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.

A Night to Remember

After a wonderful week-long visit, our daughter and family departed Australia early on Boxing Day. We had a great time with the grandkids and were very sad to see them leave.

Not letting any moss grow between our toes, Meryl and I hopped on a bus down to Manley where we met our old cruising buddy, Andrew from Eye Candy. We had been invited to watch the start of the world-famous Sydney Hobart race aboard Moonshadow, a 62 ft. Deerfoot sailing yacht, owned by cruising friends John and Deb Rogers of San Diego. This was a lifetime dream for me to see the start and to be able to watch the race aboard Moonshadow was the icing on the cake. The 630-mile race goes from Sydney Harbor NSW to Hobart, Tasmania.

John and Deb are the consummate hosts and you know you’re in for a great time.  Even though it was somewhat early, the course was lined 10 boats deep along the route, including large ferries, tour boats, every size sailboat imaginable, and a myriad of other oddball craft. John had his hands full dodging the other boats as everyone jockeyed for the best position to see the rapidly approaching racing yachts.

Blackjack and Comanche neck and neck after the starting gun.

Even though the wind was very light, these super lightweight racing boats knifed through the water at about seven knots.

Wild Oats is one of the perennial favorites for line honors in the Sydney Hobart Race. Ironically it was berthed just across from us in Pittwater.

The first two boats to reach us were the RP 100 Blackjack with Bob Butterworth as crew, closely followed by the 100 Supermaxi LDV Comanche, which included world-class sailors Jimmy Spithill as crew and Stan Honey as navigator. This was like a “Who’s Who” of the world's best sailors.

I had heard descriptions of the mayhem in the spectator fleet, but you really have to be there to fully appreciate it.

These AIS targets best describe the chaos during the start of the race with everyone vying for the best vantage points.

Our stalwart Captain John did a great job steering us in close quarters during the start.

Even though the wind was relatively light, the maxi’s moved along at a good clip and were soon out of sight down the coast. They were followed by the Volvo Challenge series yachts and a bunch of offshore racing yachts including the famous Dorade that we saw in Antigua years ago.

A few days later we hemmed and hawed about sailing Flying Cloud from Pittwater (seven hours south) to Sydney to watch the New Year's Eve celebration. An email from our friend Marce on Escape Velocity stated “this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. You have to do it.”  We had heard New Year's Eve was a zoo with thousands of beer imbibed and poorly anchored boats trying to watch the festivities and I was paranoid about anything happening to Flying Cloud this close to the sales date.  We finally decided the fireworks were not to miss the event and wanted to spend a little more time in Sydney before heading back stateside. The sail down was more of a motoring event but we eventually arrived at the very popular Spring Cove just southeast of Manley. It was chock a block full of boats but we found a good spot and just vegged out for the rest of the day.

The next morning we decided to move further into the harbor to Athol Bay, near the Tarango Zoo, to claim our space for New Year's Eve. Good idea since it was already getting crowded the day before New Years'. We connected with friends BJ and Katherine Porter on Evenstar. We had agreed to sell them our Sailrite sewing machine and decided now was as good as any time to transfer the 40 lb. machine over to their boat. Thank goodness they had their son to help out as the water was rough from all the boat wakes.

One of the problems all over Australia for cruisers is the lack of places to tie up or land your dingy. Many times your only choice is to find a stretch of beach and haul the dingy up. In order to go grocery shopping, we snuck the dingy under the large boarding ramp of the Taronga Zoo ferry landing, not sure if it would be even there when we got back. We took the bus up the steep hill past the zoo to the very posh (think old Sydney money) Mossman neighborhood to stock up on groceries and other sundries. We could have stayed and wandered about for the rest of the day looking at all the quaint stores and beautiful 19th-century architecture.

As the dawn broke on Dec. 31st, we could see more and more boats headed towards the area where we were anchored. A number of these boaters had very little anchoring experience (they normally use mooring balls in Australia) so what was comical at the beginning became more serious as the day progressed. Many already anchored skippers just stood on their bow and warned off any boats trying to anchor too close.  I choose to be a nice guy, which turned out to be a huge mistake. 

My new best friend who just wanted to be close to us.

Our first encounter was a 45 ft. sailboat that looked so derelict I was amazed it was still floating. Amazingly, it had about 7 to 8 young kids aboard and it soon became obvious that they all lived aboard the boat. The skipper tried anchoring with two anchors (a terrible idea given the conditions) and didn’t have an anchor windlass so every time he had to re-anchor he had a long line of kids help pull up the rope. He finally gave up and moved a short distance away.

Our next situation was a white, 45 ft. powerboat who anchored somewhat close, but seemed OK at the time. When the wind shifted, however, he swung right into us. As we were fending him off he mentioned: “You’ve been so nice, everyone else has been yelling at us.” By the sixth time he hit us (not hard but still concerning to someone wanting to sell his boat in a short time), I finally started yelling. He refused to move. The crew of Evenstar came over to try to dissuade the guy, but it wasn’t until some Australian’s visiting Moonshadow nearby(including a former cop) came over and read him the riot act that he finally moved.

After all that trauma Moonshadow took pity on us and invited us over for drinks. We ended up staying on board for the remainder of the evening.

The fireworks, which didn't start until midnight, over the Sydney Harbor bridge.

As for the fireworks, they were absolutely spectacular. It seemed like they were exploding all around us in a 360-degree phantasmagoria of light and sound. The Sydney Bridge looked like a waterfall of white sparkles with multicolored bomb bursts of color overhead. Despite all the hassles, it was a “once in a lifetime event” and we were so glad we got to see probably the best firework show we have ever seen and a great way to welcome the New Year.  Happy 2018 to you all! 

Australia: A Family Christmas

We finally got our Christmas wish:  our grandchildren would be visiting us during the Christmas Holiday.  They were scheduled to fly from Guatemala and arrive in Sydney Dec. 18th.

With guests coming, we were a little rushed to get the varnishing done on the cap rail and stripping all the old caulk from our teak decks, along with the micro cleaning of the boat that only Meryl can do when she knows we're having company.

On Dec. 18th our daughter Christa, her husband Andrew, and two very active children, Quinn age 7 and Conner age 5, arrived at the marina, tired from nearly 25 hours of traveling but anxious to see Mimi and Boppa's (that's us) boat.

Taking everyone out in the dingy, along with luggage, required a bit of magic but we finally got everyone settled and headed one hour north to Coasters Retreat, a wonderful anchorage nestled in the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.

Quinn, Meryl and Nash enjoy their first time on Flying Cloud.

Quinn and Meryl checking out the view from the foredeck as we approach Coasters Retreat in Pittwater.

Quinn and Nash check out a Swamp Wallaby at Coasters Retreat.

Two very special women in my life.

Quinn and Conner very excited about their first night on a boat.

We took a nice hike up to the top of the road in Coasters Retreat. No snakes but it was dreadfully hot.

Christa always chooses great AirBnb's. This one was at the top of the ridge in Avalon. Surrounded by gum trees, we had a nightly chorus from the resident cockatoos, which have one of the most irritating squawks of any bird around. 

Christa is a stickler about healthy foods for the family.

After a morning at the beach we had a delicious lunch at the Whale Beach Deli near Palm Beach.

One of our Christmas gifts to the kids (and Christa and Nash for a day off) was taking the kids to the Taronga Zoo in Sydney.

Since Australia has more creepy crawly things that can kill you than any other place in the world, I thought I'd just put in one picture so we don't deter you from a future visit to Down Under.

The view from the Taronga Zoo is breathtaking with the Sydney Opera House and Sydney Bridge in the background.

After our experience at Sea World we were smart enough not to sit in the first row during the seal show.

When Quinn and Conner see this picture they'll be surprised to see what's right behind them.

All grandfather's brag about their grandchildren, but I have to say Quinn got some of the best rides of any of the kids in her surf class that day. Being strong, well balanced, and light weight also helps.

We took a nice hike up to the top of Barrenjoey Lighthouse. You can see Palm Beach (where the kids took surfing lessons) on the left and Pittwater (where we keep the boat) on the right.

The intrepid hikers at the top of Barrenjoey with the Tasman Sea in the background.

Quinn and Conner both got to make their very own Gingerbread Houses. The challenge was to keep grandpa from eating all the ingredients.

Wrapping presents late on Christmas Eve.

Quinn and Meryl making delicious Christmas sugar cookies.

Nash cooked a delicious Christmas Eve dinner with steak and lobster hot off the barbie.

Nash reading "Twas the Night Before Christmas."

So nice to share Christmas morning with young children again.

Mimi thanks the grandkids for a beautiful jacket from Guatemala. 

Constructing a Lego Catamaran with a 7-year-old is a humbling experience.

We took a Christmas Day walk along windy Newport Beach with large waves washing over into the swimming pool.

No Christmas is complete without some rock climbing on the sandstone cliffs above the beach.