The 2021 Adventures of Symphony – It begins!

The Baxter’s are off on another whirlwind adventure!  Yay!  Well… without the whirlwinds, thanks.  And no whirlpools, cyclones, waterspouts, tempests, tsunamis, or other natural phenomena that might turn an otherwise nice day into something a bit crap. So maybe that should read: ‘The Baxter’s are off on another fair-winds adventure!’  Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it though, does it?  It’s missing the drama, the excitement…  Anyway, we’re OFF!

To those of you who’ve never seen this blog before, welcome and thanks for stopping by.  It means a lot to us to know that people are interested.  We hope you’ll stick around.  (For information on our boat, please check the About page.)

To those of you who’ve followed us before, welcome back, and we hope we can continue to entertain you, with our ups and downs and all things in between. Also hoping to include some VIDEO this time!

So, what’s the story?  Well may you ask!

Back in January we heard a rumour that the Down Under Rally guys (who run the Go East/West Rallies) were looking to offer something a little more local, since international boating was not looking like becoming an option anytime soon.  Well, it wasn’t a rumour.  We put our boat name down on an EOI along with more than 100 other boats.  At the end of January, they held a webinar outlining the plan to visit several remote reefs out beyond the Barrier Reef in the Coral Sea, with the rally to commence at the beginning June.  Then, there was the bombshell – out of 140 prospective participants, they would take a maximum of 20.  We were pretty keen, especially knowing that Peter Sayre, a guy with a huge amount of local knowledge and author of Australia’s Coral Sea Islands and Marine Park would be accompanying us, but how could we secure a spot with so many others all champing at the bit to go on this incredible adventure?

Through a stroke of luck, we found out the registration page had gone ‘live’ the afternoon before the appointed opening time.  So, we looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, what the heck, let’s do it’, and paid our non-refundable deposit.

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The panic set in quite quickly. We had 3 months to prepare us and the boat to go cruising.  Sure, that sounds like oodles of time, but the boat hadn’t been maintained in cruising condition since we’d returned from our last adventure in 2017 (although we did manage to install a fabulous heater in the intervening time), AND the list of rally requirements well exceeded the normal preparations we’d make for heading up the coast.  We started to write a list which quickly became about as long as Santa’s NICE list.  The list included some big-ticket items such as:

• Life raft (and other emergency gear)
• New canvas work
• New solar panels
• Water maker
• New lifelines
• Satellite phone
• Category 1 First Aid Kit
• AIS Transponder

Fairly early into preparations, things started going wrong.  We were told that 4-person, second-hand life rafts were ‘as scarce as hen’s teeth’.  Too bad if we really wanted one of those.  However, we got lucky for a moment and the wonderful guys at MarineSafe helped us out when someone miraculously traded in their 4-person raft for a larger one.  So, chooks do have teeth, turns out.  We prepared extra items to be packed into the life raft, shipped them to QLD, and then had to pick the raft up from way out at Eastern Creek at a truck depot as they wouldn’t deliver to a home address.

We wanted someone to remake all our canvas work for us: the dodger (the canopy with the windscreen), the bimini (the shade canopy at the stern of the boat), and the link sheet (linking the two for extra shade).  We couldn’t find anyone with less than a six-month waiting list, but we did get on to one guy (highly recommended) who said he could do the hard bit – the dodger.  This meant Graeme would have to take on the job of doing the rest.  No small task (even though he has legendary sewing skills).  After measuring up, the canvas guy messed us around for a few weeks before telling us he was too busy to do the job after all.  We found another guy at the last minute who has done work for us in the past.  At 91 years of age, he’s but a spring chicken and still parachuting and riding his motorbike!  So, he managed to get the job done for us within our timeframe, but we have high standards and we’re not totally happy with it… It isn’t a copy of the old one, so none of the old stuff fits on it. Meanwhile, Graeme got on to the job of making the bimini, which turned out to be a little more challenging and time consuming than he expected, including taking the stainless framework off the boat – a great feat in itself – and setting it up at home on the back deck.  At 4.5x3m, his sewing took over the whole house, pretty much!  And then when he finished doing a BRILLIANT job on that, he knocked up an equally impressive link sheet. 

All this extra work held us up from getting other jobs finished.  We kept missing out on satellite phone auctions.  The you-beaut lifejackets we ordered from Arnold’s never arrived – turns out they’ve gone into receivership! That’s $500 we’ll never see again…

We already had an AIS (Automatic Identification System) receiver unit on the boat.  This device is awesome as it receives information about ships near us, with the rather important purpose of avoiding collision.  Well, the Rally required that we also transmit OUR boat details. So, we needed a transceiver capable of doing both. No longer could we move about in stealth mode!  We ordered a new unit from the US, which took nearly 2 months to arrive in Australia, causing much stress and nail biting as we started wondering if it was going to arrive at all.

There are more stories, but I’ll try not to bore you. Was the universe conspiring against us?  Sure felt like it!  One really positive thing that happened, was that whilst we had planned the trip based on Graeme taking Long Service Leave, the Big Organisation kindly offered him the redundancy package he had pushed for.  So one of us is now a bum.

Time kept on ticking by and the list… well, the list just kept getting longer.  I can see Santa, bag stuffed with presents, sleigh warming up on the runway, suddenly discovering a thousand NAUGHTY kids said ‘Sorry’, and have now magically appeared on the NICE list.  Quick, back to the workshop!  What do you mean the elves have all knocked off and gone to the pub?!

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So, D-day came… and went.  It slipped out by 6 days, so we finally managed to drop the mooring on Saturday 8 May, and set sail on Mother’s Day.

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Don’t know what you were doing that lazy Sunday morn, but we spent the previous night rolling around in the Basin (Coasters Retreat) acclimatising ourselves to the swell of the ocean.  We got up at 0530 and were on our way by 0600. 

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A colony of seals on a rock off Barrenjoey witnessed our departure (not my pic, unfortunately, but same seals, same rock!)

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First stop…well, we weren’t really sure.  Port Stephens?  Of course, just to make things interesting, there was a ‘possible thunderstorm’ forecast, and warnings of powerful surf conditions.

Conditions were ‘OK’ outside, although it was an overcast day, and the sun might have tried harder to come out.  It didn’t take long to settle into the motion of the long low swell from the east.  There were large pods of dolphins off to both port and starboard at different times, but they didn’t join us. We’ve heard the whales are on their way north, but none sighted yet. We settled into a speed of 7-8 knots, probably 2nm off shore, with the hope of keeping in close enough to avoid the East Australian Current.

In the evening of that first day, it was very tempting to slip into Port Stephens for a break and a good sleep, but conditions were continuing to be fairly comfortable, so we decided to motor-sail on into the night…

With no moon, and lots of cloud cover, it was a dark night.  There were plenty of ships popping up on the AIS to keep us busy and alert on our watches. I did an early evening shift then another from 3am until dawn, in very calm conditions, taking time to watch the water foam back from the bow, scattered with sparks of bioluminescence, like fallen stars. Around 0400, the moon brightened the horizon like a false dawn, with just the tiniest yellow sliver rising into the night sky; the last crescent of the old moon. 

When the sun did finally start to colour the horizon, Jamie was the first to notice.  He had kept both Graeme and I company on our watches, spending most of the night anxious about sailing in the dark.  He has a long memory, our boy, for traumatic events like storms at sea in the night-time.  We were keen to offer him some new memories of uneventful, even pleasant, nights at sea.  ‘The sun is coming up!’ he announced, with relief in his voice.

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Our second day at sea was magnificent.  The sun was out, there were no seas to speak of, just the swell.  We were able to move about the boat freely. We were the only yacht out there on a calm ocean, watching beaches and headlands slip by.  The only downside to Day 2 was that we were unable to avoid the EAC, battling against a 2-knot current around the Trial Bay area.  So, with a speed close to 8-knots through the water, we were only making 6-knots over land. 

We arrived in Coffs Harbour Marina around 1830 and had to navigate our way through the breakwater and into the marina in the dark.  The blue lead-lights are effective, and we soon found our berth, grateful for the lack of wind as we manoeuvred our way into the pen.

Now, we’re just waiting for a good forecast for the run up to Southport. There have been thunderstorms forecast and we don’t want to spoil our good work with Jamie by taking him out into one of those again!

Oh, we’ve done lots of things since we’ve been in Coffs, including having hamburgers on arrival, visiting the laundry, long hot showers, walking up Muttonbird Island, shopping, work, boat jobs…  The best thing about being in a marina is being able to PLUG IN.  You know that saying ‘The best thing since sliced bread’?  Well, we think they got it wrong.  It should be ‘The best thing since TOASTERS’.  Normally, we toast stuff on a camping toaster over the gas element.  But nothing beats a real toaster.

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Until next time…