tuesday october 6^th 2009 (liapari – solomon islands)

Everything we’ve done for the past 13 days has been related to getting our boat fixed. Whether it’s been getting the materials, finding a slipway or getting to one, we have been consumed with attempts to remedy the results of one broken mooring line and 30 minutes of triple x-rated boat on reef action. Only 4 of those 13 days were spent actually doing the work. That’s means we spent 30 percent of the time actually fixing the boat and 70 percent with peripheral T.I.S. bullshit. I wonder of this is what it would be like working for the government?

We are back in the water now anchored in the same place we were on Thursday when we arrived, only this time we’ve done away with our bungee cords and silly putty. Our launch wouldn’t have been complete without a little T.I.S. drama though. They released the cable holding our cart and nothing happened. In an apparent disregard for the natural effects of gravity Slapdash wouldn’t budge. I nervously looked on as a couple of the guys went to work with pry bars trying to push us down the hill. The winch was repeatedly jerked tight and released but to no avail. Finally somebody had to bring a tractor over and push us down the hill. Thankfully after that things went a little more smoothly.

We’ve finished all of our repairs, have a lot of confidence in them and on top of it all have managed to knock off a bag full of irritating little chores that don’t really matter so tend to pile up on you. We had a list of these and would each knock one or two off between coats of paint or fiberglass. Long story short; we’re still over budget, out of time, exhausted, chronically dehydrated and bleeding, but the boat is better off now than before the whole miserable thing happened.

We are going to spend a day here at anchor getting the boat cleaned and organized and then head over to Gizo to stock up. We are both very exited about waking up in the morning and thinking about something other than boat repairs. It may not sound like it but we’re actually feeling pretty good about life right now... time to get to work on that dehydration problem.

friday october 9^th 2009 (gizo – solomon islands)

What a dump. Dirt poor, dirt roads, and dirt ugly. The combination of sweltering heat and a lack of pavement leaves powdery red dust clinging to every part of your sweat soaked body. The highlight of the day in Gizo is when the water truck rumbles through and in an apparent attempt to keep the dust down turns the street into a slippery muddy mess by spewing gallons of water all over the place. Ten miserable minutes later and the sun has completely evaporated any residual sign of their efforts and the hellishly hot town reverts back to producing its clouds of eye irritating dust. One residual benefit of the heat is that your t-shirt which has become inevitably and constantly drenched in sweat makes a more effective dust filter when you repeatedly pull it up over your face to keep from choking on filth.

It’s one of those dead eyed places where you can’t help but get the feeling that the locals have beaten the odds every time they survive another day. Dead stinking fish line the roads in front of vendors that make feeble efforts to swat the flies away with branches when a potential customer walks by. The shoreline collects reams of trash that’s been tossed into the ocean by people who have far more pressing concerns than recycling. The roadsides and shop walls are stained red from a scummy mix of saliva and beetle nut residue. This charming crimson spatter serves the dual purpose of beautifying the quaint surroundings and attracting hordes of angry black flies. In a state of perpetual irony the flies serve up enough nuisance to drive the chewers back to the beetle nut who eventually spit more red filth onto the sidewalk attracting even more flies.

Speaking of ironic, Jaime bought me this old t-shirt she found in Honiara that has a smiley face with “Mr.Happy” written underneath of it. I’ve been wearing it around here and the locals have taken to calling me by its inscription.

 “Hallo Mistah Happy”

“Hey lukim Mistah Happy fella”

This always makes us laugh and the locals are the one continuing pleasure that Gizo has had to offer. This is apparently the second largest ‘city’ in the Solomon Islands (pop. 3000) which for us serves to demonstrate just how detached and forgotten this little country is. Maybe that explains how it’s somehow gotten under our skin? It’s just kind of endearing in a three legged dog kind of way. It’s also got this frontier do-what-it-takes kind of no-seatbelts no-helmets feel that we like. For example they can’t fill our propane tank. In fact, they can’t fill anyone’s propane tank here in the Solomon’s second largest city because they ship the empties all the way back to Honiara where they are filled and then shipped all the way back again here (they can’t fill our water jugs either but that’s another T.I.S. story). They aren’t very particular about the tanks either, as long as you bring one in they will give you a full one. The problem is that ours are a very tight fit and any other dimension won’t fit in our locker, we’ve tried. So I drag our tank into town and spend an hour going through the several hundred tanks in the warehouse looking for a match. I unearth the one and only tank that matches exactly and it was last serviced when I was just starting grade 2 back in 1983. No really, it’s stamped right there proudly on the top of the bottle. What it has that ours did not is contents so we had no choice but to give up our 6 month old empty tank and take this relic on with us as a souvenir. If we disappear in a massive explosion you will know exactly what happened. Another example, like most islands in Vanuatu, they have no gas station with pumps here. Just enterprising guys who save up enough to have a steel 45 gallon drum shipped in from Honiara, a hand pump and some 5 liter plastic containers. They serve up diesel in these 5 liter plastic jugs so that they can keep track of how much you have taken. It’s up to you to get the diesel from the plastic juice jug into whatever container you have with you. I join a lineup to see one of these vendors with my 6 jerry cans behind a bunch of guys who are filling up little plastic 500 ml pop bottles. I manage to fill 3 jugs before cleaning him out and am glad there’s nobody behind me in the line-up. I pay the guy and he packs up his pump and rolls his barrel home - he’s done for the day. Next vendor, same story but I now have 4 full, two empty and have shut down two service stations. After three stops I finally manage to fill up all six cans and get them back to the boat. Things might eventually happen here but they are going to happen in their own way and in their own good time.

Last night a man named Mark from a neighboring island paddled up in his dugout trying to sell us his stone carvings. The Solomon Islands are famous for their wood and stone carvers. We see examples of their work everywhere and have already procured some so weren’t really interested in buying his stuff. He didn’t really seem all that interested in selling it either so we just started ‘talking story’. Mark wanted to take up wood carving because his stone carvings were too heavy to carry around. He stayed for dinner and helped us eat a Yellow fin tuna I caught that Jaime cooked up in garlic and butter and afterwards we ended up doing a little business after all. Turns out we had a few things that we’ve never used that Mark really wanted. He didn’t want to carry his carvings around anymore so in return for our goods he left them with us. Back in Vanuatu I had traded for a hand carved paddle and have been looking for a good carver to decorate it. I sent Mark away with my paddle which he offered to decorate for me. So we’ll end up spending one more night in Gizo while Mark carves up my paddle.

The plan from here is to get to Bali as soon as possible. That’s 2900 nautical miles away though, so we may end up stopping in PNG or Australia, or both, or neither. We’ll try to stock up like we are going straight there without stopping and then just make up our minds along the way. If we can handle it we’ll go straight there. If not we’ll drop the anchor somewhere, have a swim, a meal, and a full nights’ sleep then carry on. If I get my paddle back on Sunday as planned we’ll leave on Monday or Tuesday. It’s 1130 miles to Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, another 830 to Darwin and 950 from there to Bali. Massive passages. If you don’t hear from us in a few weeks that’s why. It will be the most sailing we’ve done in such a concentrated amount of time since we crossed the Pacific from the Galapagos to Marquesas. Oh goody.

Ps – We just sat down to update the site and learned about the earthquakes and tsunami warnings. Thanks for all your emails, not so much as a ripple here. A few of the locals knew that there was a warning but for the most part it was just another day.

wednesday october 14^th 2009 (mbangabanga – solomon islands)

Our quest for water has brought us to a small island neighboring Gizo called Mbangabanga. There’s a bar and bungalow setup here that we saw advertised in town, surely they must have water.

It’s a beautiful place. The bar called Fatboys (after a Dickens character) is built up on stilts and sits over top of the lagoon. There are 8 little bungalows in behind and much to Jaime’s delight are guarded by a 2 week old adopted puppy. It’s another expat project run by an Aussie (most expats here are from Oz) who’s family has been coming to the Solomon’s for years and own a bunch of the little island around here. They picked a lovely spot but like I said before, it must take a special kind of person to pull of a project of any size in the Solomons. I met the guy at the bar and confirmed that there is indeed a water source of limited capacity at a low point here on the island. They also collect rainwater to supplement this meager supply of ground water.  It’s all held in a big cistern on a nearby hill so that the water supplied to the bungalows is gravity fed. Before this new owner took over they actually used to move water from the ground source to the cistern by bucket! Logically this was the first item on the list that our new owner had identified for upgrade; he told me the whole sad story over beers the afternoon that we arrived. Plans were drawn up. A pump was purchased, shipped in from Australia, and installed. Ditches were dug and pipes were laid. This was a complex and expensive but satisfying project so they really threw themselves into it. Eventually the day came when they were finally ready to throw the switch and in so doing, introduce Mbangabanga to the modernized luxury of a pressurized and automated water system. It was an incredibly exciting day for everyone involved especially the poor guys formerly charged with transporting thousands of gallons of water (enough to run the small resort) from the low point on the island to the high point by bucket. They were all on hand to witness the grand event. The switch was flipped and the pump ran perfectly. The system was charged up and promptly blew every seal on every pipe to every bungalow. The entire plumbing network was crumbling and the increase in water pressure from the upgrades was enough to fubar the whole system. When we arrived they were digging up the plumbing to the whole compound and once again transporting water by bucket. The supplies they needed would have to be shipped from Australia to Honiara where bribes and coercion would slowly move it through the customs house just so it could be shipped to Gizo, where it would finally be transferred here to Mbangabanga by canoe. How do they do it? And the big question that’s becoming increasingly relevant to our immediate needs; where in this mind-boggling country are we ever going to find some bloody water?

We had a big feed at Fatboys and chatted up a few locals. Rumor has it that there’s an island a day sail away that has an unlimited supplies of fresh spring water. Apparently it just bubbles up from the ground. Back at the boat we located the fabled island and charted a course for Simbo. We would leave first thing in the morning. We learned another interesting thing over dinner; the little island directly behind us is Kennedy Island. I’m no expert on the pre-political exploits of dead American presidents, so forgive the missing details and rounded-off facts but here’s the story we were told; during the war John F. Kennedy was in the airforce and stationed here. His plane was shot down. He survived the crash and swam to this little island (which probably wasn’t named Kennedy Island at that point). He borrowed a dugout canoe and under the cover of darkness paddled his way across hostile waters to safety at an American base. Apparently this is a bit of a local attraction. Having little knowledge or interest in this story we didn’t visit the island but it was literally right behind where we anchored and we sailed right past it on our way out. Here’s a picture:

thursday october 15^th 2009 (simbo – solomon islands)

Stop number three on our water mission. On one hand we’re grateful to see these places we wouldn’t have stopped at otherwise, on the other hand this is getting a little absurd. We negotiated the dog legged passage into the well protected and incredibly picturesque Simbo harbor. Word of our arrival traveled pretty quickly. A bunch of little kids spotted us and began yelling as they sprinted barefoot along the shoreline towards the village to sound the alarm. Inside five minutes there wasn’t a person within miles that didn’t know that we were there, and canoe after canoe were being launched and racing towards us. We didn’t even get the anchor down before we were completely surrounded. At one point we counted no less than 18 dugouts loaded with maniacal screaming kids circling around us. There was such a commotion that Jaime and I couldn’t even hear each other as we tried to get the anchor out and set. When I pulled out the camera to snap a few pictures the intensity of the whole situation was amplified even further and I had to start chasing the brats off the boat, we were being boarded! I started hosing them down with our deck shower which as suspected immediately became more of an incentive than deterrent. It was absolutely hilarious watching these kids shriek incessantly, laugh hysterically, jump, swim, stare, and sink each others canoes while we went about securing the boat. They hung around all afternoon and eventually the hysterics began to subside a little. Now I know how zoo animals feel. We were a spectacle being studied by at least 40 pairs of curious eyes and while under the microscope each move we made would inspire animated discussion and every once in a while fits of contagious laughter. Whether they had water here or not these kids had already made Simbo worth the trip.

This is only the 5th island that we’ve visited here and the Solomon’s boast over 1000, so we’ve experienced a measly half percent of this crazy country and Simbo has shown us what we suspected all along; that outside of Honiara and Gizo are substantial rewards for anyone who has the constitution and time to conduct a reasonable exploration. For example; they don’t get many visitors here so nearly everything that we have or do comes across as completely foreign. On our way back to the shore we noticed that a crowd had gathered to see how we would launch our dinghy, how we would sit in it, how we would row it. They stood on the pier and watched us the whole time. All it takes is a wave to provoke fits of laughter from the kids. We’ve barely scratched the surface of this place and are reluctant to leave but time marches on and we are already late in the season.

As promised Mahere came by for a visit this afternoon. She brought her cousin Gloria with her and a bag full of oranges, pamplemousse, coconuts and bananas. They hung out with us for a while and covered all of the usual girl-talk topics like boys, music, clothes and for a little local nuance; crocodile attacks.  It’s hard to imagine a reptile that’s longer than our boat is wide but they’re here, and they eat people.

After Mahere and Gloria left we went for a quick swim to tease the crocs and started our departure preparations. By 3PM we had turned our backs on Simbo, the Solomons and the Pacific.

saturday october 17^th 2009 (bali passage – day 2)

Our second day at sea finds us heading due south while sneaking in as much west as we can get away with. The Louisiade archipelago hangs off of the south eastern side of PNG like a panhandle. We need to get around that panhandle before we can hang a right and make our way through the Coral Sea basin to the little bit of water that separates Australia and PNG, otherwise known as the Torres Straight. In the meantime we have no choice but to expose our beam to the trade winds and hope for mercy. Today luck is on our side and the trades are light, otherwise this would be a very uncomfortable portion of our passage. 

We could see PNG just on the horizon today. Not sure which part but it was kind of neat to see it. We were busy last night with lots of squalls and lightning. Low pressure equals light wind and squally weather so it’s the price we have to pay for the light winds we enjoy during the day. I’m sure I’ve said this a million times but we hate lightning. Our metal mast 50 feet up off the water is the tallest thing you can see in any direction which essentially makes us a floating lightning rod. There’s nothing you can do but cross your fingers and cringe. So far so good, but with our rotten luck lately?

The setting and rising sun generally puts on a pretty good show when you are at sea, and we’ve seen enough of both now that we are kind of hard to impress, but the last couple have been total stunners. We heard something about dust storms in Australia before we left. Maybe they have something to do with the phenomenon? We’re not sure but look forward to a new show every night.

sunday october 18^th 2009 (bali passage – day 3)

“Pop!”

That’s the sound that one of our breakers made this afternoon. Jaime was on watch and moments after the popping sound, came into the cabin and said that the instruments just went dead. I checked the panel and sure enough the “Instruments” breaker had tripped. That’s a new one. Not to worry, that particular breaker only supplies power to a bunch of non-essential things that we hardly ever need while on passage like; navigation equipment, wind instrument, autopilot, and depth sounder. Good thing it wasn’t something critical like our stereo or something.

I flipped the breaker and started breathing when everything lit up again, and stopped breathing when it said “Pop!” for the second time in as many minutes. It wasn’t a fluke, we had a problem. We left it off this time and Jaime hand steered to a compass heading while I started pulling panels off walls to see if a problem would make itself known to me. Everything seemed to check out okay, that is to say there was no smoking gun. I’m no electrician and probably wouldn’t find anything less obvious than a bare wire raining sparks and billowing smoke. The second tier to my diagnostic plan involved resetting the breaker and turning each instrument on one by one in order to try and isolate the problem. Depth, wind and speed? 15 minutes and still good. Chart plotter? No tripping. Autopilot? “Pop!”.

We had our culprit. With the autopilot shut down we could operate all the other instruments without a problem, which is all well and good except that it means 2 days into your 20 day passage and you have no autopilot. This was the last thing we expected as the whole helm, steering cable, pilot system had just been replaced. The autopilot was brand new out of the box and had less than 30 hours on it. Unusual it may be, but it was also our current reality. By this time we had less than an hour before sunset so I elected to leave it until morning and hand steer through the night. So we took 3 hour shifts and stared at our compass heading all night until our eyes crossed.

Jaime came off her 3 hour shift at 6AM and I started preparing things while she got some sleep. A couple of hours later we hove to and started tearing things apart. It’s a bit unnerving taking the wheel off the boat while you are at sea but that’s the only way to access our autopilot. I assured Jaime that having recently taken the whole thing apart to replace the old one, this would be a cinch and I would have us back underway with a working autopilot within an hour. HA!

I tore the thing down until all we had were a million little bits and pieces and there was no apparent problem. In absence of a mechanical issue it could only be a short in the small sealed electric drive motor. My hopes for a simple problem and easy fix were dashed. At the same time the wind started kicking up and the seas started to build (of course they did) so we were forced into a status check. The pilot was toast. We were a few hundred miles from the Solomons, a day sail from PNG, 700 to Australia, and over 2000 to Bali. If we were forced to hand steer we would need to make for closest landfall but what good would some grass-roofed village in PNG do us? We needed access to internet and air freight or someone capable of rebuilding an electric motor. We were in the midst of this most unusual conversation when I realized that I may not be able to fix the new pilot, but what about the old one? Surely I would have enough pieces between the two to get one Frankenstein-esque pilot operational?

We dug out all of our bits and pieces and I got to work. By this time the waves were rolling us around pretty good and the wind, which blowing a steady 25 knots, lent a sense of urgency to the situation. It would be a long shot but there was a chance I could pull it off. Just as my confidence was growing, a wave knocked the gearbox off the table and it smashed onto the floor spreading its contents all over the boat. We chased 21 ball bearings and about a dozen little gears, cogs and wheels (only slightly larger than what you would expect to find inside of a swiss watch) around as the boat continued to pitch and roll continually frustrating our efforts. Somehow we recovered all but one ball bearing and made a nice little pile of assorted autopilot guts on the floor. Things were not looking good.

Against all odds I was eventually able to stuff the guts back into the gearbox. With the help from some tweezers and a soldering iron we actually breathed life into this former trash heap of an autopilot. We quickly bolted the thing together, faked a few connections with electrical tape and stuffed the whole contraption on our helm, replaced the wheel and held our breath. We had liftoff! It fired up and it seemed responsive.

We were about to toast to our good fortune when the whole thing started functioning ass-backwards. We would veer off course 5 degrees to the West and instead of correcting to the East it would steer 5 more degrees to West. Now 10 degrees off course it would attempt to correct by steering another 10 degrees to the West, now 20 degrees off course… you get the point. Everything was functioning but completely backwards. Tell it to turn right and the cheeky bastard would turn left. We were both exhausted and demoralized. It had been 5 hours since we hove to and now we were underway again and no better off than before; a phrase I would get used to repeating.

We carried on like this while I conducted some experiments using our remaining bits and pieces. The problem was either in the gearbox that had been spread all over the floor, or a polarity issue. I really had no idea how the gearbox worked and, excited to use the word ‘polarity’ in a sentence for the first time in my life, decided to concentrate on that bit. We summoned up all of our determination and decided to give it another go. Hove to. Pull out the tools. Remove the wheel. Remove the autopilot. Break down the autopilot. Reverse some wires. Solder the new connections. Curse the weather. Piece it back together. Replace the autopilot. Replace the helm. Flip the breaker. Engage the pilot…

Eureka! 

We were underway with a quilt work of an autopilot that Jaime christened Frankie (short for Frankenstein). It wasn’t pretty, nor did I expect it to last, and it sounded like a gravel crusher but it was bloody well working, which was the one thing that our shiny, new, state-of-the-art, barely broken in model could not do. 

monday october 19^th 2009 (bali passage – day 4)

Less than an hour after we had the pilot functioning the weather deteriorated and gave it a good test. Suddenly we were surrounded by black clouds, the wind freshened up to 33 knots, and an electrical light show provided our only light. It was an awful night. Old testament weather; 40-days-and-40-nights kind of rain and wrath-of-God lightning. Fortunately we only had a few hours of Southerly work to do in these conditions before we had cleared the Louisiades and were able to head West which allowed us to run with the weather. It’s a good thing too because the wind just kept getting stronger and the waves kept getting bigger.

I tried to dig up some information on the weather patterns in the area. It wasn’t encouraging. Gales were meant to be very rare here, only one day per year. So what was this then? Tropical depressions were known to form here and although this would be considered too early for a cyclone it’s not unheard of. We pondered this bit of information as we watched the seas build and the sky turn a blacker shade of black. The wind hasn’t dropped below 30 in over 10 hours. 

tuesday october 20^th 2009 (bali passage – day 5)

Frankie is somehow functioning despite being under considerable load and strain  due to the weather. We’ve encountered stronger conditions before, but not sustained like this. A front will blow through in hours, a squall in minutes, even the full duration of our storm on the way up from New Zealand had the decency to confine itself to daylight hours. The gale conditions we are in now have lasted 36 long hours. It’s remarkable to see what a strong sustained wind does to the sea. We are surfing down huge breaking waves with virtually no sail up. The main is down now, and we have just a hankie of a headsail showing. We set a new Slapdash speed record; 18.2 knots. That’s 1.5 knots faster than our peak speed set during the New Zealand storm, and we had over 50 knots of wind for that one. There’s no more sail to reduce so I am thinking about towing some lines behind the boat to try and slow us down. 

We are seriously considering a stop at Thursday Island (Australia). We need to come up with a more permanent repair for the autopilot, and the chance to top up diesel and water tanks for the onward portion of the trip will be welcomed.

wednesday october 21^st 2009 (bali passage – day 6)

The wind has eased a little. Still high 20’s but a welcome relief after the plus 30’s. I started my 6AM shift today only 61 miles from Port Moresby which is PNG’s infamous capital. It’s a shame we don’t have more time. The day will come that we are sitting at home somewhere looking at a map from the other side of the world only to see how close we came to this country without even stopping for a beer.

We entered a new time zone today so I changed clocks, watches and chart plotter. It’s the 10^th time I’ve done so since leaving Myrtle Beach.

Last night I was on my watch when something started tickling the bottom of my foot. I thought it was just a strap from the cushion I was sitting on flapping in the wind and, since I just worked myself into a comfortable position, ignored it. With the next howling gust it started flapping again and started annoying me so I flipped on my headlamp so that I could deal with the stupid strap. There was a fish under my foot! The poor little bugger had beached himself and was trying to get my attention. Can a fish trouble somebody for a lousy flick back into the ocean around here or what?

Jaime bought a trivia game in Honiara and we took the cards out to help pass the time on passage. It’s called “Who wants to be a millionaire?” and the questions are multiple choice just like the TV show. We dug into them and were shocked to find out how smart we had become. We were getting 20-30 answers in a row and could be Millionaires 10 times over.

Attributing our increased brain power to our mentally stimulating world travels we were making plans to sign up for the game show at our first landfall when this question came up:

Which of the following can produce a pearl?

A: Snail

B: Jam

C: Oyster

D: Dolphin

Okay, something’s not right here. Jam? Yes, it was the junior edition, and we are in fact pretty smart… for 12 year olds.

friday october 23^rd 2009 (bali passage – day 8)

This morning I could see something writhing around on the surface a couple of boat lengths ahead of us. The strange sight turned out to be a huge black and yellow banded sea snake. It was as thick as the fat end of a baseball bat and at least 5 feet long, but hard to tell because it was all coiled up. We passed by and I ran to the back of the boat to see it as we went past but there was no sign of it. I imagined it clinging to the bottom of the boat, making it’s way through the scuppers, crawling aboard looking for a bare foot to bite. I spent the rest of the watch with my feet up on the bench.

We had a visitor last night. A bird which I named Larry settled down onto our cabin top during my night watch. He hung out for hours and became quite accustomed to our attention. We could pet him, take pictures, nothing seemed to bother him. Jaime became quite attached, to the point where, despite the increasing wind and danger to our boat and well being, she voted not to reef the sail for fear of disturbing Larry. Eventually the matter forced itself and we swung the boat around to reef. A couple of waves washed over the deck which, as Jaime predicted, ‘disturbed’ Larry. It disturbed the shit right out of him, which he left in a nice pile for me to clean up right before he flew away. I went back to bed and when I got up for my next shift Jaime was still trying to guide Larry back to the boat with a flashlight. Some time after she went to bed Larry came back and hung out with me until sunrise enjoying some free miles to Australia. He stuck around until sunrise, we discussed our concern for Jaime’s sanity and then he took off to find some breakfast. I told Jaime about the visit and what we had discussed. She pointed out that I was the one talking things over with a bird. Touche’.

A big red Australian customs chopper buzzed us today. They hovered behind the boat and hailed us on the VHF. They took some information from us like last port of call, next port of call, number of people on board etc and then told us that if we tried stopping anywhere before we cleared in to Thursday Island that they would prosecute and fine us. It was this standard spiel that the pilot was reading off, he didn’t sound to happy about it either. “there’s this paragraph that I’m required to read to you, let me know when you’re ready…”

Lots of islands, shallow water, and massive currents make the approach to Thursday Island a little tricky so we were trying to time our arrival for daylight hours by slowing down. The wind hasn’t been below 20 knots since the 2 day gale so this is easier said than done. So frustrating because we could be flying along in beautiful sailing conditions but instead we are looking ridiculous under a double reefed main and all but a couple of wraps of our headsail furled up.

Just after lunch we veered off course. Frankie was spinning away trying to correct but wasn’t turning the helm; the belt seemed to be slipping. There’s an external adjustment for that so I tried tensioning the belt. Nothing. For the third time on this passage we hove to and disassembled the autopilot. Broken belt. No problem, we’ll just cannibalize another piece of the other one. A little of that over here, one of these for you, and put this bit back in the bag… voila! New belt for Frankie. What a shit show.

A pod of dolphins escorted us into the network of reefs, atolls and islands that make up the gateway to the Torres straight. It’s a bit strange, we’re still a day away and for the last 24 hours we’ve been sailing through water less than a hundred feet deep.

saturday october 24^rd 2009 (horn island, australia)

Despite our best efforts we arrived after another blustery uncomfortable night in the dark. The currents are crazy here, 4-6 knots being the order of the day. After altering course for Thursday Island we no longer had the wind behind us. For a large portion of the night we were beating into 25 knots, no fun.

There are multiple lights and markers lining the safe passage between all of the obstructions. It was challenging to decipher their meaning as the night progressed. Our eyes crossed and we grew punchy from lack of sleep.  At one point we were trying to identify a pair of markers that didn’t seem to make any sense. We started second guessing our position as a hazy sort of sleep deprived confusion settled in. We looked up and the markers were now clearly a red and a green. They were running lights. If you see a green running light you are looking at the starboard side of a ship, a red one indicates the port side. If you can see them both at the same time (like we could in this case) you are on a collision course. We happened to be in a very narrow channel (of course). The ship would clearly be heading for the same channel. I hailed him on the VHF and he answered. Normal protocol would call for two boats in this situation to pass with port sides facing each other. At this point the last thing I wanted to do was cross over directly in front of this rapidly approaching container ship (we could tell by this point that we were dealing with a behemoth) for the sake of protocol. I requested a starboard pass which suited the pilot just fine –big ships require a local pilot in this portion of the straight, due to the navigational hazards and conditions- so we maintained our heading and hoped that we had learned by now to interpret running lights correctly. It was still too dark to see anything but the ships lights but as it approached the lights lifted up higher and higher off the water betraying the size of the vessel. We did everything correctly but were still pretty quiet in the cockpit and we watched this massive ship slide past us through the channel. It was big enough (and close enough) that we couldn’t see the deck or bridge, just these huge hulls looming up over top of us. It’s always a bit of a novelty to be in the same arena as these guys. If it drives them nuts to have to negotiate a safe passage with some little fly speck of a sailboat that they can’t even see from the deck you would never know it. Every time we’ve been in a situation like this the pilot, captain or officer of the watch is invariably polite, friendly, and in this case chatty. This guy wanted to know where we were from, where we were going etc, and at the end wished us a safe journey.

After that we circled around for a bit and waited for the sun to come up. Once it did we timed the tides right for minimal current and slipped through the network of passages, rocks, markers and islands that led to Thursday. They must have knocked off the names for these islands about 5 minutes before the island naming committee wanted to get to the pub. The chart lists imaginative monikers such as: No. 1 Islet, No.2 Islet, No. 3 Islet, Wednesday Island, Thursday Island, Friday Island, Bramble Cay, Bush Cay, Tree Cay…

We anchored off and waited for customs in a terrible anchorage; poor holding, completely exposed, on a lee shore. We left the drive leg down and the engine running. Eventually a troop of officials arrived. Customs, immigration, and quarantine all at once in a little dinghy. There were 5 of them in all and for the first time we’ve seen anywhere the customs guy had a gun. All but one guy took their boots off, and they were a pretty good group. We’ve heard nothing but horror stories about the Australian clearance process so were ready for the worst. The customs guys (4 guys 1 girl) spread out and just stared rooting through all of our stuff. Pulling things out of drawers without putting them back, going into every cupboard, closet and box. A little more forward then we’ve seen anywhere else but no big deal, they were all good natured and chatty while they did things like go through the pictures on our digital camera. Seemed a bit odd but we didn’t have anything to hide so no worries. Then the quarantine guy dropped a bombshell, his fee for clearing us at 9AM on a Saturday would be $618.00 AUS! We actually thought he was joking. He assured us that he was not. Our jaws dropped. We explained our situation. We would happily be on our way to Bali right now if we weren’t forced into stopping for emergency repairs. We would only be here for 48 hours. Surely there must be some sort of provision for circumstances like this? His reply was “will that be cash or credit?”. We called a full stop to the process and 5 officials crowded around while Jaime and I discussed our options. We were still 1700 miles from Bali. Would the autopilot make it? Did we have enough Diesel? Water? We don’t normally complain too loudly about prices, life costs money. It was our choice to visit foreign countries, we expect to play by their rules, but $618 dollars for an emergency 48 hour stop? This was insane. We weighed safety and common sense against the punishing, outlandish, joke of a clearance fee and nearly chose to up anchor that minute and endanger our lives instead of playing along with this extortion. In the end we sucked it up and handed over our credit card. What choice did we have?

After the pirates left our boat we moved to Horn Island 2 miles away which provided better shelter, better holding and a place where we could catch our breath and let it all sink in. Or so we thought. By this time it was 11AM. We were told that everything closes at 1PM, and that it would all be closed on Sunday as well so we had a two hour window to get anything done before Monday. With the currents between us and the main island using the dinghy was not an option. A ferry runs back and forth though, and just as we were making a plan we saw it pulling up. We hadn’t even launched the dinghy yet. We sprung into action, threw the dinghy off the deck, dug out the engine, Jaime gathered all of our stuff together and we started racing to shore getting soaked by wind and waves in the process. The last ferry pulled away from the dock just as we arrived. That was the straw that broke our backs. We were exasperated, hadn’t slept in over 24 hours, had just parted with $618 dollars for no good reason, were soaking wet, and just about past the point of being able to cope. For the second time on our trip if you had happened to be at the right place (the beach on Horn Island) at the right time (today at 1130) you could have bought our boat from us for a dollar.

Believe it or not that’s when our luck turned around. After missing the ferry we went to shore to go for a walk and decide what to do next. We were dragging our dinghy up when we noticed the smiling guy beside us who was also dragging a dinghy up onto the beach. He said hello and I unloaded. He couldn’t have been expecting it but we just started gushing about everything. He was an Aussie, had built his own boat that was anchored nearby. He felt terrible about the reception we received to ‘his’ country and decided to single handedly make a difference. Shane turned out to be an accomplished mechanic and as mentioned built his own boat. There weren’t many things that would be beyond his ability to fix. He also had a ton of local knowledge, and missing the ferry soon became irrelevant. We were able to get everything we needed right here on Horn Island. Laundry (at the Pub), water (at the dock), propane and diesel (100 feet from where we were standing) and so on. He told us to come by the boat with both autopilots once we were finished and he would help me rebuild them.

I brought beer and a bunch of autopilot guts. Jaime brought a chocolate cake and  a bottle of wine. We hung out with Shane and Lydia who turned out to be a super friendly chilled out couple, drank beer and wine while muddling away at electric engines and gearboxes. We left late at night with a couple of new friends, one working Frankie and one broken one. The new autopilot is indeed toast, the engine is fried and it needs to be replaced (factory defect). I’ll see if I can organize that on Monday. So just when we thought we were at the end of our rope, missing the ferry turned out to be the best thing that happened to us all week.

We stumbled through the door and hit the bed like a ton of bricks. What a day.

sunday october 25^th 2009 (horn island, australia)

I woke up early and installed the autohelm. It worked in reverse and then blew the breaker. My heart sank. Shane and Lydia had already left and now our pilot situation was even worse than it was before. I pulled it apart again (5^th time in a week) and found a short. Repaired that, rebuilt, installed and held my breath. It works. Untested mind you, but at the moment it is working.

Being Sunday we can’t really do anything but boat chores so over breakfast we started making a list. As boat lists go, this was pretty typical; in 5 minutes we had 12 items to keep us busy, and here we were wondering what we would do all day!

Happy to be at anchor with the opportunity to address some things we attacked the list with gusto. Without stopping for lunch we built up the momentum and crossed the last item off just as the sun started to set. Miller time. Actually in this case it’s SolBrew time.

We need a weekday to get some stuff done and want to be on our way Tuesday. We have to go fight with Quarantine (still not ready to accept a $618 dollar bill), not sure what good it will do but we have to try for our own peace of mind. We also need to clear out and get some kind of replacement forwarded to us in Bali for the broken autopilot. At least once we finish with that whole drama we will have a working spare that we can just bolt in if it ever happens again.

So 1700 miles to Bali. We’ll leave Tuesday so should be there by Friday November the –gulp!- 13^th at the latest.