Gibban

18 October 2016 These blogs of our cruising life are packed with reports and photos of fantastic sailing passages in South East Asia, the Mediterranean, and Australia, great food and drinks accompanied by brilliantly colourful sunsets, exploring wonderful new anchorages, cities, towns, villages, deserted islands, coral cays and reef systems, making new friends from all over the world and generally living the dream.   But it’s not all fun. Sometimes the weather is really crap and, more often than we like,   we find ourselves hot, filthy and stressed fixing something on the boat that shouldn’t need fixing but broke, failed or blocked up at the worst possible time and which is always located in the worst possible place on the boat to get at. At least when the wind blows up  , a stormhits or the steering breaks it provides interesting content to blog about. Unfortunately we also have passages that can only be described as boring deliveries.   We rise up in the morning,...

August 3-5, 2016. Another early morning start saw us underway across Upstart Bay heading for Townsville well before the sun appeared above the horizon. With over 70 nautical miles to travel, we knew it was going to be a long day but had no idea just how challenging it would turn out to be. Again the wind was stronger than the high teens predicted for the morning. Our gauge seemed permanently stuck around 25 knots but ALL the forecasts we checked had agreed that the wind would ease right down through the day. In the meantime we had two reefs in the mainsail, left the mizzen in the bag and had the genoa pulling us downwind nicely. We had been underway for about an hour when we found the auto-pilot having trouble holding course and the boat weaving considerably back and forward. We blamed the large swells pushing through on our stern quarter and tried resetting it a couple of times with no improvement.   Rob began hand steering and quickly discovered he was also having trouble keeping...