Our Last Days in Paradise

After all the craziness of New Year's Eve in Sydney Harbor, we decided to retreat to Blackwattle Bay in Sydney's Inner Harbor. While there are restrictions on where and how long you can anchor, it is a beautiful place to drop the hook and relax right in the middle of downtown Sydney.

Needing some downtime, we decided to just chill out and walk along the waterfront and then up to the Tramsheds, a restored trolley maintenance building 

that houses about ten specialty restaurants, to score some delicious gelato. After lunch, we walked down the street to a great supermarket in the historic Glebe neighborhood and stocked up on necessities for the remainder of our stay in Sydney.

Cognizant that the clock was quickly ticking down on our Australian visas, we still wanted to do some last-minute tourist activities before beginning the arduous task of preparing the boat for sale and planning our move back to the US. At the top of our list was the Australian National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour.

The museum is huge and you could easily spend a week exploring its nooks and crannies. The first stop on the tour was the art gallery and what did we see but a gorgeous painting of the original Flying Cloud clipper ship that sailed between London and Sydney in the late 1800s.

Interior view of the James Craig whaling ship. I can't imagine functioning down below during heavy weather.

The engine room of the HMAS Onslow submarine. My dad's job was to oversee the men who maintained those massive diesel engines, used mainly to charge the huge banks of batteries that propelled the subs while they were submerged.

We also explored a large whaling ship, the James Craig, from the mid-1800s, which gave a good picture of the dangerous life sailors had in the whaling fleet. The James Craig is one of only four remaining, working 19th-century barques in existence. The highlight for me was visiting the HMAS Onslow, an Oberon class submarine that was the latter-day version of the S-class diesel boats that my dad served on in the South Pacific during World War II. I can't imaging living in those confined spaces with 38 shipmates while enduring depth charge attacks at 100 ft. depth. My dad was Chief of Boat, meaning he was responsible for all the enlisted men and the mechanical functioning of the sub. He died when I was ten so I didn't get to hear of his exploits firsthand, but I have obtained his wartime patrol reports from his sub, the Searaven, and plan to read them at some point. When talking to an old-time submariner I mentioned my dad had served eight wartime patrols in the South Pacific, he commented: "Wow, that's a lot. He was either very good at his job or very lucky -- most likely both."

On Jan. 4th we motored out of Sydney Harbor in very light winds and continued north up the coast to a small bay called American Bay. It is very popular with the thousands of boats in the nearby Pittwater area.

The last night anchoring FlyingCloud during our six-year trip from New York to Sydney. She's looking as pretty as the day we bought her.

You can only moor on private buoys owned by the various yachts clubs in the area. If the owner arrives you need to go somewhere else. Luckily it was a Thursday and the bay was not very crowded so we got to enjoy a tranquil night aboard. This overnight anchorage would represent our last true "cruising" night on Flying Cloud after 17,000 miles and six years of sailing. We savored every minute of it.

We motored back to Pittwater the next day in surprisingly heavy winds, barely clearing the headlands near Barrenjoey. We were paranoid about doing any damage to the boat this close to her going on the market, so the trip back was fairly stressful. We finally found our mooring buoy in Pittwater and carefully tied up, most likely for the last time in our lives.

Our priority at this point was getting the boat ready for sale (not for sail as in the past six years) and removing nearly 1,600 lbs. of gear that would be shipped back to Seattle.  The problem we faced was that selling the boat with all our extraneous gear would not increase the selling price, and as when selling a house, you want it to look as spacious as possible. That meant selling as much gear as we could in Australia and then shipping the remainder to the States for later sale.

This photo really doesn't do justice to the mess aboard the boat as we emptied out all the lockers and packed all our belongings for the trip back home.

We selected about 100 items we felt could be sold locally and wrote up sales descriptions and photographed them for sale online. We then placed ads in Australia's equivalent of eBay, called GumTree. GumTree is a good web site and very popular with the Aussies. The only downside was Aussies are notoriously tight with their money (which we learned having sailed with them for the last six years) and would aggressively negotiate the prices downward. Overall, we met a lot of interesting people during the ongoing sales, including one couple who bought our rather expensive sat phone and were about to drive across the breadth of the dangerous Australian outback.

Along with emptying the bilges and packing all our stuff into cardboard boxes, we also had several major boat cleanup jobs to complete. Our boat had teak decks, and over time the decking wood wears down and the teak plugs (called bungs) that cover the screw holes either fall out or are above the surface layer of the deck (the bungs are end grain wood which wears much slower than the flat grain of the deck). That meant either shaving off the tops of the high bungs (and hoping there was enough plug left to stay securely in the hole) or removing the bung, the screw, drilling the hole deeper, and then inserting a new plug with epoxy and shaving the top flush with the deck. We did this over a period of a week with over 100 bungs -- not a fun job.

One of Meryl's favorite jobs: cleaning and polishing the stainless steel fittings on the boat.

We cleaned the entire boat meticulously and decided to hire a local company to polish and wax the hull (very difficult to do while on a mooring ball), and while we were glad to not have to do that job, the bill just about induced a heart attack in me. Sydney is a very expensive city and labor rates are commensurate.

The next major project, and one we'd done many times, was sanding all the teak cap rails and handrails and covering them with six coats of varnish.  This has been an arduous job each time we've done it (about twice a year) and this time was no different. While I worked on that, Meryl cleaned and polished all the stainless steel railings and tubing on the boat, another huge job. That being said, we were moored in one of the most beautiful harbors in the world and had the advantage of dinghing over to a very posh yacht club for dinner or drinks (and much-needed showers) at the end of the day.

We managed to squeeze in some social time here with Liam and Annie, Australian friends on Gone with the Wind whom we met while sailing in the Caribbean. Annie was a former flight attendant with Ansett Airlines in Australia.

As with all cruising, it's important to remember that we still had to do all the mundane daily "housekeeping" chores such as laundry and grocery shopping. Laundry meant taking the dingy over to the Royal Albert Motor Yacht Club, walking the length of the dock and sneaking into their laundry room. All this took about four hours to complete. For groceries, we had to walk about one mile up to the Newport area grocery stores or take the bus down to Mona Vale (one village south of Newport) to buy tools or boat supplies. Everything we bought had to be carried in backpacks back to the boat.

Neil and Heather Murray from Pandora stopped to say goodbye. Neil was somewhat famous as a skipper in the 2000-2001 BT Global Challenge round-the-world yacht race. He and Heather later worked together as superyacht captain and chief stew.

On alternative days we would load up the dingy with about six large cardboard or plastic boxes and carefully motor to a nearby dock, carry the boxes up a long ramp, and meet an Uber driver who would take us down to our storage unit in Mona Vale. One of our first Uber rides was a very proper Korean lady with a beautiful white Mercedes 500 sedan. She was a little aghast as we filled her pristine trunk with heaps of boxes.  We did this about every three days for two weeks until the storage unit was full to the brim.

While we could normally do all this at a rather relaxed pace, we were under the gun since our Australian visas were due to expire on Feb. 8th, so we were very cognizant of getting everything done as fast as possible.  While preparing the boxes for shipment, our cargo consultant informed us every box had to be labeled with the exact contents as a requirement of US Customs. We also had to weigh each box and list its contents on the shipping label and manifest necessitating a lot of custom programming on our Excel spreadsheets to meet the US and Australian requirements.

This was our storage unit in Mona Vale. We were on the third floor where the interior temperature reached 120 degrees during the summer. Not fun. 

It's hard to imagine all this stuff on our boat during our world cruise. We shipped 49 boxes weighing 1600 lbs. back to Seattle. Why you might ask?

On Feb. 1st we emptied the storage unit, took all the boxes down to the loading dock and met a truck driver who would take the 49 boxes to the shipping company to be palletized and shrink-wrapped. I can't tell you the collective breath of relief Meryl and I both felt as that flatbed truck pulled away from the loading dock. We also took about 20 garbage bags of stuff to be donated or to the garbage, and took a load of sailing gear that we couldn't sell on Gumtree to a local marine consignment shop.

On the morning of Feb. 5th, our last day on the boat, we wanted to spend some quiet moments on the Flying Cloud to reminisce about the last six years and 17,000 miles of sailing. I thought we had left enough time, but even as the launch came to pick us up for the airport I had to reach over from the launch and turn off the propane tanks. Our list of 1000 things to do had finally come to end. Now, all we had to do was sell the boat.

We took an Uber out to a hotel at the airport, enjoyed a nice dinner nearby, and then collapsed into bed with a million things running through our heads. The next morning we schlepped our bags and ourselves to the United Airlines desk at the airport and prayed they would have room for two bedraggled standbys. After the usual marathon run from the check-in gates, through security, through immigration, then down seemingly miles of concourses, we made it to the gate. At the last minute they called out "Conner, party of two" and handed us tickets for two first-class seats to San Francisco. Hallelujah!

Glad to be headed back to family and friends in Seattle, but sad to be ending our six-year odyssey.

To make things even more emotional, as we boarded the beloved Boeing 747 that Meryl had flown millions of miles in, we heard that this was the last flight for the iconic plane before it was to be retired. It was the end of the line for both us and the plane, what a fitting way to end six years of the most incredible trip of our life.

As we departed Sydney airport we flew right over Flying Cloud at anchor in Pittwater. I think we both shed a tear at leaving our faithful friend who had transported safely over 17,000 miles over six oceans and seas.