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.