Changes in Latitudes…

On Feb 22nd, 2022 Published By B.J.

Evenstar has been sold.

Our last view of Evenstar in the early Whangarei morning. Sobbing like a bereft child when I took this…

Maybe some of you noticed it on the About page, but I’ve taken two+ months for me to get my head around it to write about it here. But we finally found a buyer and moved off the boat, and we’ve been back in the U.S. since December.

More about that later.

Oh sure, there was a draft I started on the thirty-nine hour flight back to the U.S. from New Zealand. From memory, it was distinctly maudlin, so I haven’t re-opened it since since I know that maudlin and sad is not the long term takeaway from this chapter of our lives. Parting was indeed a sweet sorrow, and rather emotional after almost sixteen years and countless memories. But it’s a needed change in life.

The decision to sell her was very tough. And the sales process during a global pandemic was grueling. With 99.9% of our potential buyers locked away from seeing her, there was a lot of resistance to buying a boat like this with no guarantee when you could see it or take possession. But selling her was what we needed to do.

Twice Bitten

My last post – almost a year ago – touched on the frustrations of our first broken deal and the aggravation of almost moving off the boat and having to get everything back in order again. It was a heartbreaking and maddening experience.

And we got to do it again, when another buyer put a contract on the boat through our broker. Once again, we were started the process. Organizing and winnowing our stuff, selling off unneeded and unwanted possessions, and moving our stuff off the boat into a storage unit a second time to facilitate a quick closing and turnover.

I decided after this deal fell apart not to discuss it publicly, because I had no interest in having Evenstar get a reputation as a problem boat because a buyer was trying to press advantage on our situation again and disregard the terms of the contract to take more money out of our pockets after we’d made a deal. There was (is) also a lot of anger about how this deal went down, and I didn’t want to air that laundry before the boat was sold. There was nothing wrong with the boat, but in both cases I think the buyers saw an opportunity to pressure us since they knew we were trapped by the pandemic.

This second buyer was meticulous and put us through four (4) separate surveys – a mechanical, electrical, rig, and general survey, and they all covered many redundant parts of the boat multiple times. The general survey was done by one of the best, most reputable surveyors in NZ, and he came back with a very solid report on the boat. The sea trial went off without a hitch, and we had a nice post-survey dinner with the buyer where we chatted about turnover and closing plans and what his plan was for the boat.

Then it became evident this guy knew little about the boat buying process, and he viewed surveys like a slot machine with a guaranteed payout. The more you pull the handle, the more money comes out, right? OK, let’s do another survey…

Just as the deadline for the survey response was coming up, we received a demand for a MASSIVE discount on the boat, with a copied/pasted list of every “defect” found on every survey, without regard to the same items being found on multiple reports. He demanded money for us to upgrade the boat to standards the boat had no requirement to meet, and he essentially expected us to adjust our price to bring the boat to “perfect” condition with almost every upgrade he thought appropriate, which is ludicrous on a twenty-three year old boat.

His demand was so sloppy that he asked for a price adjustment for the steaming light not working at least three different times, because it was reported on three different surveys which he clearly did not read carefully. Five figure demands for electrical work with no documentation to support it, etc. etc.

We went round and round, and the fellow refused to 1) document the reasons for his financial demands or clarify them, 2) consider any of our responses to his demands except to demand more from us, and 3) negotiate in good faith any of the terms of his demands.

By this point – the survey and sea trial – we’d once again moved most of our stuff off the boat, sold more gear, and where prepared to move off within a few days. Finally, the buyer agreed to a settled price in an e-mail in the middle of the night, but then rescinded the agreement a few hours later before our broker was even awake to see it. And he decided to completely walk from the deal even though we’d agreed to meet him roughly in the middle on his ludicrous, unjustified and unmerited demands.

Kathy and I were strongly of the opinion that he’d failed to honor the terms of his contract by refusing to adequately provide his response to the survey in writing by just giving us a sloppy cut & paste with no reasons for the demands, and we should have been able to keep his deposit. But we did not, and this once again cost of a lot time, aggravation, and not a small amount of money.

The worst was that we were back to square one, again, with no buyers and no prospects. Because of this deal we’d lost at least one potential buyer who didn’t want to wait and see if our deal went forward. There’s a lot more spitting and fuming I could do about that whole deal, but it’s not worth the energy. Even writing about it eight months later makes me angry.

Third Time’s the Charm

After several more months in the New Zealand winter, some price reductions, and more attempts to twitch the market and get some action on the boat, a guy who’d been watching her for some time made a move. It wasn’t an offer we wanted to jump on with enthusiasm, but after some back and forth discussions we decided to go ahead with it.

This time, we didn’t do a thing to get ready to move before the survey/sea trial. Because we’d had such a good survey done a few months before by one of the top surveyors in NZ, we were able to shortcut that process. The buyer wasn’t in NZ and couldn’t come to see the boat, but he found a surrogate to sea trial the boat and have a look over her to check the surveys against the real condition.

After two go-rounds and broken deals, we didn’t book a flight or pack a box or move anything off the boat. Finally, we got a green-light that the deal was going “non-refundable” when the buyer accepted the boat and his deposit wouldn’t be returned if he backed out, and then the real scramble began.

We’d realized that given the timing of the deal in late November/early December, we’d be able to spend the holidays with our family for the first time since 2019 if we moved fast. So we booked a flight as soon as we knew it was a “go” and started packing and boxing and selling the last of our unessential personal stuff.

We left the boat for our flight early in the morning on December 9th. We had to get to Auckland for a same-day Covid test at 9:30 in the morning thanks to new U.S. rules, before waiting all day in the airport to get on our 8:30pm flight out of Auckland. Thirty-nine hours later, we landed in Washington.

What’s Next?

After nine years on a boat with no fixed address, the life of a shiftless drifter has much appeal. To be honest, the idea of buying a house or getting a lease felt too much like nailing one foot to the floor than trying to keep on living.

We had two major objectives selling the boat and returning to the U.S.

  1. Be closer to family. With our adult children back stateside and our parents all in their eighties, we felt an overpowering need to be near everyone.
  2. Downsize and regroup. Evenstar is a wonderful boat, but we bought her for cruising with two teens. In our view, she’s much too large and expensive for a couple of empty-nesters.

Given those main objectives, how to live?

Easy really…keep cruising, but do it on land in an RV. Since our family is spread out all over the country, there really is no better solution but to move around from place to place to see them.

The last two months have been a mad scramble to set up life for land cruising. We’ve moved onto a fifth-wheel trailer and bought a truck to tow it with. We’re making plans to drive cross-country with Danielle when she graduates in May, spend the summer near Will, then come back to the East coast for the holidays with family again.

We spent our first month over the holidays freezing our backsides off at a campground in Virginia – learning how to live on an RV during an unexpected blizzard that knocks out power for a week of below freezing temperatures was an education!

Yes, it’s a rather large truck.

Now we’re in Florida, enjoying the warmth and working out the kinks in our new lifestyle. RV life is quite different from cruising under sail, but there are many, many similarities, too. We plan to give it at least a year to make sure it’s want we want for a while.

It’s an Ending, but it’s not THE Ending

The Wheel of Time has neither endings or beginnings…

The next few years we see as more of a hiatus from cruising than an end to cruising and sailing forever. It’s very, very strange not having a boat for the first time in over twenty years. It’s odd not to hear the lapping of waves or the clicking of shrimp on the hull.

But it’s also good to be there for our families, and we’re enjoying the time together.

Some day – maybe in five years, maybe in ten – we hope to head out again for the horizon. For now, there’s a lot to see on the roads in North America, and more memories to make with our families.

The future of this blog is more in question. I probably will still take pictures and write stories about our travels, but it’s a very, very different thing. And we don’t own the boat anymore.

But I can still point the rig at the equator and drive when it gets too damned cold, so we have that going for us!

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Of Failed Boat Sales and Mislaid Plans

On Mar 22nd, 2021 Published By B.J.

I’ve not updated the blog in well, forever, because life has been…mundane with not very much sailing.

We’ve been in New Zealand since before the pandemic, and life here has been mostly normal since the virus isn’t out of hand. Weekly poker games, lunches with friends, boat work, and other typical non-adventures don’t make for high adventure and compelling blog content.

We had a few interesting things happen though, with an almost sale of the boat which fell through and of course lots of boat work.

Sold…not Sold

As we announced about a year ago, we’re selling Evenstar to take a hiatus from cruising for a few years. We had her listed with a broker just as the pandemic broke out, and her listing languished. The problem wasn’t so much the lack of interest in the boat. There was plenty of that. But the inability to come see the boat was a deal killer.

As a matter of pure chance, our broker allowed our listing to lapse, and a fellow came walking down the dock admiring boats. One thing led to another, and a month later we had a contract to sell the boat to a local sailor.

Such a deal is fraught with challenges, and that we were selling the boat without a broker made it that much more difficult. A few issues include:

  • Currency risks. We wanted to be paid in U.S. Dollars; the buyer had all his money in New Zealand dollars.
  • Importation. Evenstar is not a New Zealand boat, and for her to live in NZ she would need to be imported and duties paid. Due to how NZ law works, it’s cheaper to import her before she’s sold, but that means we have to do it.
  • Paperwork & Lawyers. Evenstar’s ownership documentation is all in U.S. jurisdiction, and would need to be changed to New Zealand. NZ authorities and the buyer need assurance all loans and liens are paid off, and the title is clear. This means lawyers.
  • Surveys, inspections, and negotiations. As much as sailors slag on yacht brokers, competent brokers DO perform many useful functions. Not only do they smooth the above paperwork, they also act as a buffer between buyer and seller when sorting out differences of opinion regarding a survey outcome.

That last…”sorting out differences of opinion regarding a survey outcome” may have been key to keeping our deal afloat. Alas, it was not to be.

Without publicly airing laundry over the whole affair, suffice to say that we disagreed with the factual inaccuracies and speculative assertions made in the survey. We trusted our knowledge of the boat, its condition, its capabilities and everything we’ve learned about her in fifteen years. The buyer trusted a surveyor who couldn’t find the start battery or properly count the number of life rafts on board.

Those differences of opinion proved insurmountable. The survey wasn’t without merit. It highlighted one issue we’ve since dealt with and brought to our attention a few potential issues we could proactively avoid in the future.

Pre-sale madness.

One key part of the deal was the dates. The seller wanted to get a full Kiwi summer out of his new boat, which meant a closing before Christmas. This was understandable, and we did our best to accommodate this even though it would cost us some money and a lot of work, though we didn’t relish the prospect.

But what madness ensued! We’ve owned Evenstar for fifteen years and lived on her the last eight. We have no other home, and we keep only a few things in storage back in the U.S. Everything is with us. And the pandemic did not afford Danielle a chance to go through her stuff properly and move out of the boat.

But we had a plan. We’d get a storage unit and move everything we were taking back to the U.S. with us there, then ship it back once the smoke cleared. Eight years of cruising meant a ton of gear and equipment on board, not all of which would convey with the boat. So while sorting and discarding, we were also cataloging and selling a wide variety of tools, gear, duplicate (and triplicate and quadruplicate) spares, and most things of value to world cruisers but not necessarily to a coastal NZ sailor.

And when the survey rolled around, we’d pretty much succeeded. Almost everything but our basic living needs was off the boat. We’d reserved some gear in storage since our plan was to buy a motor home to tour New Zealand for the remaining months we could stay. We’d even found one, put a deposit on it, and cleared the electrical and self containment certificates on it.

And then it all blew up.

Post Sale Letdown

Of course, the deal melting down was an immense disappointment. We got lucky on a few things, like getting our deposit back on the motor home. But we still had most of our stuff in paid storage, a boat without a listing broker and off the market in the key spring and summer months, and our plans once again in ruins.

So what to do? Regroup, reorganize, and get the boat back on the market with a vengeance, of course!

Unfortunately, the boat deal blew up at our drop dead closing date in the week before Christmas, of course. The good news – we’d get to spend a final Christmas together in our home instead of…somewhere else. A hotel, a holiday park on a camper? Who knew? But we were feeling pretty unsocial by then, and a quiet holiday at home was just the thing.

The bad news is that much of New Zealand shuts down from the week before Christmas until about the second week of January. So the boat work we wanted to do to help re-enter the for sale market had to wait. We couldn’t get a callback for a quote on anything until well after the new year, never mind get scheduled for a haul out and work.

Living in a Van, Down by the River

The first step was to address the one legitimate finding in the survey – a weeping from the crack between the hull/keel joint. Water coming from there when the boat is hauled can be a sign of trouble, and could not be ignored. After consulting several reliable expert sources, we determined that we needed to torque the keel bolts.

With an externally ballasted boat like Evenstar, the keel (19,800 lbs of lead) is held to the hull with a number of strong bolts. They bed these rather aggressively in the lead and attach to the hull at a lattice of reinforced strong points. But in essence, ten tons of lead spends its life hanging off the bottom of the boat.

After twenty-three years and many thousands of miles, some flexing and loosening in the joint and bolts is normal. In theory, torquing the bolts a little is easy – put on a wrench and whack it down tight.

In practice, the bolts are under all the tanks and only a couple of them can even be seen, never mind tightened, without moving the tanks. This turns a mundane task (tightening a bolt) into a more complex feat of engineering, since Evenstar has two water tanks and two fuel tanks over the bolts.

When we could finally talk with a yard, we figured it would take about two weeks with the boat out of the water to sort out the keel bolts. The surveyor had suggested the entire keel needed to be removed, and the joint inspected – a massive and expensive undertaking. To us this seemed akin to cracking a patient’s chest open to check out a heart murmur. It just wasn’t needed until we determined there were bigger problems.

Life on the Hard

I think I’ve discussed the little joy that is “life on the hard” in a sailboat. Out of the water, you can’t use the boat’s heads, sinks, or refrigeration systems. You can stay on board, but life is a nuisance since you’re climbing up and down ladders to get to the toilets and you have to cook and do dishes in the marina’s kitchen facility (if there is one!).

But this project would disrupt the interior of the boat. Not only would we have no food storage, cooking, washing or toilets, we wouldn’t even have a floor. Or stairs down into the boat. Or even a little ridge of wood to get a toehold on when lowering yourself into the boat like Spider-Man or some thief sneaking past a security system.

Life aboard would be impossible. Two weeks or more at an AirBnB or hotel were in our future, plus an awful lot of eating out. There had to be a way around this.

The Little Blue Van

The solution came to us in one of those “Kath, you’re probably going to hate this idea” moments. (She really does hate it when I say that…)

Get a campervan.

It seems obvious now, but facing a few thousand dollars in hotel rooms and dining out, why not just buy a little campervan and sleep in the boat yard? That is free, and you don’t even need to climb down a ladder to pee at night. When it was all done we could sell it, and even if we took a ding on the price, it wouldn’t be worse than 2-3 weeks in a hotel and dining out daily in Whangarei.

But the bonus was that after the boat project…you have a campervan! A self-contained camper in New Zealand is a license to “freedom camp” or stay in many cool places for nothing or next to nothing. We’d already joined the NZ Motor Caravan Association when we almost bought that motor home, so we were all set.

All we had to do was find a suitable van. Easy-peasy.

We did a LOT of driving before we found our current van. There were some adventures, like the van we drove where smoke started pouring out of the seat under my butt during the test drive.

“It doesn’t usually do that,” the seller said.

I certainly hope not. Turns out that when I moved the seat back, the metal pan under the seat shorted out the house battery terminals. The seller was shorter than me and never moved the seat…

We also had a terrifying incident where a child hit US while we were test driving a van. I was driving slowly through a residential neighborhood in Auckland when I saw a flash out of the corner of my eye. A boy on a bike came flying out of a blind driveway behind a bush as we cruised past. He smacked right into the side of the van. Fortunately, he was OK and his mother was far more annoyed at him (“What are you going in the road like that for? We told you not to go in the road like that!”) than at me for driving the vehicle he smacked into.

But two trips to Tauranga and beyond and back again, and we finally found a van.

The Work

We did a few things to the boat when she was on the hard. After reviewing what we went through during the false-start sale, we’d decided on a few cosmetic upgrades to the boat and repairing the hull-keel joint. And any time the boat is out of the water, you do things. It’s easier to find a broken through-hull or other problem out of the water than in. And much less exciting.

Keel Bolts and Torque

The keel bolt project went off without a hitch, and we felt 100% confident that we’d done the right thing.

First, we had to get the table and floors up. We did that before the yard guys started work. No sense paying yard rates for work we could do ourselves.

Next, the tanks had to come up. We’d emptied all but the fuel tank, then the yard pumped the fuel out. The water tanks and secondary fuel tank all came up without a hitch. The keel bolts we could see all looked fantastic – shiny, clean, and no rust or wear. Preliminary torquing took less than a quarter of a turn to get to factory specification.

The main fuel tank was a bit of a hassle. A wire conduit across the middle of it meant it couldn’t be removed without disconnecting those wires, which is a major hassle since they ran for and aft, and we did not know which wire was which. Tracing the wires and disconnecting could add days of labor to the project.

From what I could see, there was enough room to slide the tanks if a few more things were disconnected. So that’s what they did – slid the tank about two feet aft to give access to the bolts underneath it. Not easy access though – engineer had to be suspended upside down from a chain fall to get to the last of them.

While this was going on, the seam between the hull and keel was ground out and the surface near the seam sanded to the underlying material (fiberglass or lead). We watched to look for seepage through this clean opening, and there was none.

Based on this, we concluded the weeping liquid we saw after the boat was hauled had come in from the outside into the seam and was leaking back out, it did not from inside the boat. To further test this, once they torques the bolts, the engineers filled the bilge to the top with freshwater. Not a drop came out the seam.

In the end, the bolts need to be turned a quarter turn – not very much – to reach the specification we got from Hallberg-Rassy. The seam was re-sealed with epoxy and glass, and prepped for painting.

Other Projects

We were not idle when the boat was being ripped apart down below. We’d determined a few things needed to be done to help the curb appeal of the boat, and to pre-empt further speculation from confused surveyors on the next deal. And with the boat out of the water, there were other tasks to accomplish.

The most visible thing we did was replace all the lenses in the port windows. This is something which could have been done when we bought the boat, and the windows only got more crazed and clouded over the years. When we were first hauled, Kathy and I pulled all the lenses off and drove them to a guy in Auckland to re-glaze.

We also checked and worked every through hull, and replaced one we didn’t like the look of. (To be fair, the surveyor didn’t like it either, but it was above the waterline and still turned – it took half an hour and cost about $35 NZD to fix.)

Some areas of the teak were looking more weathered than the rest, and a few boards had cracked. We got a woodworker from the yard to replace those boards and cut some seams for re-caulking. Even with regular maintenance, a teak deck is going to need some work after twenty-three years. But whatever we can do to make it look better helps.

I also undertook a few minor underwater repairs, cleaning up some screw holes. I filled them in the past, but quickly and at the last minute when I spotted them. So I drilled them out and filled them with thickened epoxy instead of the rubber bedding compound I’d used the first time.

Finally, we painted the whole bottom again. This is unfortunate, since we only got a year out of the last job and we’d spent some extra money on high quality paint. But ablative bottom paint requires a boat to move from time to time, and a year in a marina riding out the pandemic did it no favors. But the keel needed painting anyway, so it was time.

So What’s Next?

As I type this, I’m riding across the Cook Strait on the Bluebridge ferry, with our little blue van sitting on the deck outside. Kathy and I are headed to South Island for some much needed time away from boat work, buyers, and teak goo.

Before we left, we secured a new broker. This guy wanted to do a professional photo shoot, taking out a drone to get shots of the boat from all angles and under sail.

Getting ready for a photo shoot was…wait for it…a lot of work. Cleaning, fixing, polishing. The guy cutting teak seems kept making more holes, and we had to fill them with teak caulk.

Before we hauled out, we’d replaced all the interior reading light fittings (ten!), and with the new, clear window lenses the inside of the boat really pops. Of course, now you have to watch what you wear in the saloon when you’re in a marina, because you can see through the windows like they aren’t there…but I digress.

The photo shoot was the target we sprinted for…then Auckland went into a lockdown the night before the first try. A week later, the lockdown lifted, and we tried again. And boy, were the results worth it – check out these pictures.

If you want to see them all, including the interior and deck shots, check out the broker’s for sale listing.

For us now, we’re headed off for some adventure for what seems like the first time in forever. Living in a small campervan is…interesting. To those who can’t envision living in the tight space of a boat, imagine living in space that we boat-dwellers find awkward and tight! But it’s good practice, since we have no interest in returning to a fixed address once the boat finally does sell.

So you can look forward to maybe some interesting travel posts. Maybe we’ll get you some mountains, glaciers, and a penguin or two!

Posted in bottom paint, broken things, Camping, for sale, maintenance, projects | 3 Comments

Goodbye, Little Friend

On Jun 18th, 2020 Published By B.J.

When I first saw a Portland Pudgy at a boat show, I didn’t know what to make of it. I thought it was kind of ugly, and had a good laugh about it with the friends I was with. But I came from that initial unflattering impression all the way to buying one and loving the boat.

This week, we bid goodbye to this trusty, well loved and used friend.

Our brand new Pudgy sitting on the shop floor, waiting for pickup.

We bought the boat over a decade ago to have a “kid’s car” for our two young sailors to be able to get off the boat and explore on their own. Though both kids liked the boat and used it, Will developed a passion for it and sailed it for hundreds of hours and over a thousand miles over the time he was cruising with us.

But he left for college in 2015,and now Danielle has been off at school for two years as well. Except for a few weeks when we had crew with us last year, the Pudgy was seeing little or no use.

Will graduated and settled into a job in Anacortes, Washington. He’s bought his own boat, a Capri 22, which he’s been racing and cruising all around his local waters. He’d love to have the Pudgy for a tender, and we’d love to send it to him. We’d hoped to sail Evenstar back to the U.S. and visit him in Washington.

But with our plans to sell the boat and our inability to leave New Zealand with the current global crisis, the odds of us making it to the U.S. before we find a buyer look slim. The Pudgy has been weighing on our minds; because of the deep emotional attachment to the boat we didn’t want to just sell it if we could get it back. But the cost to ship her back to the U.S. is nuts; even though she’s a solid boat, the cost to ship it to the U.S. is better saved for a new boat.

The other day though, I was walking down the dock with a friend and he mentioned he was “looking for a little rowing or sailing dinghy for his son.” His boy is about the same age Will was when we got the Pudgy.

The solution seemed obvious.

We talked it over, and we thought the idea of selling the Pudgy to another family boat with a young sailor was much more appealing than scrambling to sell her or give her away at the last minute if we found a buyer for Evenstar.

The second we took her off the bow and put her in the water, the Pudgy started attracting attention again. Will always got a lot of questions about the boat everywhere he sailed, and in this part of the world I don’t think there’s another one. By the time our buyers decided to go ahead with her, neighbors had already told me they wanted the boat if the first buyer didn’t!

Poster child.

There are so many good memories associated with this little boat for our family, and it will always be specially linked to our son. He’s sailed with sea lions, seen a sea turtle larger than the boat, handled it in 30+ knot squalls, gone on camping trips to islands, ferried friends around the harbor, and sailed, rowed, and power it so many miles. He was literally the ‘poster child’ for the Portland Pudgy, appearing on the boat on their web sight and product literature.

 

As we bid adieu to the most-traveled Portland Pudgy in the world, we wish her new owner many happy future memories!

 

On the trailer coming home from the factory.
Reefed in heavy breeze in Panama.
Tahaa in the Society Islands
Camping in Australia. Note the Wallaby.
Camping in Australia’s Gold Coast
Sunset on Stradbroke Island camping.
Camping in Australia
In front of the campsite in New Zealand
Seal Bay, Maine
On the factory floor.
Tahaa
Coming back from exploring on Toau, Tuamotus
Toau, Tuamotus
A wet trip back from camping on an island in the Tobago Cays
Beach camping in Australia
Will and Kathy heading off for Boxing day camping.
Toau
Poster child.
Our brand new Pudgy sitting on the shop floor, waiting for pickup.

If we’re getting this mushy and sentimental about sailing off the kids’ dinghy, selling Evenstar is going to involve ugly-crying.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Goodbye, Little Friend

Teak Bungs in the Time of COVID-19

On May 1st, 2020 Published By B.J.

It’s been a while since my last bombshell update, but surprisingly little has happened. I mean, we’ve returned to New Zealand, put the boat up for sale, moved into a marina, and been locked down for a month.

But other than that, not much has happened. At least that’s what it feels like.

The world is on fire, but that’s a totally different story than what we’ve been up to. What we’ve been up to mostly is lying low, making Zoom calls, eating too much ice cream, and making the boat look prettier one small step at a time.

Updates on the Boat

In the last post we made the decision to sell the boat. At the time, we hadn’t fully researched the local tax implications of listing it in NZ but were concerned about some of the language in our clearance paperwork. Since January we consulted with some brokers. We spoke to a U.S. based broker than had no interest in selling her for us, and had a couple of conversations with NZ brokers who filled us in on the guidelines for selling her here in NZ.

So we went ahead and listed her.

A week or so after the listing hit Yachtworld, New Zealand closed down completely.

Before then, the borders were tightening, and by the time the listing was up any foreign visitors to New Zealand would require a two week self isolation period, but very shortly afterwards even that wasn’t an option.

Even travel within New Zealand has been restricted, and with the isolation rules in effect we wouldn’t be allowed to have anyone on the boat for a showing anyway.

So nothing has changed in her status, outside of being officially for sale.

The Work List

There’s always a work list. Always. The question is, how urgent is it?

After showing our boat to a couple of brokers, we realized that while Evenstar is rock-solid and well equipped to leave for Fiji tomorrow, there were some things to deal with from an aesthetic perspective to approve the “curb appeal” of the boat to prospective buyers. From worn cushions and missing teak bungs, to flaking bright-work and rusty ground tackle, a lot needed to be tidied up.

None of it would affect the boat’s ability to cruise, but would affect her ability to be sold. So we began a full court press to get the boat up to a higher aesthetic level than full time liveaboards at anchor are ever used to. In the window between making the call to sell the boat and NZ shutting down we managed to complete a few things, including:

  • Replace the anchor chain, since the old one was rusty and we could not get it re-galvanized (longer story there).
  • Re-galvanized the anchor.
  • Re-upholstered the saloon settees, chairs, and nav station
  • Re-upholstered the cockpit cushions
  • Cut, buff and wax the hull and topsides
  • Clean up and polish a lot of brass and stainless steel
  • Started sanding and cleaning the brightwork
  • Prepared to replace many missing teak bungs (getting tools and teak organized)

We did all this with a “let’s get it all done yesterday” mentality, because we wanted to get pictures ready for the brokerage listing as soon as possible, and have the boat ready to show. Some of these we did ourselves, some we hired out. But in very short order we got the boat ready to take some of the nice pictures you see in the listing and on the “About Evenstar” page now.

She really is looking good.

But there’s always more to do.

Teak Bungs

As you may have guessed from the title, I’m a little fixated on teak bungs. Those are the little plugs of wood that fill the screw-holes through the teak deck. On our boat, the screws are not structural, they’re only put in when the teak is installed to hold it while the bedding cures.

When I re-caulked the teak a decade ago, I replaced a lot of bungs. And every bung I didn’t replace got sanded, making them thinner. Since about a week after I finished that job, those old bungs have been slowly popping out. I knew this and watched it happen, but I didn’t replace them over the years. So in January, at a rough count, I estimated I had about 2,200 +/- to replace.

They screws don’t do anything, but without the bungs they look terrible. So the goal of this project is to take a deck which looks like this:

  

With a deck that looks like this:

Eventually, those sanded light spots will fade into the gray color and match the deck, and you won’t even be able to tell the bungs were missing in the spots I didn’t screw up too badly.

It’s a lot of work, because I have to do everything from cutting my own plugs from a teak board on a drill press I bought just for the job, to drilling out the old holes, tapping in the bungs, cutting them, and hand sanding them down to blend into the existing wood. It’s a slow job, but I try to do a little every day.

Sometimes, I even succeed. Unfortunately, with the lockdown preventing any showings for at least six weeks some of the urgency has been lost. My “If I can do 100 bungs a day I can finish this in three weeks” idealism hasn’t quite survived contact with the teak.

Varnish & Brightwork

As I type this, my head is gradually clearing from the smell of varnish fumes and paint thinner wafting down the companionway from the cockpit. It’s a cheap rush, which is good since the only way to replenish the hard liquor is to arrange delivery to the boat.

Kathy has her own special ongoing Herculean labor – cleaning up the bright work.

Varnishing bright work (the shiny, pretty wood on a boat) is a job which requires patience, care, attention to detail, dedication, an eye for aesthetics, and a willingness to do the same job 7-10 times in a row before it’s done. Which is why I’m better suited to drilling holes in the deck and banging teak bungs with a mallet while Kathy tackles this.

We don’t have much brightwork, but it’s enough so that it can get to looking terrible if you don’t keep up on the varnish. I’ve give you three guesses at how many varnish touch-ups I’ve done in the last few years.

Unfortunately, most of the brightwork is around the cockpit, essentially the front door of the boat. So a prospective buyer may walk down the dock and be awed by the shiny hull and topsides, in bliss over the anchor and chain, astounded by the lack of missing bungs in the deck, and still give a resounding “blech” at the brightwork before they ever get a chance to get blown away by the spiffy new upholstery.

It’s a long process. A proper varnish job takes at least seven coats and preferably ten to get that deep, rich, glossy shine. Each coat takes a day to dry (or more if it’s cooler), and must be sanded between coats and cleaned of all dust and residue. So you can’t just sit down and do it all at once, you have to keep at it a little bit every day for a couple of weeks to do it all properly.

It also means we’ve had our companionway disassembled and been unable to completely seal the saloon, which is a special treat as we head into fall with cooler nights. But it will be worth it, as it’s starting to look really nice.

Life Under Level 4 Lockdown

New Zealand has done a bang-up job dealing with COVID-19, and have nearly eliminated the virus in the wild. This was done by shutting the country down almost completely. Restrictions on regional travel, which businesses can open (groceries and gas stations and a few other essentials), and very strong guidelines on social isolation and distancing have made a huge difference.

But not without a cost. Costs to the freedom to move, costs to the local businesses and service providers. But the people here are resilient and have taken this seriously, and the results show it.

Marina Life

Prior to the shutdown, we made the decision to come up to the Town Basin Marina in Whangarei for a couple of days once the boat was relaunched. We kind of had to, since the anchor was still at the galvanizing shop. But as we scrambled on our boat preparation tasks, we realized that since we’re serious about selling the boat, staying in the marina for a while would make that easier. It would make getting the work done easier, waste less time on thing like shopping, food, getting water and so on, and as a result give us more time for boat tasks. (yay!)

So we decided to hang out for a month or two more in the marina. This is way outside our normal pattern of behavior, as we prefer to anchor out. But it turned out to be a lucky decision for us, as the shutdowns were announced a short while later.

Cruisers are ordinarily a social lot, but “social distancing” was becoming all the rage. The local VHF radio net had shut down shortly after we arrived, but I decided I needed to talk to people, in particular at this time since information sharing is so important. So I re-started the net myself, the first morning shouting in the void with no one hearing. But in short order, we had participants, volunteers to take a few days as net controller, and a daily lively net.

We also set up a Facebook group for all the liveaboards on lockdown here, which proved to be a good resource for not only information exchanges, but socialization, cooperating, and staying in touch when we aren’t allowed to host other people on our boats. A couple of other boats have stepped up to receive packages and mail, act as the bank for exchanging laundry coins, and help people out with tools and other needs.

Once or twice a week we’ve even been having “Sundowners” via Zoom, sharing stories and laughs via video conference instead of dinghying over to each other’s boats.

I’m glad we ended up in a marina for this; it’s been more than just convenient being able to walk to groceries. We feel connected to the community even if we’ve not been within six or eight feet of another person in weeks.

Lockdown Rules

The lockdown rules for us have been less onerous than for the locals, I am sure. We don’t have any family here, and the friends we have we’ve made since arriving. We bought a car, but have nowhere to go.

So the rules that really affect the Kiwis about funerals, weddings, social gatherings, work, and play don’t hit us as hard because most of them don’t apply.

The New Zealand government has been fantastic through this. Back in February, when all this started, we reached out to an immigration lawyer because we were nervous, to understate the situation. Our visas were due to expire by June, but the handwriting was already on the wall that most of the South Pacific countries would be closing their borders soon.

The nightmare scenario would be having to leave New Zealand because of visa issues, but have literally nowhere within thousands of miles where we could safely go.

But then we received an e-mail from immigration telling us that ALL tourist visas were getting extended automatically until mid September. They didn’t have to do that, and we appreciate it. It was an incredibly compassionate gesture, and not one I’d expect my own government to make for trapped travelers in our situation.

There’s still some stress over what happens if the South Pacific doesn’t open by August, but we felt a huge weight lift from our shoulders when we got that notice.

But for now, we wait until the alert level lowers and see what develops. We’ve got a secure spot for the next few months, but beyond that there’s not much we can do.

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Changes in Latitudes…

On Jan 21st, 2020 Published By B.J.

We’re mere weeks away from a return to the boat from a long, unwilling exile from home. We arrived in the U.S. back in July of last year, expecting a return to the boat the first week of October after helping my parents move into their new apartment. Almost six months and many wrecked plans later, our return to the boat approaches.

It’s been an interesting six months, being back in the U.S. Spending the holidays with family was nice. Being close to our parents and children for a few months was also good and enlightening. It’s also been stressful, expensive, and at times difficult. But there are some important takeaways.

All Good Things

After seven and a half years living on the boat, we’ve realized that we need to find an exit strategy and take a hiatus from long-distance cruising. We’re not talking about swallowing the anchor forever, but taking a break for a few years to downsize, be near family, and regroup for a different sort of cruising.

The Call of Family

The big lesson we learned here in the states for so long is that, despite how much we don’t really enjoy the land-bound life, we need to be closer to home and family. Closer sooner, not later.

We’ve got parents now in their late seventies and eighties. Though they do not need us daily, it’s clear that our presence helps. And we want the time with them. We enjoy the time with them. And there will be a time when they need us more and we want to be a short flight or drive away instead of halfway around the world.

In addition, our kids are getting settled into stateside life. Will is thrilled with how his career is taking off out in Washington, and Danielle has two more years of college in Pennsylvania, after which she’s likely to end up in the U.S. for work or graduate school. Neither of them are in any imminent danger of producing the ultimate anchor for cruisers – grandchildren – but we still want to be a part of their lives.

With all the people we care about so far away, something has to give.

The Practical Reality

Over a decade ago, I sat down and created a really complex spreadsheet (that’s a sample without real numbers at the link). Its intent was to plot out a “what-if” for the cruising lifestyle. To see if, in theory, the finances worked out to sell up and go sailing for as long as we could. If it would not work in theory, it could not work in practice. But if you could make a model that worked in theory, you’d have a chance of making it work in reality.

Despite some setbacks, fall-forwards, unexpected expenses and windfalls, and a lot of contact with reality, the basic tenets of the plan were surprising in their accuracy. It predicted a probable cash-crunch in 2019, when we would have had two kids in college if Will hadn’t done a three-year bachelor’s (fall-forward!). This, despite things like the house taking almost a year and a half to sell after we left (setback…). We’re there now, and it didn’t surprise us. We’d hoped to avoid it, but c’est la vie.

It wasn’t disaster or ruin in the model in all but the worse scenarios, but the odds of running out of money versus the odds of having enough to cruise forever seemed about even. It’s all about not touching the principle.

So we find ourselves now…somewhere in the middle. Someplace where we can exit gracefully and regroup now, or push it for a few more years sailing and hope for the best. We’re tending towards the more conservative approach with a controlled landing so we can take off again in a few year’s time.

Goodbye to an Old Friend

Evenstar has been our home for over seven years, keeping us safe traveling halfway around the world with our family and taking us on countless adventures since we first brought her home in 2006. But she’s too much boat for a cruising couple looking at our long-term plans. She’s a fantastic boat, tougher than we are. And she’s fast and a great sailer for a heavy boat. But not what suits us for the future.

It’s not sailing her that’s the issue, Kathy and I can handle her by ourselves. But as empty nesters we don’t need all that interior volume forward of the mast; a smaller boat will suit the sailing we’re thinking of long term. And a bigger boat means bigger bills. Everything costs more, from bottom paint to hauling. For the sake of our financial sanity, we have to step away from our dear friend and move to something smaller and different after we regroup.

We can’t put her up for sale yet (hear that, NZ tax guys!), but eventually we will have to part ways. It will be heartbreaking, but it must happen since we can’t store her. She’s a boat for adventures and crossing oceans, and we’re stepping back from that for a while.

The New and Revised Plan

As always, recorded in wet sand at low tide. But the new plan brings us back to the West Coast of the U.S. in late 2021, by way of Fiji, Hawaii, Alaska, Seattle and points between.

Christmas in Hawaii

The next stage is to move from New Zealand in April or May to the north and east, to set the stage for a move to Hawaii in October or early November. As always, our schedule is set by weather, seasons, and storm schedules.

As early as possible, we plan to sail to Fiji. From there, we will spend the next few months moving east and north against the prevailing winds in short hops. The plan is to get as far in those directions as we can by October, setting ourselves up for a run across the equator at the end of the northern cyclone season.

This could include stops in Samoa (regular and American), the northern Cook Islands (Suwarrow and Penrhyn), and maybe the Line Islands (Kiribati) if we can swing it. This is the fuzzy part of the plan, and depends on our ability to find weather windows, sail on favorable winds, and get east. East is more important than north.

This is a part of the world you will probably need to Google.

Wherever we end up in October, the plan is to position ourselves to make the trip to Hawaii before Thanksgiving and spend the holidays there.

Back in the U.S. of A.

From Hawaii, our intent is to check off a bucket list item and head to Alaska in May/June 2021 to spend the shortish Alaskan summer cruising the pristine waters looking for icebergs, bears and whales. We’d head to western Alaska and make the cruise east towards Canada, probably taking the Inside Passage down towards the Pacific Northwest by the fall.

From there, it’s sell the boat and figure out our plan for the next few years.

How the Future Shakes Out

It’s tough to say how the next few months or two years will finish. We may sail all the way to Washington state. We may struggle to head back the way we’re planning; it’s not a common way to do things. We may decide to change how we get back. Someone could even come along who wants to buy the boat out from under us before we get too far along the plan – we’d be okay with that, too.

As sad as it is to contemplate an end (for now) to cruising and giving up a boat we’ve loved for years, the future still holds exciting stuff. We know we don’t want to own a home and join the nine-to-five again, so longer term we’ll always be light of foot and on the move no matter what we do. And no matter what, we DID it, we got out, lived on a boat and sailed halfway around the world – something we’d dreamed of and planned for years. A dream that never happens for so many.

I can see us regrouping to get back out to see in a few years, spending our time between Maine and Trinidad so we can be close for family and (maybe some day) grandchildren. The next two years are the time that we can control the landing the way we want to, to leave the door open for future exploration and adventures.

It’s been a hell of a ride, and it’s still far from over.

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Remember Those Plans?

On Sep 29th, 2019 Published By B.J.

Not long ago, it seems like yesterday, I was bemoaning the fact that our entire plan for the next couple of years had been completely shot down in flames. And I waxed poetic about the fluid nature of cruising and how you need to be flexible.

And we sketched out another rough plan – head to New Caledonia and maybe Vanuatu before coming back to New Zealand. Sounds good, right?

Wrong.

Turns out the fickle gods that govern marine mechanical devices were not so down with that plan. Never mind the entities that safeguard the borders.

The Autopilot – Not Actually the Deal Breaker

We had a nice trip from Tauranga to the Bay of Islands. We had more wind than predicted, so we sailed most of the way and only had to motor the last couple of hours when the wind shifted on the nose and died.

As we motored, we picked up companions as a small pod of dolphins shadowed us, playing our bow wake and playing and splashing along for over an hour. Unfortunately, in the middle of this the autopilot died, so I didn’t get to watch them very much.

To make a long story brief, the binnacle control head shorted out and a new controller for our old autopilot couldn’t be had for love or money. Some obscenely expensive used ones were available from the other side of the world, but for that money it made more sense to replace the whole system. That was expensive, but easy and only took a day.

While we were doing the sea trial for the autopilot we ran across a family of Orcas!

While this was a setback that costs us a week or two, it’s not what really messed things up.

Steering Redux

We noticed in a routine check that the steering column we’d just spent a ton of time and money fixing in Tauranga was leaking oil and water. The repairs didn’t work.

This was a crushing blow. We were in the heart of winter. The walls were weeping from the cold and condensation, and we were going nowhere fast.

With another haul-out and long shore stay pending, we made some decisions.

Around this time my parents announced they were finally moving out of the house they’d lived in for thirty-five years. A while back I’d promised that when that finally happened I’d come back to help with the task.

Even if the repairs went quickly, we’d be pressed to find a weather window and sail to the tropics and still have enough time to make it worth the visit before we’d have to come back again. So we made the call to pull the boat in Whangarei and fly back to the U.S. for two months to help my parents get out of the house.

We’d come back in October – spring in New Zealand, spend a pleasant summer sailing back to South Island, when move on in April or May of next year.

Right.

Out of the Frying Pan

Things went well for the first few weeks. We changed Danielle’s flight back to college to match ours and had a nice visit with Will on the way to the east coast. We caught up with family, and started to help sort, pack and clean the house.

After a few weeks we started the Visa application for New Zealand, requesting eight months (of the maximum nine month visa length) so we could leave by the end of May. We knew we’d need chest X-Rays again, so we booked them for the first date we could.

Our first word back from NZ immigration was that we needed a report from the FBI because we’d be exceeding two years total from the FBI. This was now mid September, and we were scrambling to get ready for a short jaunt up to the east coast to see family.

I was getting concerned with the timing now, as we were only a few weeks from heading back to NZ. In my e-mails to immigration over the FBI issue and X-Ray timing, I asked if I could extend our request to June, just in case, since we’ve run into June in the past trying to leave New Zealand in the fall.

“We will only approve you for a four-month stay,” came the answer.

Let me repeat…

“We will only approve you for a four-month stay.”

Gut punch.

Involuntary Hiatus

Our flights back to New Zealand are October 3rd. Four months in New Zealand puts us in the middle of summer, or as it’s known in the tropics, “Cyclone Season.”

We ran afoul of New Zealand’s “nine months in eighteen” rule, where you can only be in country nine months out of every eighteen. Arriving as we did in March, we’d used five of our nine months up. We had no idea this rule existed as our prior visits to NZ did not cross this limit.

NZ can, with mechanical failures of emergencies, add another three months. But you can’t apply for it in advance and there’s no guarantee you’ll get it, so we have to plan on only four months.

When sailing from New Zealand your options are limited.

  • North, to the tropics. See “Season, Cyclone.”
  • West, to Australia
  • East, against the trades to French Polynesia

We won’t even talk about going South from NZ, even if the penguins wanted us…

North isn’t an option until April or May. We’ve been in Australia for the last two years. Not only do we really not want to go back (Sorry Oz, we love you but it’s time to move on) but we’re not even sure we can because we’ve been there so much of late. And we already know we don’t have the visas for French Polynesia.

So where does that leave us?

Here, back in the U.S. with no real way to reach our home until February.

Back in the EST

The moving truck came to my parent’s house yesterday, and they spent last night in their new apartment. It’s lovely, but a bit stuffed with boxes at the moment. But our job is done, I’ve handed it off to my sister to help with unpacking.  Though there’s lots to BE done, we can’t do much more.

So our plan, while we try not to dwell on being displaced and homeless for the next four months?

Our plan is to look on the bright side. Some bonuses include:

  • Holidays with one or both of the kids. In NZ, wouldn’t see either at Thanksgiving, and only Danielle at Christmas. We’re planning Thanksgiving with Danielle and my parents and Christmas with all four of us. Somewhere, location TBD.
  • We haven’t been in the U.S. for Thanksgiving since 2011. Do you know how hard it is to find a turkey in November outside the U.S.?
  • Nevermind how a turkey small enough to cook in an oven that can barely fit a loaf of bread. We’ve been roasting ours on the grill the last few years.
  • Time to write. There’s not much else for me to do, so with few distractions I can focus on the fiction and freelance work I’ve been ignoring so long.
  • The place we’ll be staying is only an hour and a half from a Skyline Chili. This is huge for someone who hasn’t lived in Cincinnati in thirty-five years.
  • I won’t have to get up at 4:00 a.m. on Monday mornings to watch football. I can watch the Bengals lose with Buffalo wings, nachos and beer like a normal football fan instead of black coffee and breakfast cereal.
  • Since we won’t be in New Zealand for six months, we didn’t need to drive to North Carolina for the chest X-Rays (don’t ask…)

On the downside, storing our boat on the hard for four more months is a huge unplanned expense. As is buying a car, changing flights, etc. etc. So we can’t be all “let’s rent an RV and go land cruising” since it would be wiser to put a few bucks back into the cruising kitty instead of burning them faster.

So we’re back on Eastern Standard Time for the next four months and still getting used to life in the USA again. There may not be many blog updates for a while, unless I play catch up.

About Those Orcas…

There were three. A large male, a smaller female, and a baby. We were inshore, less than half a mile from land on a casual cruise to adjust the autopilot when we spotted them between Russell and Paihia.

They came VERY close to the boat. We followed them around – keeping an appropriate distance – for over an hour as they swam back and forth.

The last picture isn’t a good picture, but it gives a sense of just how close they came to the boat. The mother and baby came over to check us out. They caught up to us from behind and cruised up right behind the boat. Close enough that they were almost under the davits.

In this picture, that swirl of water isn’t our wake, we were barely moving fast enough to maintain steering. If you look closely you can see the black form under the water and a tail.

 

Now and then we got a nice reminder why we do all this.

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Nerdvana III – Tours of the Rings

On Jun 30th, 2019 Published By B.J.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to New Zealand…more LOTR geek touring.

It started when Kathy an I went to Wellington for a day to fail to apply for our visas for French Polynesia. A visit to Weta Studios was always on our bucket list and we couldn’t go to Wellington without making time for it.

The Weta Cave

We had some initial disappointment when we learned that you can’t actually tour the Weta Studios. I guess hey’re always filming movies there and doing actual work. Instead, they’ve set up the Weta Cave tour, which is adjacent to the studios and intersects with some of the buildings.

It’s not a long tour – 45 minutes or so. But it you love movies – and in particular if you’re fond of the Lord of the Rings & Hobbit movies, it’s worth the time to take it.

We had no idea how many movies Weta had been involved with. Turns out I’ve seen over thirty of them.

Unfortunately you can’t take pictures on the tour, but they do provide some photo ops before and after.

The techniques and detail work they do there is simply amazing.They have the ability to create or re-create almost anything with 3D modelling, composite construction and painstaking painting and fine work. They even have a sword-smith on premises to make perfect swords for closeups.

Of particular interest to us was that both of our children were using some of the same 3D design and modelling tools they use in house – a tool called Rhino. Will uses it almost daily in his yacht design job, and Danielle learned as part of her digital art and 3D modeling course at Bucknell.

The Second Road Trip

With all of our problems with Evenstar and us getting stuck in Tauranga waiting for parts to arrive, we decided to take Danielle and go on a road trip. We were frustrated waiting around in AirBnBs and decided to just DO something rather than stew around the house and grumble about UPS and their inability to get a package through customs without punting it.

South to Wellington

Kathy and I spent one day in Wellington, and most of it was ruined by the pall cast over our failure in the French Embassy. We returned there with the boat for a week or so, but we didn’t really get to spend as much time seeing things as we wanted to. We knew Danielle would love Weta, so we decided to press on for Wellington and work our way back. We still had one of our crew members with us (Lauren) but she was departing halfway through and joined us for part of it.

So we took Danielle to Weta, then explored the town for some locations after an enormous breakfast at Americano’s with one of the best (read only, except for Denny’s) bottomless cups of filter coffee in New Zealand.

Mount Victoria & Flight from the Shire

Many locations around Wellington, both in the city and around it, were used in the LOTR movies (presumably some were used for the Hobbit movies too, but we didn’t much like those). Right smack in the middle of the city is Mount Victoria, a wooded park full of walking paths and trails with a stunning view from the top.

It’s also where they filmed a number of scenes around the flight from the shire, including the road scenes and the terrifying sequence where the Nazgül almost finds the hobbits as they cower and hide under the roots of a large, gnarly tree.

Most of this was filmed in Mt. Victoria park, though the tree was built and later removed so you can’t see the roots. But there still are trees like that along the paths, and you can feel the atmosphere and the lighting from the movie walking through the woods. The topography is obviously the same and  the dappling of the light similar even if it’s not so easy to find the exact spots since props have been removed and scenery restored.

The Hutt River

North of Wellington, the Hutt river was the site of several other scenes. One scene which annoyed purists like me (because it was 100% created for the movie) was when Brego the horse finds a sodden and unconscious Aragorn lying on the banks of the Anduin river. Aragorn dreams of Arwen Evenstar and imagines the horse starts sniffing his face and…

…it didn’t go the way it could have.

Our rental car’s GPS had a number of LOTR movie sites conveniently marked on the map for us. This location was on a very scenic river, with fast moving clear water and smoothed stone beaches.

The exact spot, as always, was a little difficult to pinpoint. Rivers run higher and lower, and clever camera angles show you different views. But the GPS doesn’t lie…

Lower Hutt & Rivendell

Outside the town of Lower Hutt lies the Kaitoke regional park where many of the scenes in Rivendell were filmed.

The Greater Wellington Regional Council was wise enough to commemorate the filming and preserve it with several signs and plaques and maps which show where certain scenes were filmed.

The maps and posts and guides are more helpful than many of the locations which are barely visible any more. This one even had Peter Jackson! Even if his face in that kiosk is more evocative of Jack Nicholson coming through the bathroom door in The Shining than any of Jackon’s cameos in the LOTR.

 

Many of the scenes like this were filmed on sets built in this area.

After the filming was complete, all of the sets were removed and the sites restored, as they did in every location. The trees are still there though, an someone left a scale model of an arch to leave as a reminder.

 

Nerdvana IIa – Confession Time

If you read these posts, you’d think that between our last LOTR trips and now we’d done no other movie sites. That’s not completely true. In March of 2018 Kathy and I came to New Zealand for a week to clear out visas back in Australia and celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary.

While we were there, we visited Arrowtown and the Ford of Bruinen where the Nazgül almost catch an injured Frodo only to be rescued by the combined magics of Arwen (Glorfindel, dang it!!) and Gandalf.

We also came really, really close to finding the canyon where the Argonath was filmed, somewhere near the Kawarau Suspension bridge.

Anyone who has spent any time in New Zealand or around Kiwis wouldn’t be surprised for a second to learn that bungee jumping was basically invented, at least commercially, by jumping off this perfectly nice bridge into a terrifying gorge.

Anyone who has spent any significant time around us wouldn’t be surprised to learn that we never found the Argonath, but we did find Chard Farm winery which was quite delightful and distracted us from the mission at hand.

We don’t know how many more movie sites we’ll be able to take in. We’ve seen many of the ones you can reach without a helicopter. But it’s been a fantastic way to see New Zealand, because every time you look for a movie site you find three other cool things on the way worth seeing.

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Firmly Etched in Wet Sand…

On Jun 8th, 2019 Published By B.J.

…below the high water mark.

That’s how I generally describe our plans and how we make them. But sometimes it’s nice to actually KNOW what you will be doing, and it is also required to know when you are applying for things like visas and permits.

The Original Plan. Sort of.

Once upon a time, we had a plan which was “Sail to Australia and New Zealand before Will leaves us for college.” We mostly did that, Will went to college, and we were in Australia trying to redefine our plans for the future.

From Australia three things usually happen to cruisers. Some sail on West and continue around the world to complete a circumnavigation. These will often times go by way of South East Asia, and take some time cruising there before moving on. Some – a fair number – put the boat up for sale and “swallow the anchor” as we put it in the cruising community. Stop cruising and grow roots on land again. And a smaller group decides to cross the Pacific back the other way. The reason few do this is because it’s against the prevailing winds, currents, et.c

But that didn’t stop us from setting this as our goal. With our kids headed to the U.S. (one off to college in Pennsylvania, one now living and working full time as a yacht designer in Anacortes, WA), and our parents reaching the age where they will be making some life changes and maybe want our crap out of their basements, heading back towards the U.S. seems like a decent goal.

Not TO the U.S., but close enough to spend part of the year sailing in the states if we wanted to, and close enough to be withing a 6-8 hour flight that costs less than $1,000 instead of the current madness that is 3-4 times that in both time and money.

Back across the Pacific seemed most expedient. So we thought Australia to New Zealand, then NZ on to French Polynesia, Tahiti to Hawaii, and Hawaii to Alaska or the Pacific Northwest. Lot’s of sailing, lots of foul wind, but it would put us in striking range of annoying our children in a year or two.

 

Reality Intrudes

After a year or so of false starts and roughly seven months of traveling outside Australia and away from the boat, we finally got our act together and left Australia. The trip to New Zealand was slow but uneventful.

Things didn’t start going south until we got to New Zealand. First, a few things started breaking. While this is normal on a boat, it would be nice, for once, if they would all break at the same time like the Bluesmobile at the end of the Blues Brothers, rather than one failure after another, so as soon as you fix one thing something else stops you dead. Trying to move on with the agenda makes you look like Spongbob trying to run with his laces untied.

While I will not go into detail on this post, we’ve been dealing variously with problems with the batteries, the engine, also the engine, the rudder post, the watermaker, and the wind generator. Though two of those were somewhat self inflicted. Yes, there is another blog post on broken things coming.

But that wasn’t what actually untied our shoelaces before we started our sprint to French Polynesia. That was the French Embassy in Wellington.

Bureaucracy Rules

In order to spend more than three months in French Polynesia, an American must apply for a “Long Stay” visa. Since French Polynesia is roughly the size of western Europe with hundreds of islands and lots of water, and given the specifics about regional seasons and weather, three months is a really short time to spend there before moving on to Hawaii. It would have us sailing right into the north Pacific cyclone season. Largely considered an unwise move, by the way.

If one wants to apply for a long stay visa, you have to make an appointment with the French Embassy. They prefer it if you do this from your home country, but you can do it from another country under some conditions. If applying from the U.S. or Australia, you may not apply for the visa more than ninety days ahead of time. For us, this made applying from New Zealand the sensible thing to do, since we were hoping to sail from New Zealand in April, and would be leaving Australia in January. Since it can take four to eight weeks to process the visa, applying in January from Oz wasn’t going to work.

So we sailed to New Zealand, then made an appointment to apply for our visas at the earliest possible date. We booked a ferry from Picton, NZ to Wellington and planned to spend the night and havbe our appointments in the morning.

The Hitch

It wasn’t until I was talking to the woman at the French embassy that I learned that rules for their embassy were different. She told me I should have applied “six months ago” from Australia or the U.S. when we were there. But the important thing was that she would not process our visas until we could provide “proof of residence” (which I’d never be able to get) or at least, at a minimum, had been in New Zealand for three months.

She absolutely refused to accept our Visa applications, effectively destroying the plan we’d had in place for the past year in minutes.

Maybe it was For the Better

What a disaster. All of our plans up in smoke. After a year of working towards this plan, we were rudderless again (more on literal rudderlessness later) with no definite plan.

We’d taken on some crew with us for the passage to French Polynesia, and that plan was dashed. With our plans wrecked, we eventually ended up parting ways with the crew, for a lot of reasons I won’t get into. Suffice it to say that we weren’t able to deliver on what we promised once it became clear the boat needed some more repairs on top of the visa failure.

But as we spent more time in New Zealand, we also discovered a few things more wrong with the boat. Had we found these things en route to French Polynesia or once we got there it would have been much more difficult to sort.

In the middle of all this, Danielle was supposed to re-join us after the end of her first year in college. Fortunately, we found out about the French visas before we booked her travel and were able to send her to New Zealand instead of Tahiti.

What We Found

I’m going to summarize here. I could (and probably will) wax long, poetic and technical about the problems, the problems getting the problems fixed, and the eventual solutions in another post. But for now, I will list them.

  • In Picton, I managed to short out my last good battery cell sensor. New ones were caught in customs for weeks. We could not charge the batteries safely during this time.
  • While in Tauranga we decided to get the boat power washed before heading north to comply with Mediterranean Fan Worm protocols. On the way back from the short haul, we noticed water shooting out of the engine’s raw water pump. We also saw penguins on the trip, so that was kind of cool.
  • Shortly after this, Kathy noticed water weeping in around the rudder post. This was potentially a Very Bad Thing. This also can not be fixed in the water.

    It’s hard to make a case this isn’t worse than it looks. But it actually wasn’t. But it wasn’t good, either.

  • We had an oil leak in the engine we knew about. It was getting worse so we decided to get it checked out while the boat was out of the water for the rudder.
  • Turns out the Turbocharger was seized.
  • As part of the turbo replacement, we had the aftercooler inspected. The core was no good, and the case was corroded through.
  • In a completely unrelated series of events, the watermaker, which was wonky in Australia but worked when we tried to get it serviced, packed it in.
  • Finally, I somehow managed to order the wrong set of replacement blades/upgrade kit for the wind generator when we were back in the states without realizing it. We’d taken it down for the haulout for the rudder and were planning to replace the bearings and install new carbon fiber blades that would offer quieter performance and better charging. But a part was missing from the order.

None of these things individually would stop us. But one of the troubles we’ve got is that with a twenty-two year old boat (and engine), large expensive parts like turbo chargers and aftercooler cores are not lying around in inventory. Not even in the U.S., never mind in New Zealand. The same applies for the rudder parts.

And am I the only one that things aftercooler core is something Scotty should be screaming about over the intercom to the bridge?

Aye Captain, but we’ve lost the aftercooler core with that last hit, if we can’t find another one she’s gonna blow!

So all of these projects needed parts, and all of them were expensive, and all of them needed to be imported. Our initial hope was to get the boat in and out of the water in four or five days. If the rudder parts hadn’t been caught in customs we might have been able to do that. But like the battery parts, there was a hangup. Then we had to wait for the engine parts to be shipped from Australia (turbo) and Belgium (aftercooler core).

In the end, we spent fifteen days on the hard while the work was being done. At the start of this decisions were made about crew, and departures were planned. We decided to spend the week waiting for parts touring around and seeing things, rather than moping in an AirBnB in Tauranga.

But now our crew is gone, for better or worse. And the boat is mostly fixed. We’ve hit a spate of less than pleasant winter weather that has slowed us down on a few things, and we’re still waiting on the “Clark Pump” for our watermaker to rebuilt.

Back to the Stick and the Wet Sand

After a year of being without a plan, then a year of having a plan, then seeing our plan wrecked in moments in Wellington, we’re back to three of us on board (until August) and no plan.

Tentatively, we’re headed to New Caledonia again. Then on to Vanuatu. Somewhere in all that, we have to stick Danielle on a plane to Auckland for her return flight to college.

And after that?

We’re still drawing lines.

Posted in Batteries, broken things, Customs & Immigration, Engine, French Polynesia, hard to find parts, haulouts, Lithium, New Zealand, projects, South Island | Comments Off on Firmly Etched in Wet Sand…

Four Days On the Way Back to New Zealand

On Mar 1st, 2019 Published By B.J.

To date it has been a delightfully uneventful passage.

We don’t like exciting passages. We prefer deathly dull, unintersting trips were the sailing is easy, nothing major breaks, and there’s, as our Aussie friends are keen to say, “No Drama.”

A Few Things Acting Up

It wouldn’t be an offshore passage if a few things didn’t go wonky. The hose connection to the check valve on the water heater popped off, executing an unplanned steam cleaning of parts of the engine room. The backup autopilot drive threw an error and stopped working. We haven’t tried it gain to see if it’s broken again, or just got overheated and lost it’s temper. We’ve been watching a slow oil drip, but it’s in checl. So far nothing major to complain about.

The Snazzy New Satcoms

I’ve been playing a lot with the new Iridium GO! satellite communications device, and the related XGate software and the Predict Wind weather routing. I’ve learned a lot, found a few flaws in everything, and have found some really nice, powerful functionality with the new tools.

I’ve not yet made an HAM/SSB digital connection to send a position report. I’ve tried, but I’ve not been connecting. Compared to the Iridium GO, it’s looking a lot less reliable and low tech. It works, but it’s spotty and slow. The GO has it’s moments when you’re ready to chuck it overboard too, but they’re fewer and farther between.

The Predict Wind data and routing tools are a nice complement to the existing routing we’ve been using with MaxSea/TimeZero. PredictWind has the edge in a few areas – like data from the Euro model, which is why we bought it. But the current information is expensive, and the data files are too large to be practical with the Iridium GO data speeds.

So far though, the weather information and routing has been pretty solid, and we’re happy with most of it.

The Good Kind of Excitment

There is such a thing as good excitement on a passage. Wildlife is always exciting, whether it’s a pod of dolphins, a trio of Albatross, or a huge Mahi Mahi that became The One That Got Away (again…). We’ve had several large pods of dolphins come along for the ride, even one at night when all you could see was their wakes in the water in the phosporescence. Yesterday we had three Albatrosses circling the boat for the last hour or two of the day. If I can figure out how to upload a picture with the new tools, I’ll do it. And many other birds – petrels, gannets, a boobie, and shearwaters in addition to the majestic Albatross.

Wind Issues

We didn’t expect much from the wind this trip. Leaving on a massive high that was pushing Cyclone Oma to the north, I didn’t expect to do much sailing before Wednesday. So we’ve been pleasantly surprised to have done a fair amount of sailing so far, though much of it more upwind than we like. But I’d rather sail at 5.5 knots than motor at seven if I can. It’s not just the diesel, it’s nicer to sail. Evenstar is a sailboat, not a motor boat, so the motion is better under sail even if we’re tipping.

But the models all have the wind dying more than it has already. We’re not expecting to see more than 10 knots for a couple of days, and much of that light air is on the nose. I’d definitely rather run the engine and motor at seven knots than beat slowly to windward in light air.

So motoring it is, for now.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Four Days On the Way Back to New Zealand

Stay Glued to Your Screens!

On Feb 23rd, 2019 Published By B.J.

Okay everyone, stand back… Evenstar now has hourly position updates on our whereabouts during passages.

See that little red dot? That’s us. Tomorrow is starts moving if all goes as planned.

For now anyway, because it’s a side effect of a bunch of other expensive stuff we’ve paid for for other purposes.

With out new and increased satellite communication with an Iridium Go, we have better access to weather data, e-mail, etc. at sea. But one thing this recent experience with Tropical Cyclone Oma taught us, was that our weather information was sometimes…incomplete.

There are two major sources of large scale weather modeling available – the “GFS” model, produced by the U.S. based NOAA, and the “Euro” model (or “ECMWF”), produced by a consortium of meteorologists and scientists in Europe.

A lot of people like the GFS model because well, it’s free. But in some parts of the world it does not do as well as the European model. This is one of them. But the European model is not free and readily available. It’s really nice to have both of them, and you can see some sources when you are land with a good internet connection. But to get the GRIB files (weather information files) of the Euro model takes some spending.

We decided that we’re sailing enough in the next year that the weather data from PredictWind was worth buying, since it included the ECMWF and the GFS, as well as PredictWind’s own take on those models, and some nice routing and planning tools. And it also plays nice with getting this information via the Iridium Go. PredictWind sells the Iridium Go; we purchased ours through them because we liked their pricing plans for unlimited data and texts.

As an added feature, when you subscribe to the “Standard” PredictWind plan or higher, AND you have an Iridium Go purchased from PredictWind, they will create a dedicated link for you to track your position in near real time using hourly updates from the go.

So…since we’re paying a hefty sum for satellite data offshore, and a tidy amount for weather data, as a side effect we can share our position with the world hourly.

So bookmark this link, and stay glued to your screens!

https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/Evenstar

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Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Stay Glued to Your Screens!