Australia, Sydney - 22/4/14

We've made some big decisions in the last few weeks. The first of which was deciding not to try and go through the Red Sea. We'd always planned to change our route if the pirate situation looked too dangerous, but it was still a bit of a shock to realize we'll now be going the opposite way around the world. The wrong way, against the wind for months. It took a while for me to get comfortable with the idea - it felt like everything had just been turned upside down and now we were venturing into the unknown. We'd researched ports and anchorages in India and Indonesia, we knew what to do for our visas and we knew where and when we were leaving from. Now we're leaving on a date to be determined, from somewhere up the coast of Queensland and crossing the South Pacific across a vast amount of ocean to eventually end up somewhere in South America.  This new plan didn't exactly leave me brimming with confidence. But it's been a few weeks since this decision was made and now I'm excited. Largely due to having entered the words 'Pacific Islands' into google images.

I'm disappointed we won't get to play with monkeys and elephants in Indonesia, and that we'll miss the eclectic chaos of India. But those countries aren't ideal for sailing through anyway. We're on a boat, and it makes more sense to visit tropical islands. We'll get to go back to New Caledonia and probably Fiji as well, along with Vanuatu and French Polynesia, which should be well worth the 3 months of headwinds. I hope. I very much wanted to see a good chunk of South America as well, which probably wouldn't have happened on our old route, so the decision seems to be pretty positive all around. Plus our chances of being ravaged, tortured, held captive for ransom and losing our boat to pirates in the Red Sea have been greatly reduced. So that's good.

This is a picture from our spot tracker - the dotted lines are the route we've taken so far, and the red X in South America is the general area of our destination. We've got a long way to go!

We've also recently decided to blow a significant amount of cash on a fancy new navigational system. Eating into our savings will mean missing out on something fun we could have done, or a few months of sailing. But it will also make it a lot harder to run into careless boats in the dead of night. Or the middle of the day. Or ever.

We went past a lot of crazy people driving massive ships down the coast of Australia, and they freak me out. Knowing they're out there makes being on watch much, much more stressful - it's like sitting in the middle of a speedway surrounded by drunk drivers whizzing past in formula 1 cars. My levels of nervousness around land escalated significantly after that little yacht behind us nearly got run down near Bundaberg. So considering how much more traffic will be around us in busier areas (once we're away from the chilled out awesomeness of the South Pacific), we've decided we need an AIS. It's a handy little electronic device that sends our location out to other ships and lets us see what boats are around us. Unlike radar, the AIS also tells you what speed it's doing, what kind of boat it is, where it's going, the last port it was at and if it's going to run us over. All useful information, though the majority of it is just to entertain me while I'm on watch. It's pretty cool staring at a dot in the distance and knowing the name of the ship and where it's going. They usually have collision alarms as well, just to be extra safe. I think we'll see a lot less boats now - I noticed during the day when we're more visible, the big guys just went around us. But they have to know where we are first.

We're also finally giving in and submitting to the advances of a permanently mounted chart plotter. Which we refused for a long time - the boat is overrun with GPS devices, 3 of which have charts. We're just too broke to buy the stupidly expensive charts to put on them, which renders them kind of useless. So we mostly use Navionics on Garth's phone and my tablet, as they can be shared between the two and are cheap. That has been great so far, but we need a grown up system to run the AIS on. So an upgrade it is. I've never been so excited about boring electronics - the chartplotter even has wifi! As in, I can look up the charts on my phone whilst lying around in the cockpit like a sleepy sloth. Fabulous.




Our new crew member has arrived as well, which is exciting! Sam is one of Garth's best friends and he'll be chilling with us up the coast until he gets bored of boats. He's been a lot of help and is great fun to be around. Since he arrived we've actually made an effort to be tourists - we spent a whole day exploring Sydney in the rain and had a blast.




We wandered round Paddys markets, ventured to the rocks, stared at the Sydney Harbour bridge and licked the Opera House. Sam assured me that licking it was more normal than just touching it. All the cool kids seemed to be doing it.





So I have a lot of obligatory tourist pictures. But the good news is that Garth is using the big boy camera again, instead of just having me snap pictures on my phone. So hopefully now my visual aids will be fancy and shiny, with a few artsy pictures thrown in when Garth gets excited by pretty things.





The bad news is that we all seem to be as bad as each other - Garth and Sam encourage each other's ridiculousness and neither of them care when I climb on stuff. And then they follow me.  Or I follow them. So I think we'll have some exciting adventures over the next few months!





We found some random boxes on the side of the road. We couldn't figure out what they were for... The conclusion was to climb in them.



There's some beautiful rock walls in Sydney - it's actually a very pretty city. We had a blast exploring and now we just need an expedition to the zoo for our Sydney tourist expedition to be complete!



Xxx Monique













This sign had fallen down and I couldn't resist putting it back up...