The Darn Weather

The weather is turning here in Tasmania.  Rain, hail and wind - it's been a good time to have a wind generator on your boat.  We've been in one anchorage through it all - visiting with friends, taking the kids on the occasional foray to the beach and staying warm.

The first night we were here it was really breezy - average wind speed 30 knots or more, wind shifts, all that.

It was Friday, and there were a dozen boats in the anchorage.  And, just as you'd expect, two boats dragged anchor.  One wrapped its chain around another boat, while the other drifted away peacefully, its anchor light growing remarkably distant before the crew finally woke up and re-anchored.

I always hesitate to comment on other people's bad anchoring moments for fear of jinxing us.  But this time I was really impressed by how unnecessary it all was.  If you have a boat in Tasmania, and head out on a night with 30-knot winds forecast, wouldn't you think you'd have anchoring more or less figured out?  It's not like there's anything much to it: use a big anchor, use a good anchor, use lots of chain, put your engine in reverse to set the anchor.  And you're done.

Inshore

Sooner or later, every sailor finds that town life pales.

Ishmael knew that he had had enough when he felt himself seized by the desire to step into the street and knock the hats off of people's heads.

We know we've had enough when the playground starts fighting back - vide Eric's ear, above.  Bad day on the slide.  And it was four in the afternoon and Alisa was a mile from the boat, no car, no mobile, both kids, and Eric bleeding copiously.  Turns out that if you jog to the doctor's office at that time of day, and present them with a bleeding, screaming one year old, you go right to the front of the queue.

So, no lasting damage, we trust.  And Eric is tough.  He wasn't too happy for the rest of the day, but hasn't mentioned the ear once in the two days following.

All the same, we took it as a sign that it was time to leave the concrete jungle of Hobart behind, and to go sailing.

So we're seeing a bit of Tasmania outside of the capital.

We sailed wing and wing down D'Entrecasteaux Channel, on a breeze that started out talking in a loud voice and ended up whispering.

We gybed at every turn of the channel.  And where a gybe with a poled-out jib takes about 40 minutes for me alone at three in the morning out on the sea with a bit of breeze and swell, they were taking ten each on the flat inshore water.  Normally I channel my inner matador to approach the whisker pole as it swings wildly across its foredeck domain.  But in the Channel everything was so still and suburban that I could let go of the pole to adjust something and it would just stay where I had left it.  Weird, but something I could get used to.

So we'll carry on with the family life in this corner of Tassie for ten days or so.

And tomorrow is Easter, of course.

We embrace the most incredibly pagan interpretation of the holiday.  Chocolate and easter baskets define the outer limits of our theology on this one.  Hard to have the traditional pagan celebration of spring in a hemisphere where autumn is just beginning, but we're making do.

Elias left taped this note to the Easter Bunny on the companionway hatch.  It reads in two columns, first the right and then the left - "Dear Easter Bunny, please hide the eggs".  As in, don't just leave the goods lying out, put some sport in it for me.

We're anchored up next to our good mates on Aratika.  And we got brave this afternoon and had egg dyeing for all the kids in our saloon.  Great picture above of the kids dyeing and Alisa in the background, quietly freaking out over the chance of spilled dye.

It's all good.

The Old Girlfriend

When we arrived at the marina in Hobart a couple months ago, I immediately scanned the forest of masts  for the unmistakeable profile of Pelagic.  We sold her in Hobart a little more than a year ago, and I had heard the new owner was keeping her in that marina.

The thing is, I didn't really want to see our old boat.  I'm not sentimental about boats.  (Really!  I'm not!)  But we just had too much of a history with that old boat.  Seeing her again would be like seeing an old girlfriend - it would make me remember the good times, but also remind me that they were all over.

It turned out that Pelagic was staying on the other side of the Derwent estuary, so I was spared the sight. But Hobart is small, and we quickly met the new owner.  And then, this last week, he brought her to this marina for her annual haulout (above).

And I've got to say, it wasn't so bad to see our old home.  I even brought Elias by to take a look.

It's reassuring to see that she's in good hands.  And seeing her again really did bring back a few memories - I looked at the spreaders, high above the boat yard, and remembered standing up there, looking for coral, the afternoon when we first sailed into Tahanea.

And, maybe because we're busy making sailing memories on Galactic, it didn't bother me too much to realize how remote the Pelagic years are now.