Category: 2017 Capers

We spent a couple of weeks looking for options to get Wine-Dark Sea back to Sydney quickly. It seemed crazy to leave her in Darwin until the end of Cyclone season and then sail her home, so we looked for transport by road and by sea. In the end, the only real option seemed to […]

Since my last update, it’s been a bit of a roller coaster ride, but the main reason I am posting is to say that the circumnavigation has finished for now. Pete and I have decided to stop, focus on building his business, and bring Wine-Dark Sea back to Sydney. I am also resuming my job, […]

We spent the week settling in to being in a marina again, not a small task after the long days and nights at sea and the complete lack of other boats around us. In addition, we needed to think about WDS being able to weather stormy conditions, tied up to a dock. Not such a […]

Somerville Bay and the Naked Truth We were tired. We thought we were getting enough recovery time between these long legs, but it now seems that we sold ourselves short. Our second evening in Somerville Bay turned into one of those horrible experiences you never want to repeat. It wasn’t any issue with the boat, […]

Seisia We hadn’t been sure what to expect from Seisia, believing there was not much more than a camp site there, but we were pleasantly surprised. Arriving from Possession Island, we continued to be amazed by how green the area is from the water. We had to anchor outside the main anchorage, which is in […]

The sail through Albany Passage was in the end simple. It looked more challenging on the chart, but we have to remember the charts are very sparse up here, and only the main shipping channels have really good detail. The Passage was about two miles long and about a quarter of a mile wide, and […]

(Friday 3 Nov) After a pleasant second night at Lizard, we had watched the breeze increase, and on waking we hoped we would be able to sail today. In the end it was lucky that we could, as when Pete went over to the resort with the jerries, there was no sign of the guy […]

It’s All Hallows’ Eve and we are anchor, in a very light breeze at a beautiful little island called Hope Island. This is where we hope there will be wind tomorrow and we hope we can make it to Darwin without any more challenges! The birds on the island are making a weird, ghostly sound, […]

So unhappily, we made it as far as Palm Cove, before our trusty water maker blew a high pressure hose. Obviously we had not performed all our checks adequately, so we turned around and headed back to Cairns, as we did not have a spare on board. We anchored in the river this time, just […]

The installation of Sadie (as she has come to be known), the new sail drive, went as smoothly as we could have hoped, with the guys from McLeod engineering doing a great job. They were able to have us ready for a lift back into the water by Friday lunchtime, and ran a sea trial […]