Sydney

After a 48 hour stopover in Sydney, it’s off to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains for the next three nights. During our stay, Sydney was in the throes of preparations for New Year’s Eve celebrations which will be centred around the Circular Harbour and Darling Harbour areas. Restaurants are all advertising special New Year’s Eve parties with prices in the region of AUS$500 (€250) per head for tables with views of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House where the pyrotechnics will welcome in 2009. However, you don’t have to pay these prices to view the fireworks - there is plenty of free entertainment on offer as well around the harbour as well.

If you look very closely at the photo of the Harbour Bridge, you can see a group of people on the very top of the bridge just to the left of centre. These are tourists who have paid for a Harbour Bridge Climb experience which takes visitors to the very top of the bridge - not for the fainthearted (or the poor) !

Sydney is a very busy city with an unusual juxtaposition of thirty storey plus modern skyscrapers and hotels in the CBD (Central Business District) rubbing shoulders with older buildings dating from the city’s Victorian past.

Flicking back briefly to Melbourne, just down the road from where we were staying was a mural celebrating the making of the movie “On The Beach” in 1959. This movie was based on Neville Shute’s (a Melbournian) book of the same name and, as far as I can remember, told the story of the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.


Corrections to my literary recollections are welcome...

Yule at the pool

We’ve spent the last five days in Melbourne with the family of George & Anna, who made us really welcome and showed us great hospitality. They live in Mount Eliza, a suburb of Melbourne to the southeast of the city. The day after we arrived, I went into the city by train and joined the last minute Christmas shoppers thronging the shopping centres and streets in the sunshine. The Salvation Army was much in evidence with many brass ensembles playing carols on street corners, just like I would have been at home on Grafton Street on Christmas Eve (well, almost just like..)

On Christmas Eve, we went to watch the Penguin Parade on Phillip Island. This is a huge attraction every evening as hordes of people turn up to watch the penguins make their way from the sea to the burrows in the sand dunes where their chicks have spent all day waiting for their parents to return and feed them. The whole spectacle takes about an hour from the time the first wet bedraggled birds lurch up the beach to the time when they are all back in their burrows, but because the timing is so unpredictable it involved about two hours’ waiting on a cold beach for their arrival!

Christmas Day was spent with George & Anna and their family, a huge meal with antipasti, cannelloni, roast pork and all the trimmings, followed after a suitable interval by a swim in the pool and then another meal of cold seafood - oysters au naturel and Kilpatrick, huge prawns, smoked salmon and more.

Tomorrow morning (Saturday 27th) we tear ourselves away from this fantastic hospitality and great food and set off very early on the long (911km) drive along the Hume Highway to Sydney where we will spend the next two nights. More from there anon....

Whitsunday cruising

The week’s cruising has come to an end and we have reluctantly handed back the keys to “No Ties”. This was probably my ninth or tenth charter holiday and one could not fail to be impressed by all aspects of the service provided by Charter Yachts Australia. From the moment we were met and brought to our boat, to the excellent and very thorough briefing to the test sail before departure (that was a new one on us), everything had been thought of. We had ordered a provisioning package for the entire week and this had been delivered to the boat, unpacked and put on board an hour or so before we arrived - even down to the cockpit fridge having been well stocked with beer and Coke !

The cruising area covered by the charter is relatively small in terms of miles from north to south but almost unlimited in the number of anchorages, beaches, bays and sailing possibilities it offers. We spent most of our time circumnavigating Whitsunday Island and covering some of Hook Island and spent one night moored at the luxurious Palm Bay Resort on Long Island, where we had dinner ashore. The weather was consistently good, with winds ranging from 10 to 20 knots between NE and SE. Temperatures were just over 30° every day with some days being just a little too humid for comfort.

The snorkelling was of mixed quality (some days the wind was a little too strong which made underwater visibility rather limited) but we lost count of the number of turtles we spotted (almost impossible to photograph though), especially in some of the shallower anchorages.



Sailing a cruising catamaran was a new experience and certainly makes for comfortable sailing (no need to be too careful stowing everything away before setting sail) and good off-wind performance. Tacking, however, was another story and was best achieved with a little engine help. Having two engines with individual controls makes for really amazing manoeuvrability and it was very easy to spin the boat on her own axis. The boat was very well equipped and onboard kit included a chart plotter and autohelm along with all the usual stuff.




Although we started our charter at Airlie Beach, we finished at the marina on Hamilton Island, an island resort just south of Whitsunday Island, from where we flew to Melbourne for a five day stay. This whole small island is basically a holiday resort with its own airport, a 210 berth marina, about 1000 regular residents, 1500 staff and goodness knows how many holidaymakers all in full swing. Our three hour flight to Melbourne (with another hour added on for Daylight Saving Time) saw us arrive at about 4pm and we then had to face the navigational challenges involved in getting to our hosts in south east Melbourne, our home for the next five days.