Gary's deliveries

This is getting a bit like “Groundhog Day”. We have had the same conditions today as yesterday and the day before that and the day before that………… We have seen a few ships passing in both directions. If one comes up behind and overtakes we move over a little bit more to give them room to pass safely as the shipping lanes can get a bit tight in some places and these ships are pretty long and wide! We have really enjoyed coming down the coast as we have “all you can eat” Starlink internet connection for the movies etc, some amazing scenery and relaxing watches. Kel has been trying to catch fish since we left Hong Kong, weeks ago, without success then caught that Spanish Mackerel yesterday and would you believe it he caught a little Tuna today. And his time I remembered the camera! Fish steaks tonight and probably a few more few fish themed dinners coming up on the last leg to Sydney. The temperature and humidity has been reducing as we go further south which is actually pretty nice as it...

  So we went past Thursday Island and the other Islands of the Torres Strait last night and hooked a right.  We are now cruising down the east coast of Northern Queensland dodging all the islands, islet's, sand banks and ships, not too many ships to be fair.  It has been yet another day of amazing conditions, we certainly got lucky on this leg from Darwin. We dumped the 2,000lts we had in the IBC tanks in the aft cockpit and you will notice in one of the photos the blue drums on the upper aft deck.  We put them up there after we emptied them as they were no longer required plus it freed up all the front cockpit making for better visibility forward when we are running the boat from the saloon area. Kel managed to catch the 1st fish of the entire trip today!  A decent sized Spanish Mackerel which he filleted and is now waiting in the fridge to be consumed.  Unfortunately we were both caught by surprise and neither of us thought to take a photo, bugger! We mov...

First of all I would like to say thank you to everyone who sent me birthday wishes, it is much appreciated. Another amazing sunrise this morning.  If you look closely you can see we even picked up a hitchhiker needing a rest! We are only 100nm from the Torres Islands at the tip of Australia and the point at which we enter the shipping channels, turn right and head down inside the great Barrier Reef.  We are really looking forward to that. Gone are the glassy waters and zero wind.  The replacement is 1m waves on the nose and 15kts of wind.  This is forecast to reduce as the afternoon goes on. If you have been following us on my tracker page ( https://share.garmin.com/FKHAP ) you will notice we had a slight change of course, that’s to make it a more comfortable ride.  There’s not a lot of distance between these waves and they are coming from directly where we want to go. If we head directly into the waves the boat rises up on the front of a wave, drops over the ba...

  27th Dec and my birthday!! The 1st picture shows what the weather gods and Neptune gave me as a present this morning when I came up for my 06:00-12:00 watch. WOW!  The water was like an oil slick it was so shiny and not a ripple to be seen. Very impressive. During Kel’s early watch he nearly had a heart attack when he noticed a red nav light that looked really close but nothing on radar.  Turned out to be a very low flying plane, possibly an ABF plane doing a low pass to have a look at us.  Then he had 2 ships pass at the same time about 3nm one off the port side and another off the starboard side.  It’s getting to be a bit like rush hour out here! I had the amazing sunrise and a small pod of very lethargic dolphins this morning and a turtle yesterday. 2nd picture is taken out my cabin window today. 3rd picture is just showing the sort of conditions we have been experiencing since leaving Darwin 2 and a bit days ago, amazing! As the day draws to an end it fini...

*  A note for my mate Pete in Guernsey  - with reference to your comment from Christmas Days blog see note 4 below!!!  When we arrived in Darwin I would have put a reasonable sum of money on us not moving for a week or more due to 1.  It being right on Christmas 2.  Being given a “Restricted to Port” notice by ABF as their was an offical form missing for the importation of the boat 3.  Having something wrapped around the starboard prop or shaft causing a vibration 4.  No way in hell am I diving into the murky Darwin waters only to have a chat with a prehistoric salt water crocodile! Sends shivers down my spine just thinking about it. Apparently they get around 300 of them a year inside the port area. 5.  Also the nasty jellyfish etc etc etc It seems everything up here wants to kill you. Needless to say nobody goes swimming in the sea in Darwin. In the end the miracle happened and all the stars aligned albeit at a cost. We left around midday and th...

We had a night at anchor when we arrived waiting for ABF to call us into the pontoon to clear into Australia. The call came and we were told to go alongside the pontoon for a 09:30 appointment with ABF and Biosecurity. The later took ALL our Chinese takeaway meals we had left over from Hong Kong and all the top up ones we bought in KK . I have only ever had the pork meals taken, but, no not Darwin they take ALL meat! Grrrrrrrr……. Then it came time for ABF. Well, we had 2 officers doing the clearing in paperwork with me, a sniffer dog going through the whole boat, THEN another 4 officers going through EVERYTHING for 45mins! OMG. Nearly 2hrs later and we were all done. Then at the end of all this the ABF officer give me a piece of paper that says “Restricted to Port”. There was 1 piece of paperwork missing for the importation of the boat into Aus so we were not free to leave Darwin till that was sorted and it was now the 23rd Dec and we wanted to leave on Christmas day, BUGGER. Another p...

Sunday 22nd Dec '24 Sun Dec 22 2024 13:27:00 GMT+0930 (Australian Central Standard Time) We have arrived! The picture shows what is the most expensive flag pole I have ever seen on a boat! The ships crane. When we arrived into KK I put the flag’s on the bow rail as we do not have a flag staff set up up high on the boat and it was the only place I could think of until I had a brain wave this morning! We have a very nice, shiny, expensive, crane that even extends and is also up high on the fly bridge aft deck . So I thought that would make a great flagstaff and get the flags way up high. It worked so I gave myself a big pat on the back for such a brilliant idea especially as it was still only 06:00! We arrived into Darwin and anchored in the Quarantine anchorage just before dark 18:00. Yah! Just have to wait for all 1 document from the import agent to arrive at ABF tomorrow morning and we can then go to the Quarantine pontoon outside Cullen Bay Marina where we will be met by ABF and ...

Well, everything calmed down overnight and we both had very relaxing watches. During today we have had no wind, 25-30kts of wind, calm seas, choppy seas and everything in between. We are finally on the downward slop to Darwin with only 250nm to go we “should” be in Darwin before midnight tomorrow, Sunday. Then the fun starts with the authorities. If we are lucky we will only have 2 or 3 ABF (Aussie Customs) come onboard, maybe 1 person from Health and 1 or 2 from Ag & Fisheries. Hopefully that should be it and it all goes smoothly… I saw a strange sight this afternoon just before i was going to call Darwin ABF to confirm arrival timing and where they want us to go, I spotted something floating in the calm water ahead of us. As we got closer it looked a bit suspicious. As you can imagine that spending so much time out here you get used to the way most things look so you notice things that look out of place. So I got the boats super effective stabilised binoculars out and had a look....

Yesterday, Thursday, turned out to be slightly different.   It was also pretty calm again, until, it wasn't!    I got up for my 06:00-12:00 watch and had to hold on moving around! The calm seas had gone and the squally weather had set in with 30kts gusts, 1-2m short chop, torrential rain and sheet lightning.  The waves  were on the beam so we are getting thrown around a bit and the boat was getting a salt water wash down, even the fly bridge!   With all the fuel off the bow yesterday, good timing, the boat is riding well and handling the conditions no problem, we just need to hold on walking round.  Can't really complain as we have had a decent run of good weather.  The seas did calm down a bit during the day, still from an uncomfortable angle but picked up again in the late afternoon/early evening.   The best news is we still haven't seen any fishermen, fantastic!

Not only did we have a really relaxing night, for the first time since leaving KK, due to lack of fishermen, we also had a big moon, calm sea and were lucky enough to have a stunning sunrise. The1st picture below was taken around 05:30 from the flybridge. What a way to start the day. The 2nd picture is of one of the many we will come across while transiting Indo and that is of a tug towing a very large barge. When Griff and I did the Selene we would come across these things with a mountain of sand, no AIS and no navigation lights. Maybe they have been told cause we have come across a couple so far and both had AIS we will see tonight if they also use their lights. The day turned into a productive day as we moved the fuel (picture 3 is of Kel looking after the suction end of the hose) from the forward boat tanks to the main aft tanks then refilled the forward tanks with the 2 x 1,000lts cubes we have on the aft deck. Then we transferred another 300lts out of the 6 x 200lt drums we have ...

It’s the early hours of Wednesday morning and I’m the 22:00-02:00 watch. We are still in the super highway current doing 10.5kts when all of a sudden there’s an almighty thud as if we were hit by a big wave but the seas are pretty calm. I suspect we just hit a log floating around. Will have to wait till daylight to see if there was any damage but the good news is that so far none of the 8 bilge pumps has been auto activated which is obvious a good sign. When daylight came I had a walk around to check as best I could to see if there was any obvious damage and to my relief I couldn’t see any. Now 02:30 on Thursday morning and we have had a busy Wednesday. In Indonesia they have a particular fishing method whereby they anchor what can only be described as a shed (see photo) on floats in waters 4-5km deep! Yes you read that right and apparently they use rope. OMG! Theres a story back in 2019 where an 18yr old Indo fisherman’s shed broke it’s mooring line and drifted for 49 days and thousan...

Tuesday afternoon and conditions last night were great. Very little swell from the port beam, hardly noticeable and in the early hours of this morning we saw the last of those pesky fishermen!!  Until next time. If you have been looking at my Garmin tracking page  https://share.garmin.com/FKHAP you may have noticed our speed reduced slightly down to 6 ish kts. We had a slight current against us but that is now changing as we into the “super highway”. The photo below, we are the blue dot, shows the west-east current I mentioned yesterday.  We are not completely in it yet and we are already cruising along at an average speed of 10.5kts when our normal average is 8.5  Also the wind speed and sea conditions have picked with the waves now coming from starboard aft quarter which is helping us truck along and when we turn to port by 15 degrees it will be right behind us.  Our watches come and go with regularity.  Our 3rd crew member was waiting for me to give him ...

  Kel and I have settled into our usual routine again, always takes a day or 2 after leaving port to get your body back into the rhythm. Going across the top of Borneo we seem to have had a nice current which was pushing us along at an extra 1 or 2kts up.   There wasn't much traffic even though we followed the shipping lane and there weren't many fishing boats in the way either because we stuck to the shipping lane fishermen don't like to lose their nets which is what would happen if the ships ran over them so the stayed to the side out the way.  When we came close to popping out into the Celebes Sea we were contacted by the Filipino Naval warship this time who asked us similar questions to the Malaysians but with the usual Philippine/American accent they were a lot easier to understand.  We are now crossing over the Celebes Sea and going to go round Talesie Island but we're heading slightly south of a direct line because there's an amazing west-east ...

Photos below are from when were at the fuel dock before we left KK yesterday and after we had filled up all the tanks. We ended up taking on just over 8,000lts. Even with all that we were still a slightly above the boat’s water line. The trip up the west coast was not pleasant. There was a good size moon so visibility was pretty good but the sea conditions were not which had us slowing down considerably and zig zagging to try and find a reasonable angel to the waves. This went on most of the night The other issue we had was fishing boats! Plus some of the fishing boats have mini dugout canoes that wander off, so their thing and return to the mothership once they’ve finished. BUT, you can’t see them as they don’t have nav lights and they don’t show up on radar. When they realise you are there, normally really close, they shine their very bright torch at you, which doesn’t help your night vision. On my watch around 3am we must have gone through 20 or 30 of them. As soon as one shone the ...

Just a quick update.   We left KK after filling up with diesel then to immigration to do the final clearing out.   We cast our lines at around 16:00 out the bay and turn north heading to for the northern end of Borneo.  Unfortunate we are heading directly into  wind and short sea chop making for a very uncomfortable ride especially with the extra fuel we are carrying so we are zig zagging up the coast trying to keep the chop off the bow and we have also had to reduce our speed to 3-4 kts to try and make it easier on the boat.  At some stage tomorrow we will turn the corner and hopefully pick our speed back up.