Gary's deliveries

It now looks like the southerly will be further up the coast than previously forecast so the plan is to divert somewhere.  There lies the problem.  The only marina that can take us is too far down south so now we are diverting to the Gold Coast.  Not a bad thing as the owners decided to get some work done on the boat while in on the Coast in Boatworks+ up the river in Coomera.  So we will get into our berth before dark tonight, hopefully and we are getting hauled out tomorrow at noon for a check of the hulls and some anti fouling along with anything else we can get done at short notice.  I now have a flight home booked for Thursday getting to Auckland at 17:20.   The weather is forecast to be crap for at least a week if not longer so I will come back when it's looking good to finish the delivery to Sydney.

Today has been a very pleasant one, not a lot in the way of wind or waves.   It is now 23:30 and we passed over the top of Fraser Island, which is the largest sand island in the world, and started to go down the east of coast of it.  Running from here to just north of Sydney, which is a distance of about 500nm or 1,000km is what is known as the Eat Australia current and if you get into the best part of it you can get a boost of up to 2.5kts!  So my planned route is taking this current into account.  We have been cruising along at 10kts since leaving Mackay and now when are cruising along at an average speed of 11.8kts without increasing the rpm's.  Not bad, eh!? We are hoping to get into Sydney before a forecasted nasty southerly roars through early on Thursday.  at this stage I am not holding out too much hope ew will make it in time and don't want to have a sprint race with a 40kt southerly (on the nose) 'cause I know who will win that.  So my b...

I flew back to Mackay after having 5 nights home. It was great to see Tonka and the dogs after being away for so long. I got back to the boat late Friday night. Christine and Gavin, the owners, arrived on Saturday late morning. They will be crewing for the last leg to Sydney which is perfect as they can find out how all the systems on the boat work. After a nice lunch on Saturday we did a supermarket run then in the evening we went to the local steakhouse for dinner. Very nice! While I was away I managed to arrange for the Cummins guys in Mackay to go down to the boat and service the engines and generator as it was about time they had some love. There was a small issue with the belt on the starboard engine that they weren’t able to sort during the week but they came down on Sunday to sort that out. They were amazing getting that all done at such short notice and at this time of the year. As soon as they left we started the engines and prepared to depart Mackay. We cast off at 11:30, ou...

It turns out that my decision to head into port due to weather was the right one.  The weather has been atrocious around the Mackay-Gladstone area and doesn't look like it will change for a week or so.   Kel finally ran out of time and had to make the hard choice to leave the boat.  He is due to fly to Europe at the end of the month and obviously has things to sort out before that.   It was also decided that I fly home for a quick break as I've been away from home now for more than 2mths so we are both fly home today Sunday and return when the weather gets better.   Until then.......

Well last night (Thursday) took an unexpected turn.  The nasty weather that was forecast further south and the reason I decided to go in to Mackay in the first place arrived way sooner than it was supposed to.  At times we were down to less than 4kts to try and stop the slamming.  Catamaran are well known for not wanting to head directly into the waves as it causes what is known as "hobby horsing".  I described this in previous blogs.  The conditions we had last night and this morning were exactly what we and the boat didn't need or want.   Those bloody short sharp waves with very little gap between them, on the nose and this time they were getting up to 2m. The last hour before we got into marina this morning I was operating the throttles manually.  Whenever I saw an opportunity I would accelerate then slow down when the nasty stuff came along, then speed up again, then slow down, then speed up then..... this went on until we were safely inside t...

Later in the evening yesterday the conditions changed from clam seas to 1m short chop on the nose with virtually no distance between them which meant the boat would ride up over the wave then slam into the next one sending a wave of sea water over the whole foredeck and a nasty shudder through the boat which is very unpleasant.  We had to slow down to around 5kts to stop the worst of it which it helped but the boat still got thrown around a bit.  We had no room to veer off as to port we would cross the shipping lane and into the reef area, to starboard we would have ran into the Australian coastline so we had no choice to keep going. It calmed down this afternoon so we are able to pick up the pace a again. You will see from the weather forecast map (showing waves) that the gusts are now forecast to get over 30kts and the wave height is up to 2.9m on the nose which can be up to 50% more which would not be pleasant.  So the plan is to take shelter and wait for it to pass as...