Should be Easier

"Should be easier," our friend Smoke emailed me the other day.  "Need boat, find boat, buy boat."

He hit it perfectly.

I remind myself that we are searching for a yacht, after all, and that there are much harder fates out there.  But, really, talk to people who have particular ideas about what they want and a limited budget, and again and again you will hear stories of long, hard boat searches.

We're still very excited about Taiko, the steel boat in Sausalito.  But a talk with a surveyor has identified a couple of issues that might be real problems.

First, the engine really does seem to be too small for such a big boat.  I had resigned myself to the idea of getting along with 50 HP, but the surveyor pointed out that this particular engine will only deliver 35 HP or so at cruising RPM, which really might not do the trick at all.

And then there's the issue of insulation.  Both the surveyor and the aforementioned Smoke, who knows a few things about steel boats, get very serious when they talk about the suitability of a metal boat with uninsulated frames for the sort of high-latitude work that we have in mind.

Stay tuned!

Kodiakers in Tas

We just had a great visit with our Kodiak friends Pete and Margaret and their mob - Clayton, Laurel and Jack.  They all came down to Tas and we met up in Cradle Mt. National Park.  Here's the crew setting out on a hike, experiencing very stereotypical early summer Tassie weather.

Jack in the buttongrass.

We stayed in a great cabin in the park.  Elias was very excited to sleep in the top bunk.

I busted out one afternoon for a walk by myself in the hills, where I got the views above.  Cradle Mt. is a very pretty place, and we're keen to go back.  Maybe it was the presence of our Kodiak friends, but as I was walking around in the hills I did what I never do when travelling and compared the place to home.  "Jeez," I thought.  "You could set these hills down in Kodiak and no one would notice them."  But that was just my relict Alaskan bias talking and of course comparisons of this sort are odious....

After a day in Hobart we all trekked out to the Bicheno for Christmas.  Actually, what we were aiming to produce for our Alaskan friends was an Australian "chrissie" instead of a northern hemisphere Christmas.  The northern Christmas is a midwinter festival, but the Australian version is very much a "summertime and the livin' is easy" sort of holiday.  Thus our choice of Bicheno, where there is a very nice beach where Elias and I braved the cold water for a swim.  On Boxing Day the surf was up and I finally got my longboard wet in Tassie.

We rented a great beach house and set up a little Christmas tree complete with lights.  Here's Elias with a plate of cookies for Santa and a plate of carrots for Santa's eight 'roos.  (Turns out he doesn't use reindeer down here.)

We had Christmas dinner complete with the Australian touch of party hats and crackers and noisemakers.  Good fun.

Pete and Margaret and their troupe caught the ferry back to the North Island on Boxing Day, leaving behind a very warm impression of their family dynamic.  We're looking forward to seeing these good people again...maybe our boat search will find us close to Alaska sooner than we know...

Hull Knocking

One of the things that Alisa and I love to do in anchorages is to row over to a nearby boat, knock on the hull and chat the owners up.  It's always a crap shoot when we do this - sometimes we get baffled reactions from the people we approach, sometimes we meet people whose outlook doesn't match well with our own, and often we meet casual acquaintances whom we know for a week or a month while we're travelling the same path.  And occasionally we knock on a hull and end up making good friends out of the bargain.

We just had a couple of the latter sort of people visiting - Diana and Alex from Kukka, whom Alisa and Elias met on a whim at an anchorage at Magnetic Island in Queensland last year.  They just came down to Hobart and we had a good time catching up on everything that has happened since we last saw them, over New Year's 2010 in Sydney.

Really, cruising is just an elaborate way to expand your circle of friends.  The boat stuff is all secondary.