The Leg Home: A False Start and a Real Start

Day 125 (Day 1 of this leg)

Noon Position: 44.00S 150.46E

Course/Speed: ESE7

Wind: N20

Bar: 1014 and falling

Sea: N4

Sky: Scattered cloud and haze

Cabin Temperature: 69

Water Temperature: 60

Sail: Working headsail, one reef; Main, one reef

Noon to Noon Miles Made Good: 145

Miles this leg: 145

Avg. Miles this leg: 145

Miles since departure: 17,400

Down the River Derwent toward the sea goes Mo. We are motoring in the company of friends, who will see us as far as their weekend mooring. The day is bright, warm, windless. The water is glass and the trees along the shore show the burnt oranges of deep autumn. Just last week there was snow on Mount Wellington and a hard, cold wind on the bay. Now it is Indian Summer; a high caps the entire island.

Some hours out, I look into the pilot house and see that the chart plotter has gone black. I attempt to power it up, but get nothing. I reboot the whole system. Nothing. I check power to the device and get the expected voltage, but still the unit is dead.

My heart sinks. This happens as we are departing?

To be fair, the chart plotter bore the brunt of the deluge that immediately followed the last, worst knockdown. For a few seconds, it was entirely under water. But in the intervening months, it had shown no sign of being the least bothered by the dunking. It had worked without a flicker through that disaster and on every day since.

By now it is late, and I opt to take a mooring in my friends’ private bay while I work through the problem. There I get Phil Sandman on the phone. “Was the fuse box also underwater during the knockdown? If so, check for a corroded fuse. It’ll be blown but not entirely and may be passing volts but no current.”

I had checked this at sea, had pulled the fuses, cleaned them, had oiled the connectors, but they’d not made the shore list because, like the chart plotter, they’d worked every day since. Now they are indeed corroded, and the chart plotter fuse is indeed blown but not entirely. I replace all the fuses from my spares kit.

At first light Mo and I are off again, motoring down Storm Bay.

South of Tasman Island, I notice that most of my AIS ship targets have disappeared, and when I try to raise TAS Maritime on the radio, I get only silence, though I can hear them clearly. A check of an AIS tracking site shows I fell off their page earlier in the day.

A week ago we did a full shakedown and tested everything. How can this be?

“Remember, you beat the boat up pretty badly,” Dustin had said the week before. “You’ve had the mast-top in the sea at least twice; you filled the cabin with water. You may be working through knockdown issues for months.” I continue southeast for two hours running checks that tell me nothing good and contemplating a 9,000-mile passage without radio or AIS.

At six o’clock, I turn back. “I’m returning to Hobart with technical problems,” I say when I raise the customs man, David, on the phone, “and may need two days to effect repairs.” “Understood,” he says. “I know your case details. Keep me up to date as work progresses.” That is all.

Mo has lines out to Constitution Dock by eleven.

Next morning, Darryl Ridgeway is tapping on Mo’s hull before I’ve finished breakfast. “Saw you come in on that tracker of yours! How can we miss you if you won’t go away?”

Darryl immediately runs me into town for a spare fuse block and a new VHF antenna. In the afternoon, I meet John and Steve and wives Dee and Hellen, who have brought their boats to Constitution Dock for the weekend. John and Steve spend the rest of the day helping me install the new equipment. We are done in time to visit a local brewery and toast a second departure attempt, and then Dee makes dinner for all of us.

In the morning I buy meat pies and fresh bread and vegetables with my pile of coins, and once again admire a town I’ve come to love. So like my home, but smaller and manageable; so rich in history; such beautiful sailing grounds; such delightful people, if only they wouldn’t mumble so.

Then down the River Derwent toward the sea goes Mo. We are motoring, alone this time. The day is bright, warm, windless. The water is glass and the trees along the shore still show the burnt oranges of deep autumn. The same high is still parked over Tasmania. But the chart plotter is solid now; the AIS shows targets upwards of 20 miles away.

We are far south of Tasman Island by sundown, still motoring in calm, and even 20 miles off I can pick up the island’s white light.

After midnight, a wind comes out of the northeast. I raise sails, switch off the motor, and with that we have departed Tasmania.

The morning is gray and chill. Winds are now 20 out of the northeast. We’ve long since sunk Tasmania, though briefly I think I can smell it on the breeze. Mo shoulders along on a reach at 7 knots and better.

I have slept well and dreamt hard, but I have not avoided the blue funk of departure. There is too much I already miss about Hobart–where I was comfortable, warm, and Mo did not throw my coffee across the cabin–and too long to the comforts of home.

Why did I commit to a difficult return to San Francisco only to then restart the Figure 8 when I could have spent a winter slowly gunkholing around Tasmania?

Today I do not have a good answer.

The route home is long and complicated. It runs the westerlies south of New Zealand, making sure to avoid both the Traps Islands on the one hand and the Snares Islands on the other; then on it presses east and north a bit until roughly the longitude of Tahiti. There it makes a full turn due north and weaves a maze of tropical islands. In the southeast trades at last, the on-the-wind slog begins in earnest and won’t end until well north of Hawaii; then the route passes clockwise over the North Pacific High and runs slantwise to the southeast and down to San Francisco Bay.

From 48 South to as much as 40 North; through two trade wind belts and two of Horse Latitudes, across the doldrums and around the big Pacific high.

9,000 miles.

That’s the leg home.

Thank you again to all my friends in Hobart. To Captain John Solomon, Darryl and Ursula Ridgeway, Zane, Sally, John, Steve and Hellen, John and Dee Deegan, Phil Sandman, to Sonia in the office and Bosun Anthony at the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania, and to all those I am forgetting. Thanks for making it so hard to leave.