Brisbane River

Sunday 20th April

Well we're back in another major city, Australia's third largest to be precise,and really loving it! sailing 15 miles up the winding Brisbane river we passed through ever changing industrial and residential areas and finally made our way into the heart of the city. Anchoring off the botanical gardens with towering skyscrapers all around us I quite literally think we have the best view in town.

Once we figured out how to anchor without swinging into any other boats as the tide changed direction (there have been many near misses!) we were able to get ashore and explore for at least six hours until the next change over. Brisbane is a much smaller version of Sydney and so instead of taking weeks to explore it's only taken us a couple of days to get ourselves orientated. It's a beautiful city with a really great vibe, the people are friendly and we've already met just about the whole cruising community living here.

We've also finally caught up with our friends Eli & Jorn on the Norwegian boat 'Silene' who we haven't seen since Bora Bora and have been making up for missed drinks and nights out! They've helped us to decide that we will be carrying on to Indonesia with an organised rally in July. If you know us you know that we're incredibly indecisive and would have procrastinated to the last minute. We did consider stopping in Australia to work but there lure of more exotic islands and warmer climates (yes it is autumn here and absolutely freezing at night) is just to much!! So we'll be leaving for indonesia on the 26th July and then cruise through to Singapore, Malaysia and hope to be in Thailand for Christmas.

Goodbye New South Wales - Hello Queensland!

5th April 2008
Yes we have finally crossed the border and passed out of the State of New South Wales and into Queensland! It’s been a bit of a slog over the last few weeks pushing up the coast as soon as the winds turned round from the south. However the quiet, tucked away little towns we’ve found along the way have been fantastic.
We pulled into the town of Yamba after a tough three day sail up from Port Stevens and our first experience of crossing over a bar – no, not the type you buy a drink in but the kind that’s created by a build up of sand at the entrance of a breakwater! The area gets really shallow and breaks in bad weather, however, with the help of pre- planning the tidal flow on an incoming tide you can hopefully avoid anything too bad.
Yamba’s a typical Australian small surfing town, really relaxed and friendly and completely laid back. We were lucky to catch up with some Norwegian cruising friends on board “Blue Marlin” who stopped here so their twin daughters could spend a couple of months attending the local school. Luckily for us they’d befriended the local shrimp fishermen and so we feasted on delicious cheap fresh prawns! We also got our first sight of Kangaroos.....at last! We'd heard that they love the grass on the Golf course and that's exactly where they were.
We took a side trip up the river to the town of Maclean , originally settled by the Scottish it’s still brimming with their ancestors and traditions. Unfortunately we’d just missed their yearly Highland games but we spent our time admiring all the painted telegraph poles with clan tartans and took a hike up to the cairn (almost killing Jimmy) with beautiful views over the river.

Our next stop was the town of Ballina, just 55 miles north of Yamba and a slightly more tricky bar entrance. The anchorage was on the other side of the river from town so it was blissfully quiet and just a short walk to a perfect surf beach. We jumped on the bus and took a trip to the famous town of Byron Bay, one of my favourite stops on my last visit. Byron is a mecca for travellers and surfers looking for that perfect chilled out experience. With all the great little clothes shops it's hard not to love it!!
I dragged Jimmy up to the lighthouse and Australia's most easterly point to get the great views of the coast and Fingal Beach - the famous surf spot. We visited the Arts Factory backpackers where I once called home and Jimmy got a feel for the possibility of becoming a backpacker for a while!

Our time as always was short and we decided to push on through to Queensland while we had a reasonably good weather window. However crossing the bar on the way out of Ballina in rougher weather was not a fun experience. After arriving we heard from a local that this one was rated one of the worst bars in Australia (we wished we'd known before coming in). As we started to leave we could see big breakers all across the entrance and as we got closer they got bigger. The thought of turning around was appealing but we decided to keep on and we're extremely lucky that our timing was perfect. With breaking waves all around us we slipped on through just before a rogue wave crashed behind us!

We are now safely anchored off of Surfers Paradise (yes that's what it's called) in the Gold coast and are waiting for the rain to stop before we sail up through the inland waterways to Brisbane. Jimmy's mum arrives on the 21st so we have a lot of work to do to get the boat guest worthy again!!

Port Stevens – We have Guests!!

Saturday 15^th March 2008

Our next stop up the coast was the town of Newcastle, the second largest port in New South Wales and a real industrial center. We spent a couple of days exploring the largest sand dunes in Australia and climbing the town’s famous phallic tower (known locally as the ‘Giant Penis’?!). The lonely planet says ‘you gotta love this city’ but Jimmy and I both agreed that two days were enough so we upped anchor and headed on to Port Stevens!

We loved Port Stevens on the way down the coast and it’s still just as great……Long white sandy beaches, quaint little towns and lots of bush walking trails.

The real excitement came with the arrival of two packages at the post office from both England and Florida. My dad sent us a mobile phone and my old digital camera and Jimmy’s dad sent a huge package filled with new running shoes and an underwater camera for me along with dock shoes, running shoes, a new barometer, loads of T-shirts and the all important Loo seat for Jimmy!! It was like Christmas all over again and the boat was filled with and explosion of goodies.

After a week of relaxing on the boat we had some great news that Jimmy’s cousin Mac and his wife Julienne were in Sydney on business and really wanted to come and find us for a couple of days. The sun god decided to bless us with a predicted nine day heat wave and as the temperatures soared we got to work cleaning and organizing realizing how much we’d been neglecting our boat chores lately!

Mac & Julienne were to be our first guests on board since Jimmy’s mum in Galapagos and a couple of cruising friends during the Panama Canal crossing. I was really worried that they’d feel cramped, especially trying to fit Mac’s 6ft 3” frame into our tiny V-birth! However, Jimmy cunningly prepared them that it would be a lot like camping and when Julienne arrived with her own toilet roll I was able to relax that it had to be better than they expected!

With the sun shining and not a cloud in the sky we spent two days showing them around. With the perfect weather, however, came little wind so when we went out sailing we were only able to turn off the engine for a couple of minutes, just long enough for Julienne to take the helm and get a couple of all important Photos. Extra hands also came in handy especially pulling our dinghy ‘Goliath’ up the beach, it weighs a ton and with the big tides here I think we’re going to have to invest in wheels!

We had a great time and really enjoyed having Mac & Julienne on board, Jimmy loved having some fellow Americans around to talk about home and have a break from all the Europeans and Australians! They were great guests and very easy to please, we were sorry to see them go but at least we now feel a lot more confident about having more visitors……So what are you waiting for?!!

Since they left were still experiencing the heat wave with temperatures rising to over 35*C. We’ve made the most of it by having BBQ’s on the now famous ‘Jimmy’s beach’ (yes that’s what it’s called) and searching for the illusive Kuala and Kangaroo – which as of yet we still haven’t been able to find!

Broken Bay and Home & Away Beach!

Tuesday 24^th February

Broken bay is just 16 miles north of Sydney harbour and as our cruising guide says ‘this region constitutes one of the world’s great cruising grounds’. We had a beautiful sail up the coast and then another 6 miles into the bay heading up the Hawkesbury River. There are loads of cruiser friendly 24 hr courtesy moorings throughout the bay and along with ‘Helen Kate’ we picked one up off the town of Brooklyn, happy not to have to drop the anchor. Our Dutch friends on ‘Antares’ had rented a house further north for a couple of weeks while their family visited & had invited us all up for a BBQ. The next day we jumped on the train and headed to Gosford where Jasper met us in a huge rented car and took us to their house in Coca Cabana beach.

After living on the boat for so long it’s a really strange feeling to walk into a house with a full size kitchen and Bathroom – everything seems huge. The back porch is bigger than our whole boat and the BBQ grill almost twice the size of our Galley!! We had a great time relaxing in a new environment and it was easy to see that Astrid was going to find it very hard making the transition of moving back on the boat after all this luxury. Their son Marijn, who’s just over a year & a half and lived on the boat his whole life, was over the moon to have so much space to run around in. However, we heard later that he was the happiest of the three to return home to the boat……with cruiser kids it’s in their blood!

A couple of days later we headed to one of the southern inlets called America Bay and picked up one of the hundreds of moorings right next to a huge waterfall that pours into the bay. It’s named one of the best anchorages on the east coast of Australia and is extremely beautiful. However it’s not a well kept secret and you’re certainly not going to get any privacy here! Every square inch is taken up with private mooring balls and on the weekend or holidays boats are packed in like sardines with music blaring. We couldn’t really go ashore here as the sides of the bay are sheer rock faces and vegetation and so after a couple of days of being boat bound we decided to head around to Pitt water and re provision.

Pittwater is an inlet that stretches south of the main harbour with Ku-Ring-Gai Chase national park on one side and Sydney’s northern beach suburbs on the other. As we started to motor down the channel we had a call on the radio from Ingvil and Gunnar to say that their engine had broken down and could we give them a tow in. We took them to the closest mooring ball and then decided to sail the five miles to the end of the inlet as we’d be closest to the facilities. We’d never seen so many sail and power boats in one place and every bay was packed full. Luckily we found two free police mooring balls and squatted on them for the week – If the police came we’d tell them it was an emergency!!

It turned out that Helen Kate had shattered a few of the valve springs and bent one of the rocker rods in their engine. After checking out the price of mechanics here in one of the richest parts of Sydney, Gunnar decided that he’d just have to fix it himself! Luckily he was able to order the parts and had them in his hand a day later; he went to work straight away and did a great job. Three days after he’d ordered the parts the engine was back together and chugging along happily. It goes to show that cruisers can do anything when they put their minds to it!

We were all happy to leave the rolly moorings in Pittwater and headed back up to the entrance of the bay to anchor off Palm Beach – the home of the TV series ‘Home & Away’. I grew up with this show in England as it’s been screened five days a week ever since I can remember. We Walked over to the ocean side of the spit and stood outside the surf club looking at the familiar scene of the long golden beach. It’s probably the most beautiful beach in Sydney and surprisingly very few people on it. Hiking up to the light house high on the point we got fantastic views of the whole bay. Looking out to sea it was obvious that this was perfect weather for making our next hop north up to Port Stevens. Southerly winds don’t come along too often and so the very next day that’s exactly what we did!