Reaching Sydney was a bit of a milestone – celebrated with delightfully hot showers at Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron. I was surprised by how small the Harbour seemed compared to both my memory of sailing on it as a teenager, and to my home waters of Port Phillip. The original plan was for a quick trip to Sydney, getting at least that far north as quickly as we could to leave Melbourne’s winter behind. We were then going to spend about a week there before pushing on, partly so I could go into the office and partly to do odd jobs on the boat and allow more crew to meet us and jump on board. It ended up taking us 2 weeks plus the delay in NZ, so after a short 2-day stay we’ve decided it’s time to keep going. Crew from Melbourne aren’t able to make it, so rather than do more small hops we’re setting out to go straight to Coffs Harbour – hopefully managing the 220nm in about 2 days which would see us arriving around midday Thursday before the strong southerly comes in.
This will be the first 2-night stint since the Bass Strait crossing; if we’re still contemplating a 5-day ocean crossing to Noumea, we need to test ourselves with at least that distance. It’s currently glassy seas and light winds as we motor past Pittwater. We were able to set the jib for about an hour with the apparent wind but even that is flogging now so has been refurled. Richard’s bacon and egg sandwiches have gone down a treat for a late lunch and as the sun starts sinking towards the horizon my daily check-in with the crew has us all keen to keep going for tonight, so so far, so good.
The Yellow Brick Tracker is set to update every 4 hours and we’re on 4-hourly sched calls to Marine Rescue NSW. Despite spending a few hours on the phone with Raymarine Tech Support the autopilot is still not getting data from the Seatalk NG network, so manually setting it to steer to an ‘auto’ heading that corresponds to our course. A better option that doing a factory reset and risking glitches that might mean we lose the chartplotter altogether…
It was a busy time on the boat in Sydney, but still gave me time to reflect on why we’re doing this trip and how it’s going so far. The ‘road testing’ of the sea-change lifestyle is pretty much what I was expecting; Richard and I are really comfortable on the boat, although a happy medium between getting hammered and motoring in becalmed seas would be nice. The personal challenge of organising the trip, navigating, weather routing and handling the boat is also about what I expected; there has certainly been a huge learning curve and I feel so much more equipped now than I did setting out from Queenscliff. Leaving Sydney quickly meant there was no time to organise a fundraiser for Children of Phoenix Scholarship Trust – so I’ll be focussing on writing some media articles and trying to generate some awareness and funds that way. Thinking about the challenges faced and overcome by survivors of child sexual abuse and in particular the inspiring story of Professor Caroline Taylor certainly gave me motivation to dig in and do what had to be done to get us to port safely when things got tough. If we can generate any increased public awareness and enough funds to provide a scholarship to someone in need, it will have been a worthwhile activity.
If you’d like to donate please go to www.childrenofphoenix.org – and read about the work the Foundation does.