Sailing Around Australia; Cruisas Interruptus

Cairns Queensland

March 2017

Cruisas Interruptus

Its ow been 5 weeks since our great road trip from Western Australia to the Gold Coast to restart Easy Tiger's Sailing adventures.

With Easy Tiger having been in storage for a year, there were of course a number of jobs that needed to be done for for relaunch.

For example,  replacing a leaking through hull fitting and sorting new tie downs for the old kayak and now a new kayak.

Also, we decided that being nearly ten years old, Easy Tiger's inside could do with a makeover which we achieved in two short weeks. As we were whittling away our to do list, we were getting more and more excited about getting Easy Tiger back in the water and heading off wherever the wind took us.

Then our daughter called with some exciting news. No, not grand kids; but they had bought their first house. How lovely it would be for us to go to Cairns and help them move in and get settled. Arrangements were made and tickets were purchased for us to arrive in Cairns the day after their settlement.

Since we were going to leave Easy Tiger for another three weeks, we calculated that leaving her in storage at the boat works was the cheapest option we could find. Plus, on our return we could finish our to do list before antifoam application on the hard stand work area and then into the water she goes.

Then we got a call from our son. He was looking at buying a yacht and sailing for a year or so. He had found one that he wanted us to look at for him. It was in Cairns. So without further ado we were on a plane to Cairns to look at a Roberts 39 sailing boat on behalf of our son.

We arrived in Cairns two weeks earlier than expected. The only bummer about that was that our to do list for Easy Tiger remained. A day spent inspecting the "Alice" and a day spent packing stuff into boxes for our daughter and then back to the Gold Coast.

In the next ten days we installed our Iridium Go, which would give us satellite communications, We cut and polished both hulls, we fitted Nomad matting to our cockpit, serviced our Honda generator, repacked the storage compartments, had our life raft serviced and completed many 5 minute jobs all that took several hours each.

Then we locked Easy Tiger back up, asked the car (the mobile storage unit) and drove to Cairns. 

On arrival in Cairns we helped our daughter and her partner move the last items out of their house, scrubbed their old house from top to bottom and unpacked boxes of stuff at the new place. 

We also attended the survey and inspection plus lift out and hard stand of our son's boat "Alice" and commenced the clean up and odd job list for that. 

While we were doing this Cairns was placed on cyclone alert. So we had to tie Lukes boat on to lugs set int the concrete at the big boat shed, then strip everything off the deck and stow sails etc inside.

Fortunately cyclone Debbie bypassed Cairns and went to the Whitsunday Islands and Mackay instead.

After 20 days in Cairns we then flew back to the Gold Coast, boarding Easy Tiger at 1.00am on the Sunday. At 7.00 am on the Monday morning we were lifted, that afternoon the boat was prepped and Antifouled as I serviced the engines and sail drives, then at 12.30pm on the tuesday Easy Tiger got wet for the first time in 14 Months as it was lifted back into the water.

So now we can catch our breath. We are back in the water anchored at Dux anchorage near Tipplers resort. We have the phones turned off and are enjoying a bit of a midday nap. This is what we paid the dollars for, this is what we had dreamed of, so no more interruptions for a few days.

Lolling about in lovely anchorages on lovely days like these is worth all the rushing, hard work, helping others, spending lots of money and unplanned interruptions for sure.