Last Blog For the Forseeable Future

Wednesday 19th November

As planned, for once, we upped and left the marina in Mooloolaba at 0845, a little earlier than planned. On leaving we found the weather not as forecast, the wind was blowing 20+ knots and the seas were 1.5 metres average and higher frequently. Val & I stayed out in the cockpit as we couldn't miss out on the lashing rain! We were wearing our full foul weather suits for the first time since mid-Atlantic, and we were cold!!

There were a few ships around so I kept a close eye on the radar and its plotter system. That tells me the closest point of approach of any target that I choose. There was one ship about 3 miles away, barely visible in the very poor conditions around, that seemed to be on a slow collision course. Eventually I realised that she was in the Brisbane shipping channel, running almost parallel at that stage and no danger at all.

At about noon we entered the shallows in the bay, heading South. The lowest depth I saw was 2.5 metres under the keel, whilst running at 8.8 knots over the ground! Our course was a bit bendy so as to miss the shallowest areas, successfully as it turned out. All the time the rain was pouring down and the wind was 20+ knots and all very unpleasant. Actually, except for the wind, it was similiar to leaving Dublin in July 2007, a curious sort of symmetry. As we left the shallows and entered the shipping channel for a short while, I saw about 6 ships in the widest part of the channel. It turned out that they were all at anchor which saved me the trouble of avoiding all these potential hazards. We did avoid 2 more ships that were going north in the shipping lane, one overtaking the other as we all passed in one place. We skirted the side of the channel at that time!

After we had passed Mud Island, St. Helena Island and Green Island it was turn to starboard, watch the depth and into the Royal Queensland Yacht Squadron Marina. Here we are booked in till the end of January 2009. Perhaps we will keep BlueFlyer here for a year and join the yacht club.

On this last trip from Cairns to Manly we passed by Panama (creek) and St.Helena Island. I suppose you could say that we must have crossed the South Atlantic as well as doing the ARC & WARC!

Tomorrow we are packing up a lot of stuff to be shipped to Melbourne by carrier and then cleaning the boat. All the pilot books, the charts and the routing books are going to the house and will form the basis for a library. A contractor is due in the morning to price all the little nicks and bangs repairs, and wax and polish the topsides. There isn't too much to be done, but the Ecuadorean repairs need to be finished off and the cockpit seats re-painted properly as they weren't finished in Dublin.

I hope you all enjoyed the blogs, they are great reminders for us of what we did and saw along the way. However I have to say that we are both very glad not to be doing the rest of the WARC trip, and have no long distance sailing plans for the forseeable future. We are very proud of what we have achieved in completing this trip, even though there was a serious hiccup along the way. I think that there are not many couples in the World who have done this sort of trip.

We found the boat to be excellent, with only a few problems, but an excellent sailor. There were 3 Jeanneau 49's on the WARC and we are the only one to have stopped. If we were doing this again there are things I would change, not put on the boat at all and other things I would put on, but nothing major.