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I had been weighing up a few options for this next leg. Do I do a short hop to Pancake Creek or Lady  Musgrave? Or a longer leg directly to North West Island. Frankly it came down to not wanting to spend any more time with my keel in the mud at Bundberg. At its […]

With the handover of the Sydney Football Stadium imminent, I could start my long 2 months of live-aboard. Joining me for that last overnight passage for a while, around Fraser Island, was long time crew and ex-work colleague Doug Rayment and girlfriend Sascha EE. This would be the first overnight sea passage on a sailing […]

Lindy Hardcastle joined me for the short trip from Southport to Mooloolaba. I flew up on Sunday morning and met up with my uncle, Steve, and my cousin, Sean. The later of which works for Riviera yacht on the Gold Coast. The place was pumping, so much so the yacht club couldn’t accommodate us for […]

This year the delivery of Wine-dark Sea to Queensland for Airlie beach race week and magnetic island race week is being juggled with the final commissioning of the new Sydney football stadium. Eyeing up a potential 5 day weekend without commissioning and a favourable weather window, on the tail of a southerly blast, I decided […]

It feels great to be getting back into the routine. As departure approaches I’m now in my route planning routine. Every 12 hours, when the new forecasts are released, I download the 6 models from Predictwind and import them into Expedition to run my optimized routes at 6 hour departure times. Currently I’m debating slightly […]

So long since my last post. Well I didn’t seem to get out much on the boat over summer. Not really sure why. The general blur of the last 2 years of the ‘rona has me wondering what exactly I have done with the last 2 years. I even had to Google when we came […]

…a little scaled back though. Today we finally start the 2021-2022 sailing season. I’ve decided to back my racing off for a few reasons, so I am only planning to do Friday twilights. I might throw in a regatta here and there depending on crew interest. One of the main reasons was that over the […]

….but COVID has made a right mess of things for all of us hasn’t it. So what’s been happening? (I can’t believe my last post was for Sarah’s birthday last year) At that time I was newly installed in my brand-new-second-hand apartment in Dee Why. I’m well settled in now and have ripped up the […]

Today would have been Sarah’s 56th birthday. Today I feel her loss as keenly as the day she was taken from us all too soon. I can’t help but think what we would have been doing. I suspect we would have, as I have this morning, gone down and watched a beautiful sunrise over the […]

Tech talk with Pete today I was inspired to have a look at Wine-Dark Sea’s cooling system after Sunday’s CYCA Winter Series race (which we won by the way). I saw another yacht blowing steam out their exhaust. We told them and they shut their engine down straight away most likely saving their engine from […]