The folks at the boatyard really like to remind us of this fact. Yup. We know. It’s a big boat. We know it intimately, now that we have sanded its 65-foot hull repeatedly for nearly a week. Those of us with back problems really felt it. Those of us without back problems no longer exist. But even the pain and tedium of sanding came to an end at some point, and that point was when Doug said “Okay, that’s enough sanding.” If our arms were not already frozen in overhead positions, we would have thrown them up in jubilation. Denied our gesticular glee, we celebrated instead with a bit of bubbly later that evening. Continue reading ““That’s a big boat.” – post by Janice”
Tag: challenges
Seeing red: what to do with a store credit?!
Shopping is not my favourite hobby and yet it seems to be taking up a lot of our time at the moment. We’ve started ‘provisioning’ (stocking up on food for the voyage, more on that soon), and we’ve also become regulars in the marine chandleries in the Auckland area. They’re mostly located within a 10 minute walk of Westhaven and Beaumont and the popular ones are as close to that corner as possible. A yacht refitter quickly realizes that a purchased item will not necessarily end its life on the yacht – and if lucky can recycle an unwanted item back to the shop, not into the yacht’s spares locker. During Illusion‘s refit, various items purchased with good intentions have turned out to not quite fit the need when compared more closely with the matching parts already on board. A couple of examples below illustrate this while giving a little insight into the exciting (?!) challenges of refitting: Continue reading “Seeing red: what to do with a store credit?!”
Paying attention
It’s so easy for mistakes to happen on boats. Things get broken easily in a small space, extra care needs to be taken on board. As has been mentioned before, I can get a little bit obsessive about neatness and looking after things – probably partly because from my previous boat-life days I know what it’s like to break something when there’s no easy way to replace it and boats are already so costly that I hate to have to waste money on replacing broken things that need not be broken. Also because I am just a little bit obsessive. So yesterday morning served as a cautionary reminder of the need to focus and stay alert. Continue reading “Paying attention”
Sea changes: the first month!
Wow! It’s a month today since I arrived in New Zealand. The cunning plan to document the process of getting Illusion ready to sail again has been somewhat foiled by the fact that by the time we finish work each day I’m ready to sleep. That combined with our internet connections being fairly unreliable has made contact a little irregular. And did I mention that our days consist of basically working for hours, eating, sleeping, then starting all over again? It’s been busy! I’ve managed the odd Facebook and Twitter update, but nothing on here. However, as our plan in having a website was not only to share with friends and family what’s going on, but also to document the experience for ourselves and to keep some kind of journal of the expedition, I’m going to do a catch up post here. Maybe when (if?) things calm down a bit, I’ll be able to go into some more details, but for now here’s a bit of a summary of the past month….. Continue reading “Sea changes: the first month!”
The Peruvian Guano Case – post by John
In the commonwealth countries around the world, the case most often quoted to determine relevance of documents is Compagnie Financier v. Peruvian Guano, known simply as the Peruvian Guano case. This was a dispute between companies over the mining of large reserves of bird guano fertilizer. In this case the court also set out the legal tests to determine when documents are relevant, and therefore must be produced, as opposed to when they are not relevant and need not be produced. The fact that the legal test to determine whether documents are crap or not, happens to come from a case with such a name, has always made lawyers and judges smile.
I had been traveling through the north and south island of New Zealand for three weeks, when my sailing friends arrived. Doug Hawkins, Deb Jandrlich and Mike Sullivan. Janice Lo would join us later. Mike, Deb’s partner, was here to visit nz with us, offer his skills for boat maintenance, then fly back to Vancouver. Myself, Doug, Deb and Janice were to sail Illusion back to Vancouver, taking four months to do this. And the boat should have been in good shape for us. Continue reading “The Peruvian Guano Case – post by John”
Cruising concerns: being safer at sea
While reading through the CruisersForum recently, I found a post by someone concerned about the major threats while cruising and asking for advice. There were a few replies and comments about how “normal” life is statistically much more dangerous. It got me thinking about some of the dangerous situations I’ve seen out on the ocean… Continue reading “Cruising concerns: being safer at sea”