Sydney to Hobart

Out the back of the Wooden Boat Centre, on the Huon River, Tasmania

We’ve entered the calm after the Christmas storm. Alex and I are home alone, with our various offspring accounted for (in Morocco, in Laos, camping, working or recovering from work – take your pick) but not present. We have a fridge full of Christmas ham and sweet leftovers and our house is scented with fresh pine needles and November lilies. Lovely. Who cares about the weather?

A southerly buster came through last night, and for the next few days, if the forecast is right, there won’t be much joy for southbound sailors. We watched yesterday’s start of the Sydney to Hobart race from the water - not on Kukka but on our friend Wayne’s deep sea fishing boat (the spectator event favors a boat with a big engine). We followed the fleet out through the heads and then (throwing fuel consumption to the winds) kept up with the race leaders as far as Botany Bay. What a blast to pace the maxi yachts Loyal and Wild Oats as they sliced through the water at about 14 knots in a light north-westerly breeze. The crew lining the rails knew their moment in the sun would be short though. By the time Wayne turned his boat back towards Sydney, the horizon to the south was filling in with towering cumulus clouds. I’m much too much of a softie to go ocean racing, but I’ll follow the race progress on-line and cross my fingers that by next weekend every competitor will have arrived safely in the Derwent and be perched at the bar of the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania or the Shipwright’s Arms (aka Shippies) Hotel.  Either would do the job nicely. 

The Shipwright's Arms, Battery Point, Hobart

We were drinking at both these establishments just a week ago with a couple of Sandy Bay locals, John and Ange, lately of S/V Nada. Alex and I fitted in a quick trip to Hobart before Christmas, partly to catch up with John and Ange whose company we’d enjoyed so much in Vanuatu and partly to see the crew of Pelagic which has increased by one since Mike, Alisa and Elias sailed into Sydney harbour to see us and the New Year’s Eve fireworks a year ago en route to Tasmania.

Mike, Alisa and Eric

Mike and Eric

Baby Eric (above) was born in Hobart in very late April (or was it May?), and we thought it was high time we made his acquaintance, brought his big brother some new books and topped up our friendship with his parents before they moved on again.  Mike and Alisa are people you don’t want to lose track of. They're onto something good - each other, and a very immediate sense of what being alive adds up to and how to play that against the odds. You learn that stuff in Alaska, I believe.

Elias and his pony make the summit of Mt Wellington

Elias plays with Eric on Pelagic

Pelagic is on the market, and after a nearly a year of doing short-term house-sits around Hobart, Mike and Alisa are desperate to get onto their next boat. At the moment, it has to be steel, but.... what boat search does not involve as many twists and turns as an episode of The Wire (yes, we are watching the second series, and no, you may not call us any evening this week)?

Ange buys pink-eye potatoes at a rooadside stall for Christmas Day

I like to uncover a new place slowly.  I'd never been to Hobart before, and  it might have been enough to be introduced to the town by friends, both local and imported (as well as through writer Peter Timms' nice book on Hobart, kindly passed my way by Kathy Bail).  But Tasmania, as everyone knows, is more about about country than town. John and Ange took matters in hand  and drove us out for the day so we had more to rave about when we got home than the abundance of Hobart's second-hand bookshops, the headiness of its gardens (who ever knew that fuchsias could grow so abundantly and lusciously?) and the excellence of the bread and coffee at Jackman and McRoss (pictured below).

We headed south, following the ins and outs of the d'Entrecasteaux channel and then up the Huon river valley to the Tahune Air Walk.. How I wished my dear dad had been with me as I tried my best to identify various wondrous trees from high above the forest floor. A farm forester’s daughter ought to know better, but she doesn’t. She still has to read the labels on the bottom of the turned bowls at the Salamanca market to tell myrtle from sassafras.

The Huon river from the Air Walk

John and I drop coins onto the Wishing Tree

We chanced upon a sheep's milk producer called Grandvewe - heaven on tasting toothpicks. I left with yoghurt, curd and hard cheeses and a book on cheese-making.  I couldn't get enough of the ample expanses of the d’Entrecasteaux channel. Its colours reminded me of New Zealand, of course. In comparison, the mainstay cruising grounds for Sydney sailors, Pittwater and the Hawkesbury river, much as I love them, seem cramped and crowded. At Franklin, on the Huon river, we stopped by the Wooden Boat Centre, a small operation with a very strong whiff of an oily rag about it. The Sydney chef Tetsuya is having a classic motor yacht built there, and. I'd bet that his commission is probably keeping the place alive right now. I felt an odd sadness running my hands over the silky Huon pine planking of his boat, knowing from the blurb that its permanent home will be Pittwater. Silly I know, but that seems to me like keeping an exotic animal in a suburban backyard. I'm beginning to develop strong feelings about boats.

Tetsuaya's boat under construction

She'll look very like this when she's finished

Idyllic conditions

When you are on a boat,  there are several very satisfying measures of progress. You can track how far you’ve sailed in terms of miles covered, or in hours out from port, or in the change of latitude and/or longitude. Even if, at the end of a day’s sailing, you put down the pick in an anchorage which wouldn't have been your first choice at the beginning of the day, there’s always the satisfaction of having arrived safely.

Back on land, I cover a lot more distance, and much more quickly than at sea, but I don’t have the same simple – or is it simplistic? - sense of progress. I now struggle to keep a course in a way I never did during the cruising season, and on some days I make embarrassingly heavy weather of what, to an objective observer, must seem the most idyllic conditions.

People talk dreamily of going with the flow, as if nothing could be more pleasant or desirable, but in reality, we’ve been taught - and conditioned - to drive ourselves forward, to resist the current, to swim against the tide.  I’m a city girl, and in the city, if you go with the flow you get washed down the storm drain.  I’d like to think I can profit from, not to mention be grateful for this much gentler, and relatively stress-free period of my life, with its unlimited room for turning. I don’t know why the feeling of drifting, or of going around in circles, should be as unsettling as it is. What I do know is that there are days when I pine for the straight forward satisfaction of a job well done, or Progress Made. How very Protestant!

These next few months look like being a waiting game. First, we wait for some interest in Kukka, which could come sooner, or it could come later. She is now with the Sydney broker Windcraft. She’s also featured on several local and international boats-for-sale websites including Yachtworld and, thanks to Agnes, the popular Swedish site Blocket. She’s more than ready to meet new admirers, with no part of her having escaped Alex’s fastidious attention. While I was in New Zealand, he and Bertil solved a superficial wear-and-tear problem – suffice to say that when a man is thrown across a cabin in a gale, something has to give and in this case, it wasn’t just the man.  She’s even got new fender covers (I think the skipper was right not to wait until I felt the urge to run up replacements on the sewing machine – though I remember how intrigued he was last year to learn from a crafty woman on a Clipper launch of how she saved megabucks by making her own fender covers from the chopped-off legs of cheap over-sized track pants.)

I found myself looking at Kukka differently on my return from NZ, not just because absence freshens the eyes, but also because I’d been looking closely at another boat….Grace, the HR46 for sale in Auckland. Grace is a beauty too and, given the right circumstances, I would be more than happy to spend the next few years living aboard her. The immediate questions I had have been answered – 46 feet isn’t too big, and the bed in the aft cabin is perfect. Buy! No, wait….she’s on the wrong side of the world, we haven’t sold Kukka yet, and did someone say something about money? Ah, details…mere details.