NOVEMBER 2002 Friday, November 1st -Friday November 8th, 2002 Latitude: 26 degrees 41 minutes 10 seconds South Longitude: 153 degrees 07 minutes 40 seconds East Mooloolaba Yacht Club, Mooloolaba, Queensland, Australia We have spent our first week back in Mooloolaba settling back in for cyclone season. We rescued our car from the sail loft yard where it resided for the last 6 months. Of course the battery was dead and so that was our first fix of the year. Everything that could be taken off the boat and washed is now sparkling clean including the dinghy. David’s contacted the Perkins hospital (the diesel engine mechanic) to make arrangements for repairs on our poor old engine. We visited the big smoke (known as Brisbane) and stayed with our friends Karen and Graham in their new house. It was really nice to sleep in a real bed, and sit at a table that isn’t bouncing around. Monday we made a visit to customs to turn in our cruising permit and get permission to leave the boat here for another 6 months. We of course will have to leave the country by Nov. 30th. We had a fun day wandering around Brisbane checking out the new bookstores and coffee shops. We picked Dudley and Philippa up at the train station late in the afternoon and made a beeline to the boat bookstore to organize who was buying what books for our journey through Indonesia next year. After a nice dinner we delivered them to their hotel and we were on the road back to Mooloolaba. Dudley and Pip are on their way home to California via Indonesia, Thailand and England. The big excitement in Australia this week is the Melbourne Carnival. The biggest day is the first day known as the Melbourne Cup Day.  All this fuss is for a big horse race. It would be the equivalent of our Kentucky Derby, but only on a much grander scale. In Victoria everyone has the day off work, in other states most people take the afternoon off. The women usually dress up in fancy dresses and hats that would give the mad hatter some competition. The third day of the carnival is known as the Oaks Crown day and also happens to be ladies day at the big racetrack. This is a very ritzy affair, with even more outrageous dresses and even wilder mad hatter convention. Between horse races there are fashion shows and interviews with fashion designers. What a big affair. They take this horse racing very serious here. At least its another excuse for a Big Party. We didn’t participate in any of the festivities this year, just watched a few of the races on TV. We’ve had a pretty eventful week for our first week back. We had great fun catching up with all our friends we haven’t seen for awhile. We will be leaving the boat here in Mooloolaba for the next 4 months so if anyone needs to contact us the address is: Sv Francis C/O Mooloolaba Yacht Club 35-45 Parkyn Parade Mooloolaba, Queensland  4557 Australia Saturday, November 9th  - Saturday November 16th, 2002 Latitude: 26 degrees 41 minutes 10 seconds South Longitude: 153 degrees 07 minutes 40 seconds East Mooloolaba Yacht Club, Mooloolaba, Queensland, Australia What a week!!! Saturday David started disassembling the engine. Absolutely every single thing that can be removed from the engine will have to be off for the engine to fit through the little door and out the companionway hatch. If you have never taken an engine out of a boat its absolutely nothing like taking it out of your car. The only thing I can compare it to would be taking an engine out of your bathroom closet and then having to shove it out the window to the ground below. Our engine resides in little room under the cockpit. Once all the parts, hose and wires are disconnected it will have to be unbolted from the floor, slid on to some 2x4’s and then slid out the tiny 2 foot wide by 2.5 feet high door. Doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that this thing weighs 500 pounds! David smartly realizes that this was beyond my abilities and hired the help of a fellow cruiser who actually used to do this for a living. While David spent the weekend in the engine room I began sanding the trim around all the hatches that need varnishing again.  Monday the help arrived at 8:00 am and for the next 8 hours they worked at removing the rest of everything from the engine and managed to get it out of the engine room and pushed through the little door. When I returned from the errands we had no steps and the engine was propped up on a wooden frame in our galley. The worst appears to be over, or so I thought! Now we have to get the engine out of the boat and into the Ute (pickup truck) I rented for the day.  Plan “A” was to get a few dinghies and push our engineless boat over to a crane on shore and lift it out into the truck. Sounds like a good plan except slack tide isn’t until 3:00 in the afternoon and there can’t be much wind. Plan “B” is too lift it out of the boat with block and tackle from the boom and lower it into some sort of transfer vehicle to the Ute. The help arrived at 11:00 am Tuesday and after assessing the wind and tide decided to go with “Plan B”. This meant we would have to totally disassemble the dodger and line the companion way with cardboard to protect all the wood. This was my job while the boys started preparing the engine. The engine was lifted off the floor and out of the companionway with the help of 4 block and tackles off the mast and boom, 4 men and one scared girl. The boom with dangling engine was pushed toward the side of our boat over the water and gently lowered in to Sedona's dinghy. It was then sped over to the shore where the crane was waiting and raised from the dinghy to the dock. Now all we needed was the ute. I went to retrieve the ute, but the place was all closed up, so no ute for us.  Looks like the engine will fit in the boot (trunk) of our car, so we backed the car up to the dock and lowered the engine in with the crane. David made a safe delivery to the Perkins hospital where the engine will under go a major heart surgery for the next month.  The rest of the week was spent putting our boat back together. I took the opportunity to clean and waterproof all the canvas while the dodger was apart and then went back to varnishing. David has spent the rest of the week living in the engine room, first cleaning and then working on rewiring the entire engine room, which is much easier to do without the engine in there. Another very busy week behind us, yet glad we have these chores done before it gets too hot here. Sunday, November 17th  - Tuesday November 26th, 2002 Latitude: 26 degrees 41 minutes 10 seconds South Longitude: 153 degrees 07 minutes 40 seconds East Mooloolaba Yacht Club, Mooloolaba, Queensland, Australia Not much exciting happening this week for I was in bed for most of it with a bad migraine headache, even in paradise migraines exist. Hopefully a trip to the chiropractor will straighten me out. David continued to work hard in the engine room working on wiring. I did manage to finish off all the interior varnishing. An article appeared in the paper this week that explained the strange reddish brown slick in the water we saw on the way here. An algae bloom called trichodesmia causes the slicks.  Trichodesmia belongs to the blue/green alga species and appears in temperate waters around Australia when the warmer weather arrives. During the day the algae produces oxygen by breaking down CO2, but at night it extracts oxygen from the water, which can cause early morning fish kills due to oxygen depleted water. When the bloom begins to die it becomes toxic releasing ammonia, sulphides, nitrogen and other toxins. These byproducts are harmful to humans, fish and marine bird life. I guess it would be wise to stay out of the water when sailing through these algae laden waters. With the full moon this week came another major and annual event on the Great Barrier Reef and that is the spawning of the coral reef. This annual event happens around the full moon in November every year and is studied by scientist from all over the world. It’s an absolutely amazing thing that coral all up and down the Great Barrier Reef send their little eggs and sperm out into the ocean to mix together in an oceanic ooze that will eventually land and begin to form a new coral polyp somewhere on the reef. Besides these two natural events that have occurred the other big natural event taking place this month is the 60th birthday of our neighbor Alan on Sedona. I spent the last few days running around with Patsy preparing for the big event. David and I are also getting ready to fly to New Zealand to fulfill our Australian visa requirement and take in a few days of the Americas Cup sail boat racing. Wednesday November 27th, 2002 Latitude: 26 degrees 41 minutes 10 seconds South Longitude: 153 degrees 07 minutes 40 seconds East Mooloolaba Yacht Club, Mooloolaba, Queensland, Australia We have a full day ahead of us today which started early helping Patsy decorate the yacht club for Alan’s big lunchtime party. The party was a big success and yachties from all over Queensland showed up for the big event. Immediately after the party David and I drove down to the Perkins hospital to see how the engine was doing. It was still laying out in a million pieces on the table taking a breather while they wait for parts to arrive from England. Turns out the engine was a lot sicker then we thought and many of the guts have to be replaced. The patient looks a little sad right now, but we are hopeful it will get a new lease on life when we return. We spent the night a Graham and Karen’s before we hop an early morning flight over the pond to New Zealand. Thursday November 28th, 2002 THE PARNELL INN, PARNELL Auckland, New Zealand Happy Thanksgiving! Up at 5:00 am to the international airport in Brisbane. Our good friend Karen actually volunteered to take us at that ungodly hour. We were to be flying on Garuda airlines on a flight that originated from Bali. We’re not sure if something alerted the officials or if this is the standard procedure now, but they unloaded the entire plane when it arrived in Brisbane and made everyone undergo an extra security check. Bags were searched; wallets opened and searched, shoes removed, pockets checked and a full body search with the magic wand. Well, at least we know all our fellow passengers are searched as well, for the flight was an hour late taking off while this search proceeded. We finally arrive safely in the Auckland airport. We rented a very funny little bright metallic green ford that looked very similar to a Volkswagen bug. We found our way to the tiny suburb of Parnell and settled into the Parnell Inn. David managed to find an Americas Cup race on TV and so we had a nice relaxing night after the rush of the last few days.   Friday November 29th, 2002 Auckland, New Zealand THE AMERICAS CUP Today is a day David has dreamed of for many years, and that is to be present at an Americas Cup venue while the actual racing is taking place. Not being a racing sailor and barely a cruising sailor I’m personally not as excited about the big event and am looking forward to a boring day of ooing and awhing at big expensive boats. In the spirit of trying anything we trotted off to the Americas Cup village in the Auckland viaduct. For those of you who are not up to speed on all this, the Americas Cup is THE big event in sailing. Two Americas Cups ago, Team New Zealand beat America and the race and the cup will be in New Zealand until someone beats team New Zealand. There are 3 teams from the USA trying to win back this treasured cup. There is Dennis Conner's Team Stars and Stripes from the New York Yacht Club, Team Oracle from California and Team One World from the Seattle Yacht Club. Other international teams come from Italy, Switzerland, France, Great Britain, Switzerland and Sweden. All these countries are competing in the Louis Vitton Cup to see who will be the challenger to take on team New Zealand. Several teams have already been eliminated, but today we will see team Stars and Stripes race against One World and the Italian team of Prada race against Swedish team Victory.  The ironic thing is that our yachtie neighbors in Mooloolaba are also in Auckland renewing their visas, so we will try to find them there when we arrive. The even more ironic thing is that the Moore's (the family will be looking for) are also from Washington State! What a small world! It was cold and gray in Auckland today, but that didn’t seem to dampen the spirit of any of the spectators. David and I spent the morning exploring the village and taking in the sites of the magnificent racing yachts and their individual villages. David and I met up with the Moore family at HQ for lunch. This is a popular spot with all the racers and we hope to spot a few having lunch. I of course wouldn’t know one if they sat down next to me, but Charlie and David were having fun spotting the familiar faces of the racing world. After lunch we made our way to racing central where there was a large screen set up for watching the race. The race itself taking place off shore, so unless you have your own boat here, it would be hard to watch the race at the actual site. We sat in the viaduct watching “One World” beat team “Stars and Stripes” eliminating Dennis Conner from the competition. Prada also beat team Victory of Sweden, eliminating them from further competition. After the races were over we hung out in the viaduct to watch the returning sailors. It was actually quite exciting as they came back flying all their flags with their entourage of boats following behind honking and hollering. After all the excitement of the races we joined the Moores for a belated Thanksgiving dinner at a wonderful Thai restaurant. Saturday November 30th, 2002 Auckland New Zealand Back to HQ for breakfast today to see who might be hanging out. After a little shopping at the local chandler we head back to the cup village where we met up with the Moores at the Alinghi Village. Team Alinghi is from Switzerland and is the only team that has gone to great lengths to educate the public about the Americas Cup racing with their spectacular village actives. They had a full size boat painted on the pavement that showed where all the sailors were stationed and what their job was. Inside you could race against your mate on a computerized virtual sailboat. Much fun was had here as we each tested our racing skills against each other. There was also a couple of grinding stations set up where you could grind against a computerized version of an Alinghi grinder. I didn’t stand a chance, those guys have arms of steel! They had many other fun toys to play with in there and out side you could get a good look at their boat, except for the secret keel! After all this fun we decide to part ways, for the Moores return back to Australia tomorrow and have other things to do today. David and I explored downtown Auckland a bit and found our selves in the skytower, a bit like the Seattle Space Needle. We certainly had a birds eye view of the city and the racing venue as well as the crazy people who bungy jumping off the top! Another busy day comes to an end and we will head south out of Auckland tomorrow to see some other sites.