Te Moana is on the public jetty at Ulmarra, just a few miles down river from Grafton. It's a convenient spot for me (Marius) to dash back to Sydney for a couple of meetings while Joy looks after Te Moana. I'll be back on the boat by Saturday afternoon together with Bruce Dell, who will help get Te Moana back to Sydney.
Cruise Report: October 2009 Archives
We’ve had a fair bit of rain over the past 24 hours and the countryside around here looks like that is a regular occurrence. We’ve sailed past lush green paddocks and canefields. Tomorrow I fly back to Sydney for a day to attend some meetings and to pick up our crew for the return journey.
The Harwood bridge opened as promised and we had a quiet motor up to Maclean. Maclean has a nice public jetty with power and water, so Me Too and Te Moana and very comfortably settled here.
The public jetty is right in the middle of town and as long as we're pretending to be MacCoomans or MacWatson, we'll get on well here.
We're on the Clarence River after an easy motor-sail up to Iluka yesterday. The Pacific Highway is going to close for us so we can go under the bridge at Harwood at 0630 tomorrow morning. Rather than rush up the river tomorrow morning, we decided to come up this afternoon and anchor at the bridge. There are two other boats with us, Mica (Mike and Carole) and Metoo (George and Nick). My Dutch friends and relatives probably won't understand the excitement of having a bridge open for you and stopping the traffic. In Australia, there are not many places that a boat can hold up traffic on a national highway. We look forward to that in the morning.
Just to follow up on our engine failure the other day. The cause was a faulty relay (the one driving the starting solenoid). There is a young sparky (Marcus Edwards, 0405 248 854) here at the Coffs Harbour marina who found the cause quick smart and had it going again in a few minutes. Today I rode the bike into town to get a spare relay, just in case the starboard engine wants to play the same trick.
At first light tomorrow we’re hoping to set off for Yamba/Iluka. Another adventure awaits…
We've been sailing for long enough to know that occasionally, things go pear shape. When they do, it's a matter of limiting the damage. You can't prevent or foresee all of the challenges while cruising, merely hope to limit the damage.
As predicted, we had a rolly night at Trial Bay. The plan was to get some sleep after the leg from Camden Haven and to simply lift anchor if it became too uncomfortable. As it happened, the Northerly came a little earlier than expected and so at 3.00 am we decided to get going.
Continue reading When things don’t work out.
We left Camden Haven today and had a gentle motor-sail up to Trial Bay. We have really good memories of the Bay because of a terrific camping holiday here lots of years ago. Another memory of this place is pulling in here on Te Moana to shelter from a Southerly Buster in the middle of the night on our way back from the Whitsundays.
It will probably be a "rolly" night, but it's nice to be back here. Tomorrow we go on to Coffs Harbour.
We're having a lay day at Camden Haven (unlike the lay week, which we had here in 2005). We're anchored just off the jetty at the Laurieton RSL club, which does a excellent job in providing complementary facilities for visiting yachties. More pictures from 4 years ago (including a visit from Oma and Opa)..
We originally set off to sail for Port Stephens today. The weather was kinder than expected and we wanted to make the most of the weather window on offer. So we pushed on to Broughton Island, ready to proceed to Camden Haven tomorrow.
We picked up a mooring on the North side of Broughton Island. Jake was "relieved" to get to the beach after 14 hours at sea. A great place to relax at the end of a long day.
