed the ingredients from the description and it's finger kissin' good.
                - Peach schnapps, refrigerated, if you can find room in your boat fridge (we're very motivated to find room in our boat fridge), spiced rum, ditto, bottled lime juice, tinned passionfruit pulp, soda water, ice! We have a freezer on board but frankly it's more trouble than it's worth, except when there's a bag of party ice in there destined for a few days on Anchors Aways. 

* I don't know how ye old tall ships managed to keep limes for so long - ours last a week tops and then we're back onto the ubiquitous bottled lime juice.

Sailors and fakes

* I wrote this a week ago but couldn't post it until now. It's still very relevant. We're now "stuck" in the Whitsundays, no northerlies in sight.



"So, which one of you was the sailor? Whose idea was this?"
This question gets asked of us a lot, by sailors and non-sailors alike, and it always makes me squirm.
Neither of us were sailors before we started this. Miles had done a few yacht charters with mates in his misspent youth, and I'd done some, um … windsurfing as a teenager.
Realising early on that this might be a major hurdle in our Grand Sailing Plan, we asked an experienced sailor friend of ours: is sailing hard?
"It can't be that hard,” he replied, “because lots of stupid people are good at it."
That was heartening news in some ways, and not in others, as it implied that something other than intelligence was at work here, and we had a sinking feeling that that thing was experience.
In the year before we left, we tried to get as much experience as we could. We both did a competent crew course, Miles did a day skipper course, I crewed as often as I could on a racing yacht, I served as seasick ballast on a delivery trip from Iluka to Southport, Miles and Tony sailed the boat from Geelong to Iluka with a professional boat deliverer. We sailed around in the river whenever the grueling repairs schedule would let us and went in and out the bar a few times. But that was all. When we motored out the Clarence Heads on the first night of our trip, we had never left the Clarence River as a family on our own boat.
Four and a half months later and almost 1500 NM in the log, would I call us sailors?
No. Sure, we can sail. We’ve sailed on every possible wind angle, under every sail arrangement (except The Dreaded Spinnaker) in many different conditions. We’ve anchored in mud, shale, coral rubble and sand, in rivermouths, outer reefs, protected (and unprotected) bays and lagoons. We’ve practiced heaving to in stiff winds. We’ve sailed off and onto moorings and we’ve sailed through many nights. We’ve stitched up sails, replaced furling lines, practiced man overboard drills, greased winches, totally revamped the (abysmal) set up on the mizzen mast, and Miles even bodgied up a mizzen staysail that he was very proud of (see video below). We’ve plotted our course on paper charts (which is considered quaint by most of the yachties we’ve encountered) and taken bearings using a handheld compass. An added bonus to this style of travel is that it turns out that I quite like sailing. I like hearing the hiss of water along the hull as we pick up speed and chew up the miles, and I get an inordinate amount of satisfaction from seeing two parallel telltales.
But some aspects of sailing lore are still a complete mystery to us. As an example, take our present predicament. We’re “stuck” on Magnetic Island waiting to head south out of cyclone range and back to our families for Christmas. The wind is relentlessly and unseasonably coming from the southeast when the direction we need to sail is right into its teeth. Tomorrow there will be a very brief period of north easterlies during which we’re going to attempt to sail, very close-hauled, down to the Whitsundays. It’s possible that the angle will be too tight and we’ll end up tacking way out to sea, or doing what so many coastal sailors seem to do without any self-flagellation whatsoever, turning on the engine.
Now, what would a real sailor do in our place? Would they have turned south months ago when there were solid northerlies? Would they shrug their shoulders, crack a warm beer and wait patiently for more northerlies to arrive and enjoy the (slightly) cooler weather? Would they sail all the way out to Davies Reef and then take advantage of a better sail angle, even though the whole passage might double in length? Or would they do what one enormous cat did a few days ago, head out to an ugly sea and bully their way south into the wind? (These are not rhetorical questions – if anyone wants to chip in with advice, be my guest.)
I’ve found myself to be an ultra cautious sailor, when in other arenas of my life I’m reasonably adventurous. I don’t like being out in uncomfortable seas, I don’t like flogging the boat, and I especially don’t like being scared. The way we’ve managed this trip has been very affected by the age of our crew: 14, 10, and 7, and our determination not to scare the pants off them either. So far so good. The only time I’ve been really terrified was crossing the Wide Bay Bar, and while I was curled up in the salon in the foetal position loudly singing hymns the kids were reading in the cockpit, happily oblivious.
Obviously there is a place for caution, but I look forward to the day I can relax a little, like one blasé family we met whose engine croaked just as they came in across the Clarence Bar (three little kids on board). “We just pulled up the mainsail and brought her round right in the middle of the bar, (the sail ripped, but not too badly), and then we sailed up to Southport through the night, rigged up the outboard off the stern and motored into Bum’s Bay under 8hp. One of our best sails yet.”
There’s only one way to achieve that kind of sangfroid. More miles in the log. More screw-ups, more successes. More time.

p.s. There are worse places to be stuck than Magnetic Island and the Whitsundays.