Dubai Part 1: The Old Town and Old Boats

We have broken the long haul back to England with a three-night stopover in Dubai (a mere 13 hours' flying time from Brisbane, which is about 11 hours too long, according to Graham). If we're honest, it's not a location that would have naturally appealed to us but we are very fortunate that Lucy and Anthony, who live here, were generous enough to welcome us to stay. Graham grew up with Lucy during summer and Easter holidays in Galloway, south-west Scotland, but, since we haven't seen them for nearly 20 years, we were stretching the rather tenuous 'old friends' link rather. However they have been wonderfully welcoming, have shown us some of the sights of the city and even managed to get an extended invitation for us to join them at a house party on the super-smart Palm artificial island.

In the 14 or so years that they have been here, Dubai has changed beyond all recognition with huge clusters of sky-scrapers, including the world's tallest building, built on what was desert when they first arrived. However, some of the old town near The Creek still remains so Anthony took us to see it (in temperatures of about 36 degrees!) on Friday and it was truly fascinating. A few photos follow:

Dianne with Lucy and Anthony on the promenade walkway at the Family Beach....

... which has some unusual rules for those used to Australian beaches

The Creek, with a sea-going cargo dhow

Many of the buildings on this side of the Creek are relatively new, but built along traditional lines. Not something that can be said for most of Dubai's architecture

Some of the big fleet of abra boats - heavily-built wooden ferries which take locals and tourists across the Creek for the sum of 1 dirham (about 20p). The close-quarters boat handling is very entertaining!

The surprisingly large fleet of wooden dhows unloading at the quay carry about 1.7 million tonnes of cargo every year, linking the city to ports in Iran, Iraq, Oman, India, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan. Mostly built of heavy teak planks, the larger boats can weigh up to 500 tonnes and all are loaded by hand; the cargoes we saw included refrigerators, air conditioners, truck tyres and even jet-skis but the boats themselves look as though they haven't changed in centuries, apart from the diesel engines which have replaced the traditional lateen sailing rigs.

air conditioning units unloaded

truck tyres and unidentified sacks

Detail of the superstructure. The toilet is just a seat at the very aft end of the top deck!

A short walk from the quay took us to the Spice and Gold Souks - rabbit-warren streets lined with tiny shops whose traders all wanted to persuade us to come inside for their 'best prices'. Meanwhile on the streets there were more men showing us their 'Rolex' and other fake-brand watches.

The smell in the Spice Souk was wonderful

Crossing the Creek in an abra we walked up to the house that once belonged to Sheikh Saeed bin Maktoum Al-Maktoum, who was the leader of Dubai until his death in 1958. The courtyard building was constructed in 1896 and is dominated by four 'barjeels' - wind-towers that directed the cooling sea breezes through the house long before electric air-conditioners, without which Dubai city could not now survive. It's now a museum, containing some wonderful photographs from the mid 1900's when Dubai city was no more than a tiny port town of traditional buildings constructed of stone and date-palm wood.

Entrance to one of the wings, with the wind-tower above

Up on the roof

We drove back along the beach-front as Anthony was keen for us to see the racing dhows that had just returned from the first days of a two-day regatta. These beautiful boats are 22ft, 43ft and 60ft long, with two masts and professional crews; it's a fiercely-contested sport of the very wealthy and is open only to locals. We passed a boatyard where one of the 60ft monsters was being rigged:

Here's a link to a photo of one of these amazing boats under sail: http://www.adsyc.ae/en/pic_gallery.php?aid=113#prettyPhoto[gallery1]/21/

So this was a great day to introduce us to 'old' Dubai as a primer for our explorations the following day into the new parts of town. Photos of that to follow soon!

Leaving Maunie behind!

Since we last wrote we seem to have been pretty busy, getting ready to leave the boat and fly home. 

Once the floods subsided over the weekend we got the Raymarine technicians aboard and were very happy with their approach. They went through all the issues we were having with the new autopilot that we had fitted in NZ last May and concluded that the installation hadn't been done properly (by a Raymarine-approved installer, hmmm) so effectively re-wired the whole thing, a process that involved taking ceiling panels down and feeding a cable through some improbable spaces. They also replaced the p70 colour-screen control panel which had started to mist up in wet weather and the whole job was done under warranty, thankfully.

So we happily set off down the river that afternoon and pressed the autopilot ‘Auto’ button, anticipating a ruler-straight wake as we watched the world go by. What actually happened was that Maunie immediately executed a tight U–turn and nearly rammed an anchored motorboat (umm that would have been an interesting insurance claim!) before we hurriedly switched it off and grappled with the wheel! We re-anchored and got the instruction book out and went through a few steps of basic commissioning; we think the guys had thought that with the new p70 the original settings would have remained in place but this is a newer model so it had to learn left from right and so on. That just shows that you can never entirely trust the experts (we know, we should have learned that a long time ago)!

Anyway, after that all was done, all seems well and now the chart plotter has a proper communication route with the pilot so we can (if we so wish) set a route of waypoints on the plotter and the pilot will follow it (it wouldn’t do that as it was wired before) . We have even linked the two screens so that when we dim the brightness of one at night, the other dims with it (we're easily pleased by things like that). Hopefully this will be the end of our random problems autopilot. Fingers very much crossed.

We moved back down to the anchorage inside Sovereign Island for a few days, less than a mile from the pontoon where we had arranged to leave Maunie - it's shown by the red pin on the left hand side of this photo:

The anchorage gave us the chance to do lots of boat preparation jobs - taking the sails off, giving the generator an oil change and flushing its cooling system with fresh water, and a hundred other little but time consuming jobs. On Sunday morning, at high tide, we motored round to the canal and introduced Maunie to her home for the next 6 months.

The mooring at a Spring low tide - we thought we might just touch the mud with the keel but were delighted to find we had enough water to remain fully afloat

Thanks to some amazing perseverance (and world-class packing skills) by Garth at Holt Farm, our custom-made boat cover (last used in the winter of 2011) was unearthed from a storage container and sent across to us. It will protect the boat from the bright sunshine and allow us to keep some hatches open to allow good air circulation below decks. Fitting it involved a bit of work with the sewing machine to patch a couple of minor holes and then some careful lashing to make it all secure.

High tide, and the forward section of the cover is fitted

 So, after a very hectic last day, everything was packed away and the final covers fitted and we could leave Maunie under the watchful eye of Lyn (whose pontoon we are renting) and our friend Brian who lives locally and arranged this fantastic spot for us.

We do have a third section of the red cover back in the UK but, since we already had the blue cockpit cover on board, it didn't seem worth the cost of sending it (or the hassle of modifying it to fit around the solar panel arch that we've added to Maunie since we left home)

And, suddenly, that was it! The flight cases were packed and we were ready for the journey home, a trip involving a train to Brisbane for an overnight in a little hotel we've used before followed by a 13 hour flight to Dubai where we are staying for three nights with an old friend of Graham's. The final leg gets us into Heathrow on Easter Monday.

Bracing ourselves for the journey ahead, and thinking that we'll miss this sunshine!

We'll do a bit of a 'wrap-up' blog update on this blog when we get back home but then you'll get a break until we return to Australia in November.

Debbie Does the Gold Coast

As cyclone Debbie smashed into the Whitsunday Islands and then made landfall at Airlie Beach in Northern Queensland a few days ago, our first concern was for the safety of niece Laura who's working in Airlie. She has a bit of a history with freak weather, have endured a full hurricane on a family holiday to Florida a few years ago, so we were very relieved that she managed to call us from a public phone on Wednesday to say that she was fine (unlike most of the buildings in the badly-battered town). 

Debbie had left Airlie and moved inland and was downgraded from a Category 4 cyclone to a Tropical Low so we had no inkling of the havoc she would then wreak down here when she moved south east and tracked down the coast.

On Thursday morning we'd arranged to come up the Coomera River to anchor off the Boat Works yard for a Raymarine technician to come aboard to sort the autopilot. We saw the forecast for gale force winds and rain so thought that being up the river would give us plenty of shelter. WRONG!

As we motored up river the heavens opened and we had torrential, stinging rain that limited visibility to only a 100m at times:

water sluicing off the bimini cove over the cockpit

When we anchored off the yard and phoned the Raymarine agent we were pretty shocked to be told that the government had just issued a severe flood warning, all schools were being shut and businesses were being urged to send their employees home before the roads near major rivers became impassable; they were about to shut their office. We quickly searched all the weather sites and realised that being anchored here would be foolhardy; we'd read enough to know that the vegetation being swept down a flooded river can quickly build up around the anchor chain, pulling the boat's bow down and potentially breaking the anchor out. Oh, crap!

Luckily a phone call to the Boat Works office was answered by Alana, who we got to know when we were here in November, and she found us a last space in their little marina. Better still, it was tucked behind (and downstream of) a 60ft motor yacht that would do a sterling job of deflecting any debris away from us so we lost no time in mooring up. We then bailed out the dinghy, half full of rain water after only 2 hours, and lashed it on deck, secured all the sails, double-checked the mooring lines and then watched as the river turned brown and swift.

Debris sweeping down the river, just where we'd been anchored

This short video clip may not play if you are viewing this on an iPad, but it shows one of several navigation buoys plus lots of vegetation, being swept down the river.

During the night the river burst its banks and crews on several yachts on the pontoons upstream of us took the decision to abandon their boats and sleep on the floor of the cafe, such was their concern about getting hit by damaging debris or even that the pontoons might fail under the strain.

As morning dawned, sunny thankfully, the river subsided and the clean-up operations began. The water was like cocoa but when we walked ashore we were shocked to see all the mud in the car parks and boat yards several metres above the normal river level. Apparently there was a real danger of a couple of catamarans floating off their stands in the yard when the water level peaked just after midnight.

muddy waters

A river authority boat with a collection of navigation buoys that had gone adrift

The water has receded and the mud has been hosed off the pathway but the electricity box on the right was engulfed in the flood

This was the high-tide line. Apparently the box started emitting substantial quantities of steam before tripping out

Across the river, the tide line, level with the top step, shows how close this house had come to having a swimming pool full of brown water

So we feel very relieved to have got through the night with no damage to Maunie but realise how close we came to a nasty outcome. In the yard the clean-up was done very quickly and efficiently and work was back to normal by midday. We stayed an extra night on the pontoon to allow the river to continue to drop and are now anchored off the yard to wait for the Raymarine expert on Monday.

Finally, though, no Maunie story would be complete without an improbable coincidence. Once we'd moored up on Thursday we received an email from Carolyn and Russel, a Kiwi couple we'd met on the Lake Waikaremoana hike that we did last February. During the walk they'd discovered we were sailors and asked lots of questions, saying they were planning early retirement to buy a catamaran to become liveaboard yachties themselves. Anyway, their email said that they'd bought a boat last June and they were aboard it, on the next pontoon only 20 metres behind us! Tiny world.

Yamba to the Gold Coast - and another daring rescue

The unplanned break in Yamba gave us the chance to walk out to the headland to look down on the impressive man-made sea walls at the entrance to the Clarence River before we motored out on Sunday afternoon.

Looking south-east from the Yamba headland....

... and looking north, with the surf beach in the foreground and the long sea walls of the river entrance behind.

The exit between those sea walls has to be approached with considerable care because the 'bar' (shallows) just beyond them kicks up some horrible and dangerous waves at times. The trick is to cross the bar when the tide is flooding in, up the river; if it's ebbing, the flow of millions of litres of water running at up to 4 knots creates huge standing waves. We left in very light winds at the time when the flood should have been well and truly developed but found ourselves being flushed out in a 2 knot ebb, caused by all the rain that's fallen in the Clarence River's vast catchment over the past week. It was only when  we were about a mile out to see that we crossed a very definite line in the water, leaving the brown, silty fresh river water and crossing into the blue ocean.

After that, the 100nm passage was very easy. The winds were light so we had to run the engine the whole way but we once again hugged to coast to avoid the current and had some nigh-time entertainment using the radar to help us dodge several fishing boats in our path. However, there's no such thing as an incident-free voyage on Maunie and we had our autopilot suddenly sound alarms and switch itself off three times, with the boat suddenly veering off course as a result.

So where has it gone, then?

 Thankfully, this problem seemed to fix itself so we didn't have to hand-steer for hours and we could concentrate on some interesting pilotage.

A slalom between the Danger Reefs off Tweed Heads. They were so named by Captain Cook who saw breaking waves and took Endeavor off shore and hove-to overnight. As a result he was the first navigator to discover the south-going East Coast Current as the ship was 20 miles further south by daybreak

 As dawn arrived we could see the delightful skyline of Surfers Paradise which meant our passage was nearly complete.

We are now anchored at Paradise Point, only a mile or so from where we'll leave Maunie in two weeks' time. Emails to the technical support team of Raymarine Australia have yielded very quick responses so we'll hope to get a local technician aboard in the next few days to find out why the autopilot's playing up. Meanwhile Maunie's reputation as the boat that tows others was further confirmed when we spotted a motorboat drifting past us on the fairly swift tide. Their engine had overheated and cut out so, once Graham had introduced them to the safety concept of throwing the anchor over before they hit something, he got in the dinghy and towed them back to their pontoon.

Clueless motorboat owners - all the gear and no idea

Having got the engine on the dinghy we then took the opportunity to go round to recce the mooring for the nest 6 months, which looks as though it'll be great.

The day ended with a really lovely bbg on the shore - the Australians provide these fantastic outdoor hotplate bbq's (which are free) and we ended up chatting to a couple of other yacht crews doing the same thing.

Di stirring the Royale sauce for the fillet steaks, with sweet potatoes and carrots. Yum-oh! Maunie's visible in the background.

R&R in Yamba

Sydney Harbour bade farewell to us in some style on Wednesday night. Just as we’d gone ashore into Manly to get final provisions from the supermarket, the sky turned suddenly to an inky black (at about 5.00pm), there was a VERY loud clap of thunder and then the ‘southerly buster’ storm arrived.  Horizontal bullets of rain scattered pedestrians into whatever shelter they could find and the wind howled through the pine trees along the esplanade. Thankfully, we’d moved Maunie onto one of the very good courtesy moorings just off the beach, otherwise we’d have worried about her dragging her anchor, so we took shelter as best we could in the nearest available place – which just happened to be the Bavarian bar at the wharf. Our timing was perfect – it was Happy Hour so wine and beers were $5 a glass.

As abruptly as it had arrived, the storm departed and, after emptying our glasses of alcohol and then the beached dinghy of several gallons of rainwater, we made it back to Maunie to get her ready for our sail north at first light the following day; dinghy deflated and packed away on the foredeck and loose items stowed below decks.

The 306nm passage was pretty good in terms of speed, to our surprise. We had fast downwind sailing for the first 20 hours or so and then had to do a fair amount of motor-sailing as the wind dropped to less than 10 knots. We managed to dodge the worst of the 2 knot southerly current that had been such a bonus when we were sailing towards Sydney in December, by dint of steering as close to the coastline as we dared; to our delight, we even found some back-eddies where the current was pushing us northwards for a few hours.  However, the weather was at best grey and at worst very rainy so the only photo taken on the 2 days was this one:

Night watch on Maunie - we use red LED lighting to preserve our night vision for when we go on deck to look out for other vessels

Unfortunately, and there’s always an unfortunately to spoil the fun, Dianne’s hacking cough, which, ironically, she’s had since we were in Port Hacking two weeks ago, made life pretty uncomfortable for her and left her short of both sleep and energy. Meanwhile, Graham was being a brave little soldier but fighting the symptoms of early-onset man flu. So, armed with the latest weather forecast yesterday evening, some navigational calculations were performed and we decided that a diversion into Yamba marina, about 100 miles short of our destination,  would not only be feasible (the tide has to be just right to cross the shallow river bar) but eminently sensible. We arrived at about 07.30, still in heavy drizzle, but our reward, apart from the still waters, was the welcome sight of some blue sky and sunshine this afternoon, the first we’ve decent break that we have seen for a week or so.

Yamba Marina - Maunie berthed to the left of the big motorboat

Stocked up with new supplies of tissues and tablets and well rested, we’ll set off again tomorrow afternoon for a final overnighter to the Gold Coast, just across the border into southern Queensland, and that will give us a good two weeks to put Maunie to bed for her six months without us. The Gold Coast usually enjoys calm, dry and stable weather conditions in the winter whilst northern Queensland has a much more tropical climate. It’s coming toward the end of their cyclone season now but Cyclone Debbie is about to pounce, landing very close to where niece Laura is working in Airlie Beach sometime in the next couple of days. Compared to a Category 4 cyclone, a thunderstorm and a few days of drizzle perhaps weren’t so bad after all.

Sydney update (in the rain)

We've had a week in Sydney and enjoyed exploring more of the city in spite of some pretty awful weather; lots of heavy rain and wind squalls have rather dampened our enthusiasm at times. The only real exception was last Sunday when we had a lovely sail around the harbour, with Kerry joining us for the day, dodging the racing yachts, ferries and motorboats; there was a great picnic lunch in the cockpit (with a training course by Kerry on the best way to peel prawns) and an entertainingly brisk return with the Parasailor.

Passing the Opera House with T/S Tenacious (last seen in Hobart)

One of the racing fleets

The latest must-have accessory? Oh dear....

Heading back under the bridge after a great day. Unfortunately the wind direction didn't allow us to sail through the bridge with the Parasailor flying.

Full moon rising in the last clear skies we'd see for a week

With the wet weather enveloping us like a soggy blanket this week, we've got on with a few jobs - some re-varnishing below (not a perfect success due to the humidity, it has to be said, but an improvement) and we collected the SSB radio, back in working order (a $10 transistor replaced, plus $320 of labour). We also replaced a corroded connector on our VHF radio aerial which we hope will solve our intermittent problems with receiving and transmitting.

In between the work, we've managed to tick off a few more city sights. We did join a free guided walking tour of the city one day but, when the heavens opened and the wind threatened to wrest the golfing umbrella from our grip, we peeled off (almost Mary Poppins style) and enjoyed a much drier, free guided tour of the excellent Art Gallery of NSW. The Asian Art section was a real hit, as was the Aboriginal Art gallery.

Asma'al-Husna, 99 Names of Allah (2014) by the female Iranian artist Azra Aghighi Bakhshayeshi

detail of an Aboriginal piece

... and another

 There's been some good social life too - a great Nepalese meal with Kerry and her friends Pete and Gwyn (whom we last met 3 years ago in Fiji) which was followed by watching Crab Racing in the wildly-eccentric Friend in Hand pub, an event which required unbrellas, again, but this time as protection against the water pistols and hose pipe. Only in Australia! 

We then caught up with Waiheke mates Trish and Ian who were over here for a long weekend so we dodged most of the showers and anchored in Athol Bay, just across from the Opera House for a prawns and salad lunch. Time for a little, belated celebration of Trish's and Dianne's 50th's

Thanks to Jenny for the 50th Bunting!

Look, some blue sky!! A slight clearance last night so we managed a walk over to Darling Harbour without getting wet

The plan now is to leave Sydney as soon as the wind goes southerly again - Wednesday night or Thursday morning probably. We have about 450nm to cover to get back up to the Gold Coast so we'll probably try to knock off a big chunk of that with a 2-3 day passage whilst the breeze is favourable. 

What are the chances…….?

Readers of our last update will know that we succeeded in sailing under the Sydney Harbour Bridge on Thursday (this was a thrill for both of us, a bucket list event and included a few tense moments for Di on the helm with ferries approaching from all directions); also we alluded to being spotted as we sailed under the bridge.

Now we all know about the 6 degrees of separation and strange coincidences but we’ve come to the conclusion in the sailing world that there is a much stronger bond that draws us together and very often cats are involved! At the very moment that we sailed under the bridge, one of those bridge walking climbs (for which people pay $270) was being led by a woman called Lily.

That evening when we were anchored in Blackwattle Bay, one of many anchorages further up the river, we heard a knock on the hull and voices. It was Lily, along with her partner Mark, who had spotted Maunie as she cycled home from work to where her boat was anchored. Lily introduced herself: ‘Remember me? We met in 2013 when we came for drinks on board Maunie’. We obviously looked confused so she added some details about Pixel, the cat. Well that clarified things in our heads as we recalled quite clearly meeting up with two boats in Moorea: Duncan & Jess on S/Y Alliance and Charlie, Lily & Pixel on S/Y Portal. Our invitation for them all to join us for drinks on board Maunie had the condition that ship’s cat, Pixel, must be in attendance (having spotted the gorgeous Maine Coon strutting his stuff on deck). You can follow this link to see that Pixel did indeed come across for drinks and it was very difficult to persuade him to disembark from Maunie at the end of the evening: http://maunieofardwall.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/exploring-moorea-and-meeting-pixel.html

Back to the coincidences, Lily happened to lead a climb across the bridge just as we sailed beneath and she actually spotted us and recognised the name of a boat that she’d last seen four years earlier. Later she cycled past our anchorage on the way back to her boat for new partner Mark to pick her up by dinghy at the pontoon near us, as their boat is anchored in the next bay.

More ‘small world’ moments followed the next day:

First of all, as we sat on the ferry from Darling Harbour to Parramatta to drop off our SSB radio for repair (and do some touristy bits on route) Graham spotted a yacht called Zeena on a mooring, among hundreds of other boats. We first saw Zeena's crew in a restaurant in the Galapagos Islands in 2013 and then the boat plus crew on board in the Marquesas later in the same year when we were all battling against strong river floods and the resultant debris being carried past our boats. Another link from 2013 to 2017!

Finally, when we returned to our anchorage, a new boat had joined the three or four others around us; a Vancouver 34C had dropped its anchor just along from Maunie. As far as we know, there are no connections to 2013 or to cats but what we do know is that there aren’t too many Vancouvers around (and sadly numbers won’t increase as the yard is closed and therefore ceased building our beloved yachts). Maunie was built in 1997 and Nausikaa, the other Vancouver, was built in 2009 by Northshore. Her current owner, Kayo, sails her single-handed and she too has just returned from Tassie.

Here are the two Vancouvers sitting majestically in Blackwattle Bay, Sydney: two proper British yachts!

Sunset in Blackwattle Bay, with the full moon rising 

So, once again, we ask: what are the chances of two Vancouver Yachts being anchored in a bay on the opposite side of the world to where they were built?