First Peak

In Port Davey, Elias and I had our first father-son "mountain climb" - up the 170 meter-or-so Balmoral Hill.  That's the descent above.  You can just see Galactic and the other two boats that were in Port Davey with us anchored up below.

Elias didn't love the going-up part.  But even though he fell down a hundred times on the way down, he didn't mind the descent.

It was windy on top.

Throwing our apple cores off the summit was a highlight.

It's my hope and expectation that we'll get back to Alaska while I've still got a lot of hiking and skiing left in my legs.  Hopefully by then Elias will still be keen to go out in the hills with his dad.

Flatties For Tea

(I somehow failed to post this when I wrote it, on Christmas Day.  Here it is now...)

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Elias started catching the flatheads on our first morning at anchor.  After weeks of catch-and-release fishing in the polluted waters of the marina, he was finally catching fish in a place where they could be eaten.

"Flatties for tea!" he shouted after the first three fish had come aboard.
"Woo hoo!" Alisa and I said.  "Flatties for tea!"

Later, out of his hearing, we tried to remember if "tea" meant lunch or dinner.

Five and a half years into this trip, the cross-cultural misunderstandings continue.  But now they occur within the family.

We motored (and sailed) all the way from Hobart to Recherche Bay on our first day out.  The weather forecast that night made it clear that we would have to either go around to Port Davey the next day, or wait until Boxing Day.  I was completely knackered after all the usual drama of getting away from town.  So we decided to wait until Boxing Day.

So we had our fifth (!) Australian "Chrissie" here in Recherche Bay.

We plucked a Christmas Branch from the National Park and decorated it.

 We went for walks on the beach.

(Captain Underpants)

And we spent time with a convivial group of friends old and new, plus a couple of random drunks.  Turns out there's a bit of a mob going to Port Davey this year.

 The kids, laughing at the carryings-on of a random drunk on the beach.

Sigh, the things we expose them to.

You know you're a yachtie if Santa brings you a new deck bucket.

Someone's moving up from driving the dinghy to driving the family home.

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The end, for now - more soon from Port Davey.

Tassie Burning

We're back from the southwest of Tasmania, into the familiar waters of the D'Entrecasteaux Channel.  Hobart is a few days away; once there, we'll be into our final two weeks of preparing for the crossing to New Zealand.  Alisa is working on her town list tonight, with a nearly frightening intensity.

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Meanwhile, now that I can again post pictures to the blog through the yachtie blessing/curse that is the internet, I'll catch up on a bit of our adventure in Port Davey.

Here's a day that stood out - the day that I hiked up Mt. Rugby with Wade and Chris from Take It Easy.

The views from the top were everything you'd hope for - the open, unique southwestern corner of Tassie, laid before our feet.

We didn't know that there was a bushfire just out of the frame in this first picture - there was no sign of it when we were on the summit.

It was a hugely windy, and hot, day.  So windy that it was uncomfortable to sit on the summit block of the mountain.

Take It Easy and Galactic in 40-odd knot gusts in the anchorage below.

When we were nearly all the way down the mountain, a smoke plume appeared above the summit.  By the time I got back to Galactic it looked like this.

We haven't been in Australia long enough to be at all used to the intensity of bushfires.  How the sky in the first picture turned into this in two hours or so is beyond me.

It looked a bit like the Mayan end time, come a few days late.

The fire was miles from us, and we were in no danger.  We watched the glow of the fires at night from our next anchorage, and the smoke obscured the views of the coast on the sail back.  But on the east coast of Tassie, things have been much more dire - homes destroyed, the Tasman Peninsula cut off, the police searching for missing people.