Our Boats

I sailed a lot as a teenager. My first sailing was with my Dad in a Heron, a small 16' skiff. Dad and I then graduated to a Hobie 14' catamaran. Most of our sailing was on Lake Macquarie on the NSW North Coast. Dad went on to sail several small sloops (I think the first one was an Endeavour 24') on Sydney Harbour before he 'graduated' to larger trawler style power boats.

My sporting life then started to revolve around flying sailplanes and I spent many years on dusty airfields, accruing about 1600 hours. So when Megan and I decided to take up a sport we could do together (gliding is a very solitary sport), we returned to my first love of catamarans.

Our first boat was a Hobie 16' cat that we bought off Ebay for about $1500.

 Gotta love the 70's coloured mainsail. We had a lot of fun learning to race this boat. It was tricky with our combined weight (guess who's mainly to blame here!!) to balance this boat on the wire, so we had a few interesting spills. The most interesting was sailing up to the Great Sandy Straits from Tin Can Bay. We were abeam the bar when the deck and hull decided to part company.

 This led to us sinking in a rather dramatic fashion, a rescue by a journalist in a small tinnie (who put the next photo into the local newspaper), de-rigging the boat (mast and all) into the tinnie, and a 3 hour tow by the coast guard back to Tin Can Bay. Can't say we don't know how to have fun!

 So then it was time to graduate to something a bit more serious. We bought a Nacra 5.8. After our first break-neck sail, I think I said to Megan "We might have bitten off a bit more than we can chew!".

 We named the Nacra 'Boudicca' (cause she was a mean bitch queen that gave it to the Romans) and she was a wonderful boat. Fast, very controllable, much better for our combined weight. Did I say fast!!

We raced this boat on the Richmond River, out of a small sailing club. There were around 4 5.8's and several other multihulls, so it was good racing. However, the idea of cruising was starting to brew, and the we were getting to the end of our 'athletic years', so we started looking around for a cruising boat.

The idea of multihulls had caught our imagination, as had the thought of being able to trailer a boat to far-flung cruising grounds like the Whitsundays. So we bought a folding trimaran - Tridents.

 We flew down to Adelaide to inspect the boat. Its a stretched Trailer Tri 720 (actually 8.5 metres) built by Peter Boyd in S.A.  It was the most marvellous boat, fast to sail, easy to maintain, very seaworthy. Our first attempt to launch her into the river at our old sailing club ended up with the boat and the tractor bogged with a rising tide. Lots of fun!

We ended up keeping the boat on a swing mooring in Emigrant Creek (up the Richmond river a ways) which reduced our rigging time. We still raced the boat but started to make foray's down to Iluka, up to Byron, and generally exploring the open ocean.

We took this boat cruising in the Whitsundays and the experience just took our breath away. Sailing, camping out, diving on the reefs, it planted the idea that we might like to go cruising long term. So we started to think about the 'big boat'. We were still multihull fans, I loved big cruising trimarans, and we looked at a few. However, when Megan saw a friends Hitch-Hiker catamaran, she was sold on the space and room of a cat.

So we ended up making the biggest mistake of our sailing career. Our thinking was to buy a big cat, spend 3 years outfitting it in preparation for retirement, then sailing it to the Mediterranean. We bought Catch Cry for the price of a small house.

Everything about this boat was wrong. On our delivery sail down from the Gold Coast, we overheated one engine, were motoring over the Ballina Bar (probably one of the most challenging river bars on the NSW coast) when we picked up a floating rope that was attached to .... an anchor! Some kind person (and we know who!!) had left their anchor locker unfastened while crossing the bar, promptly lost their anchor so just cut it away.

After improvising a bread knife on a boat hook to cut away the line, we sailed off the bar, repaired the other engine and I had the joy of my first docking attempt in 4-5 knots of current with only one engine, followed by a very public diving attempts in my knickers to cut the rope off the prop.

Our experiences with this boat went down hill from here. On bunkering the water tanks, we found the starboard hull awash, the tank top was rotten. We found other rot in the boat (it was glassed cedar strip construction, a 44' Chamberlain design). It was a monster to maintain, I found all my weekends taken up with boat maintenance, we had no time to actually sail and enjoy the boat. It dragged its mooring blocks (nothing like getting a phone call at school to say that your boat is on the rocks!), and other assorted woes.

When I found myself starting to have panic attacks at night, worrying about the size of our white elephant, we realised that we had to sell the boat for the sake of our mental health. Unfortunately, we sold it just after the GFC, and lost a bundle.

 It was a long time before we thought we wanted to go to sea again, but after struggling to learn to play golf, and realising that this was NOT our idea of retirement, we ventured onto the water again. We returned to our love of trimarans, and bought a small Farrier Tramp. (Actually, Megan bought this boat, it was her first vessel).

This was a great little day sailer, we took her out on Sydney Harbour, toured the Gippsland lakes, sailed on Lake Burley Griffen, and it washed away the bad experiences with Catch-Cry.

Farrier designs great boats, this little 20' was so seaworthy, I never hesitated taking her out to sea, crossing the bar. It was old fashioned CSM fibreglass (probably laid up with a chopper gun), but the boat will last forever, tough as nails.

Which brings us up to today. We re-visited our cruising plans, and realised that buying a boat in Australia made little sense when we wanted to cruise the Mediterranean. We also thought long and hard about multihulls. We've always loved the 'feel' of sailing in the groove. Trimarans have a definite 'in the groove' feeling, that was completely lacking in the big catamaran. We also realised that most of the world's cruising facilities don't cater easily to to big cats, or if they do, the expense is much greater.

So we crossed to the 'dark side' and bought a monohull. Pavlov was well within our budget (much reduced from Catch Cry's time). We bought it in Turkey, so we are already 'there', and now we only need to figure out how to get home!