Merry Christmas

We really can't quite believe that this is our 5th Christmas since we left home! The first was spent in St Lucia in the Caribbean, in the company of some great fellow yachties, and the following three were with our mates Trish and Ian in NZ. Bless them, they are great hosts and, despite their adopting a cunning ruse of switching locations from Waiheke Island to Auckland last year, we still managed to track them down and turn up on the day. This year, it's just the two of us, on board our beloved Maunie in Sydney Harbour, so the pace of drinking is slightly slower, there's no TV for a yuletide film but we're pinching ourselves that we're actually here.

Motoring under the Harbour Bridge was a proper bucket-list moment yesterday and we anchored near the huge (and teeming) Sydney Fish Market to buy some King Prawns which are what the locals eat here in the sunshine on Christmas Day. We then moved around to Middle Harbour (see https://www.yit.nz/yacht/maunieofardwall for a map), through the lifting Spit Bridge, to pick up a mooring. We met folks on a boat called Quickstar in Vanuatu this season who have since moved on to NZ and they kindly suggested we borrow their mooring. We're delighted to have it as it's currently Quite Breezy and so being in an open anchorage, worrying about boats dragging their anchors when we've all had a glass or two would make the Christmas celebrations less relaxing.

We did, we have to admit, start the day with a glass or two of Buck's Fizz to accompany the traditional scrambled egg and salmon breakfast but have worked it off with a lovely walk in Tunks Park, a beautiful bit of greenery and bush at the head of this bay.

The best sort of weather for a Christmas Day Walk

 Running across the deep valley at the head of the park is an interesting bridge - originally built as a suspension bridge in 1892, with typical Victorian design features, the metalwork began to suffer from corrosion so the deck was replaced with a concrete arch, leaving the old towers in place:

The view from the bridge - this was originally the upper reach of Long Bay but was filled in, with a 3/4 mile culvert for the river running below it, to create the playing fields of the park

The water just visible at the end of the park.

So, we're about to move on to Christmas Dinner here - beef fillet in red wine with fruit and cream pavlova for pud - so wish you a very Merry Christmas.

Pittwater and Sydney

Whilst in Vanuatu, we met Sue and Ian Major when they stayed aboard Sel Citron for a week and they promised to find us a mooring when we arrived in their home port of Pittwater, just 15 miles or so north of Sydney. Well, they not only lent us their own mooring for a couple of days but organised a club mooring for us to borrow for the rest of the week and took us on a car tour of their neighbourhood before a lovely supper at their house in Newport. Fantastic.

There are excellent regular buses down to Sydney from here so we have done two days of sight-seeing to get our bearings before we sail into the fabulous harbour at the end of this week. A few photos, featuring some famous landmarks:

We took one of these big ferries from Manly (just inside the harbour entrance, to the north) for the 30 minute voyage to Circular Quays

A classic view of the city's two most famous landmarks opens up

The Opera House is a wonderful building and, in spite of having seen so many images of it, we were really surprised by its scale and the detail 

The 'sails' are covered in ceramic tiles, some glossy, some matt, of differing shades of white and cream

Looking towards Circular Quays and the CBD (Central Business District)

We went on an excellent guided tour of the Opera House so sat in the main opera auditorium (which is about to undergo a $660m refit to address, among other things, the hopelessly-cramped orchestra pit) the bigger concert hall and the three smaller theatres. We just loved the internal shapes and the contrast between the un-painted pre-cast concrete structure and the wooden ceilings

You can imagine the challenge of building this in the 1960's (it was finally opened in 1973)

The atrium with a glimpse of the Harbour Bridge

The Opera House 'done' (though we want to come back and see a performance here) we moved on to the Harbour Bridge:

Completed in 1923, the bridge is based on the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle

We couldn't afford the $275 per person to do the Bridge Climb (looked a bit draughty up there, anyway)

Looking down from the bridge, the harbour's just hectic with boats. we still can't quite believe that Maunie will be here in a few days!

Day two of our sightseeing took advantage of the Sunday deal where you can do as many bus and ferry journeys as you like for just $2.50. We went to the Maritime Museum which, inside, wasn't as good as its superb Auckland counterpart but it has the advantage of some ships to explore in the docks. Dianne overcame her claustrophobia and went into the submarine HMAS Onslow before we moved on to HMAS Vampire, a destroyer built in the 1950's so probably not hugely different to the ship her dad served in.

In the control room

Between the two massive V16 diesel engines

The boat was built on the Clyde but we were surprised to see that some of the electrical switch-gear was made in Bridgwater (10 miles from our house)

HMAS Vampire was one of three Darling Class destroyers and the last of the 'big gun' ships, before missiles became the chief naval weapon

Twin steam turbines could deliver 31 knots

We're now back aboard for a few days - the sight of those monster engines in the submarine prompted Graham to do an oil and filter change on Maunie's diesel today. If the forecast stays as it is, we'll sail down to Sydney on Friday. 

Flashback to Fulaga

Kerry from Sel Citron was contacted by Gore-Tex recently and asked to write an article for their adventure blog. She's written a great story about the Fulaga experience we shared last year: http://blog.gore-tex.com.au/living-the-village-life-in-fulaga/

We really miss that place!

Challenging navigation

From a navigator's perspective, this east coast sailing is fascinating - and at times a bit challenging. Most sailors recognise the wisdom of the saying "Your problems start once you can smell the land", the open ocean being a safer place on many occasions, and we've experienced all the challenges of tides, river currents and some extreme weather. It's fun, though!

Since we last wrote, we've been up the Clarence River, some 30km inland and discovered some charming country towns and coped with temperatures in the high 30's.

Maunie at the excellent (and free) public jetty at Ulmarra

This is no place to be if the river floods, however. The marker posts give some idea of the potential rise of the river level; the last major flood was three years ago

Sunset after another hot day

 Just as we were getting used to river navigation, we met another challenge: a fleet of small trawlers catching 'schoolies' prawns. They would suddenly change course with no warning so we had to be vigilant.

After 4 days on the river we stopped at the little seaside town of Yamba and then headed south on another overnight sail to Camden Haven - another river anchorage and a friendly little town of Laurieton. We spent a day doing some running repairs to the mainsail - replacing UV-damaged stitching at the head - and rewarded ourselves with a rare treat, a trip to the cinema. "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" was terrific.

On-deck sail repairs...

.... we were able to just remove the top batten and three sliders to get the sail down to the sewing machine

And so onto today's passage - one that illustrates the particular challenges of coastal cruising in these parts. The main issue we face is that these river ports and anchorages are generally pretty shallow (maybe only 2-3 metres at low tide) and have bars at their entrances - bars in this case are shallow patches caused by silt washing out of the river and they pose a particular threat. If you arrive at a bar when the tide is ebbing (rushing out) to meet an incoming wind and swell, a tremendous (and very dangerous) surf can form.

Here's a video of a yacht getting it very badly wrong in a bar entrance: https://www.facebook.com/SailingMore/videos/881865391950076/

So, clearly, we treat these bars with a lot of respect and remember the golden rule, "If in doubt, don't cross the bar!". This meant, for example, that today we had to time our departure from Camden Haven just at the end of the flood tide (which, of course doesn't coincide with the High Tide time, because something known as the overrun keeps the water moving up to 2 hours later) and then work out our sailing time (about 6 hours in this case) to arrive at Forster at the beginning of the flood tide, about 2 hours after local low water. So the calculations included consideration of the weather forecast and wind speed, plus the south-going East Australian Current pushing us along. We started the passage with the Parasailor flying but, as the wind increased had to swap it for the yankee just to slow down. We did get some friendly dolphins playing with us, too.

As we approached Forster we called the Maritime Rescue base on the VHF for information on the conditions at the bar. Maritime Rescue is a volunteer organisation, run a bit like the RNLI but with lookout stations at every important point and river. The very helpful chap in the station told us that conditions were 'a bit messy' due to the strengthening NE wind blowing straight into the entrance; he confirmed that our tide calculations were correct so there were no standing waves but that there was a confused, lumpy sea for about 200m before the entrance. "It's not dangerous, it's just not very nice" he said.

Oh, good, we thought and prepared for the worst-case scenario - all hatches shut, lifejackets on (mandatory on all bar crossings) and pilotage directions double-checked. We came in at a reasonably fast speed to keep steerage way and good control (faster water flow over the rudder giving quicker steering response) and Maunie did her normal trick of shouldering her way through the steep waves as though they were nothing.

A bit of white water ahead

Close to the entrance between the stone piers. The Marine Rescue control tower is to the left

A big sea bursting on the left hand pier

And we're in! Safely anchored behind a sand bank, looking back towards the entrance

Boat berths along the river - but we opted for an anchorage

Once we were safely anchored we radioed the Marine Rescue tower to thank them for their advice and ended up having a long chat with the duty officer He'd Googled the boat name and found this blog so asked us lots of questions about our trip. 

Now all we have to do is get out of here in the morning!

Maunie stops traffic

The temptation to stop the traffic on the main east coast Pacific Highway was just too much for us.so yesterday we motored up the mighty Clarence River and through the Harwood lifting bridge.

Known as 'The Big River', the Clarence is navigable for about 40 km up to the city of Grafton for masted vessels and for quite a long way further for motorboats.

The river is very tidal so we had nearly two knots of flood tide helping us upstream and, surprisingly, dolphins alongside us

Organising the bridge to be lifted involved a phone call 24 hours in advance to the contractor who travels some 80km to perform the magic. 3 boats anchored just downstream and motored through in convoy whilst a satisfyingly large tail-back of traffic formed on the highway.

Taranui (whom we first met in Vanuatu) anchored whilst the traffic thunders over the bridge

The lift begins

The green light shows and we're off. The traffic is held back off the bridge

We anchored off the little town of Maclean; known as 'the Scottish Town', all the lamp-post bases are painted in tartan colours. 

Oh, readers of the last update will be interested to know that the severe thunderstorms forecast for Thursday night missed us, just. The Gold Coast that we left  took a bit of a battering, though, over the past few days - these photos from Facebook:

The other risk of severe storms in these parts - giant hailstones!

The forecast for the next few days looks ok for us, though a trifle warm!

In brief, the weather will be normal for the time of year

Back home, Britain is getting its first deep freeze of the winter (very early for temperatures to be reaching minus 9 degrees C in Wales, that's usually a post-Christmas thing) and here the coasts of Queensland and New South Wales are getting into their storm season. When they say 'storms' here, they mean thunderstorms - and big ones at that.

We got our first at-sea taste of these on the way down from the Gold Coast to the Clarence River last night and it was quite an experience! We left in bright sunshine and a lovely 15 knot NE wind, passing down the first few miles of coast dominated by the high-rise towers of Surfers Paradise. 

The forecast looked good - winds of up to 20 knots from the NE in the evening - but did mention the slight possibilities of thunder further south. Pretty soon, the sky started to look distinctly ominous and, as a tanker passed us heading south, the dark clouds were beginning to look very unfriendly:

The last patch of blue sky gets swallowed up in cloud

We had been told about a very good feature on the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) website which gives real-time weather radar images all along the coast, with a loop of 5 pictures taken at 5 minute intervals helping you to see the direction of travel of any rain cells. The Telstra mobile phone signal is good for about ten miles off shore and so we were able to have a look at what was going on. Initially it just looked like a single rain squall heading from inland towards the coast: 

A few minutes later, however, and we could see two storm cells coming out to sea and we were right between the two of them!

The sky continued to darken around us and our own radar showed heavy rain (the pink splodges overlaid on the chart, below) just behind us.

Maunie with rain on her tail - the tanker is the blue triangle just to the SSW of us

Pretty soon the air was crackling with forked lightning and the thunder was pretty loud; we managed to stay ahead of it all, but only just.

After many attempts, we just caught the tail of a lightning strike in this photo

As darkness fell and we moved further down the coast, the cloud lifted and we thought we'd be spared any more weather action. Wrong! Yikes, ahead of us the radar showed another big storm cell heading across our path and the wind did a very quick 180 degree change to the SSW and started increasing in strength. Forewarned by the BOM radar images, Graham (who was on watch) lost no time in reefing down and adjusting course as best he could to avoid the weather then sat and watched the most impressive (and, considering our proximity to it, unnerving) lightning display he's ever seen. Thankfully, after about an hour it became clear that the storm had missed us and so the rest of the passage was a gentle motor-sail where Dianne's on-watch activities centred around dodging the many fishing boats.

So we're now anchored in Iluka but it seems that the storms haven't finished with us. The coastguard has just issued a warning for potentially destructive winds, large hailstones, lightning strikes and heavy rain for this evening. This is the full text of the warning:

The advice to move cars, avoid power lines, etc is all very well but it doesn't mention what we should do if we're anchored in a boat with a metal mast right in the middle (next to Yamba) of the forecast area! Pour a stiff drink is probably the answer, but we've lashed everything down, checked the anchor and will be refreshing the BOM radar screen at regular intervals. The laptop, phone and GPS will be going in the (cold) oven if anything threatens to come close - the theory is that it acts as a 'Faraday Cage' in the event of a lightning strike so that the energy dissipates around it, protecting its contents. The rest of the boat's electrics would probably be toast so we very much hope we don't have to test that theory.