Not all who wander are lost…a couple sailing the world.

All’s well that ends well. An easy an uneventful trip to Brisbane, and we’re cleared into the country without a hitch. We arrived at the Customs dock at 0830 this morning, local time, with the trip lasting about 4 and three quarter days. Though we did slow down last night to time our customs arrival so perfectly.

Everyone here is delightful and helpful, and they say “G’day” over the VHF radio when they help you. We’ve yet to clear into a country that was more organized or streamlined. They were literally waiting for us at the customs dock (or the “Q” dock as it is often called, since arriving yachts fly a plain yellow flag – the letter “Q” – for “Quarantine”). Five minutes after Border Patrol left, Biosecurity showed up. They were all helpful, friendly, and gave us tips on places to stay and things to do in Brisbane.

No regular internet yet, so no posts or pictures. We’re moored at the “Botanical Gardens” in downtown Brisbane. We’ve gone from mountains from the cockpit to skyscrapers.

We’re off to go explore and find out what’s nearby.

The weather model has been pretty close. Except for a dozen hours or so of wind we got last night which ended in a rainstorm, it’s been spot on. Which means we’re making good time, thanks to that breeze last night, and we’re motoring.

It’s not flat, calm, glassy yet. The sea is still too riled up from a few days of wind for that to just happen right away. But with a massive four knots of wind, it will be with a day or to of this. That’s not supposed to hold too long, but long enough to matter. We’re burning dinosaurs now.

And we’re not fishing any more. With an arrival time looking more like tomorrow morning, we don’t want any more food on the boat than we have. And we have a pretty clear idea how many meals we have to get rid of it. In fact, much of today will be spent trying to eat as much of the frozen stuff we have that we’re pretty certain that Australian Biosecurity will take.

They have a reputation for being very aggressive about the what they let you bring into the country. Going beyond meats and fresh fruit and vegetables, they may also dispose of frozen vegetables. Most countries make it impossible to tell what they will or won’t take, and put a broad array of foods on a list that must be “declared” so they can “inspect” them. In our history with some countries, “inspect” usually means “frown at before tossing into a trash bag.” But New Zealand didn’t take our French cheeses when we arrived there, so there’s hope for some things.

I’m not taking a chance on the frozen escargot, however. We forgot about them before we left New Caledonia or we would have had them then!

P.S. Do you remember that huge fish from yesterday? It wasn’t the only one. When I pulled in the hand line last night something had actually hit it hard enough to bend the hook! Yikes. Thar be monsters, indeed!

We’ve been towing fishing lines behind us for thousands of miles since we took off cruising. We’ve hauled in some nice Mahi Mahi, Spanish Mackerel, and a few other things we weren’t as sure about. With the exception of one little tunny we tried, it’s worked out well. Enthusiasm on board for Mahi Mahi is now very high, and efforts to fish meet less resistance. But no one wanted a tuna.

Recently in Noumea I finally got everyone on the boat with the fresh tuna program. We were buying it at the fish market, fresh and locally caught, and it was to die for. The kids even ordered it in restaurants and asked for it for dinner.

So finally, with a receptive and excited audience I’ve upped my fishing efforts. Prior to this we used a stand up rig; a stout boat rod with a big Penn reel on it. The reel is a pretty high end ocean fishing reel, suitable for taking big game. I loaded it with several hundred yards of Spectra line, then a couple of hundred more of 80# test mono filament on top of that. The reason for this is the Spectra braid line, while expensive, also is much more compact than the mono filament, and stronger. So you can pack a lot more line on the reel with the braid, but it is very visible. So you fish with the clear mono end of the line.

I grew up in the midwest, fishing in lakes farm ponds for bass and sunfish, or streams and rivers. In fresh water, you get pretty excited for a five pound fish. From there, I moved to the East Coast and did a lot more surf casting for Bluefish and Striped Bass. Much bigger than the freshwater fish, to be sure. Five pounds is a small fish, not a keeper. Much larger fish are the norm.

What I am not used to is the freaking monstrous fish that you can run into off shore. A medium size yellowfin tuna, if we could get it in the boat, would provide more tuna than we could eat in a month. That also means I’ve got very little experience “playing” a really large fish. Except for a couple of charter fishing expeditions I have every little experience hauling in fish that weigh in excess of twenty pounds. A big yellowfin can weigh up to a couple of hundred pounds.

There is NO WAY I want a fish that big.

To date, the largest fish we’ve brought to the boat was a six foot sailfish that hit on the way from Aruba to Panama. We brought that to the boat after a few spectacular leaps, and worked the hook loose and let it go. They aren’t supposed to be great eating, and that’s a lot of pointy fish parts to wrassle on boat.

But a key point here – that six foot sailfish, which is not a small fish, did not peel enough line off the reel to get to the spectra braid.

In fact, nothing we’ve hooked into has pulled out enough line to reach the braid. They’ve all tired and been brought to the boat before running that far off. I literally have not seen the spectra braid on this reel since I had it loaded on there. Until today.

An hour or so ago, something hit the braid. It hit a red and white cedar plug about 275 miles of the coast of Australia, where the water is a mile or two deep. We were sailing along at a little over seven knots , and it started peeling line of the reel. I increased the drag to slow it. It didn’t slow. We slowed the boat to two knots, and the line kept peeling off. Then the spectra came out. I increased the drag. More line stripped.

At this point I was starting to get a little nervous. This thing had stripped about 75% or more of my line off in minutes; it seemed like seconds. I’d maxed out the drag, and it just kept going like nothing was wrong. Finally, as the core of line on my rod was dwindling to a small and scary amount, it stopped pulling out line.

Then the work began. Prior to that, I hadn’t taken the rod out of the holder, because I was afraid the fish would yank it right out of my hands while I tried to move it to my fighting belt. I have to reach out and around the wind generator to do this, and I don’t have great leverage. When the screaming of the reel stopped, I carefully took the rod out of the holder and placed it in my belt and tried to move the fish.

Nothing.

I pulled up, it pulled back hard. Eventually I was able to start cranking some line in, slowly. Painfully, a couple of feet at a time I started moving this monstrous thing closer to the boat.

We had no idea what it was. A Mahi Mahi would have to be gigantic to pull that much line, and was unlikely. Marlin, Sailfish, and other bill fish tended to jump, and probably would have shown themselves by now. A Wahoo or a shark would have cut right through the nylon leader. So we figure it was a tuna, and a good sized one.

I made the mistake “playing” it. There was no play involved, my arms and back were burning and I was breathing hard, fighting for every inch of line. At this point I knew it was too big to keep, too big for us even to get up in the boat, most likely. But I didn’t want to lose my line or if possible, my favorite cedar plug. And I wanted to see it and get a picture. So I fought it.

I’m not good at handling drag, not with big fish. And I must have left the drag on too hard as the fish slowed down. Because when it rallied and ran, the shock snapped the mono line out near the fish, a few feet above the nylon leader.

Probably for the best. The temptation to boat it would have been huge, and if I was to let it go I didn’t want to hurt it. It cost me a cedar plug lure, a few bits of fishing hardware and some line. And some pretty sore arms.

I wish we’d gotten a look at it, though.

Skipped a day. My bad. Or blame the Stugeron; this trip it seemed to affect me like it never had and I spent the bulk of the first two days either sleeping, feeling sleepy, or blinking stupidly.

It’s been a delightfully uneventful trip. We love uneventful. The best passage is a dull passage. Good breeze, mild seas, clear weather. About as exciting to read about as a visit to your dentist for a routine cleaning. We’re good with that.

We’ve been on port tack since leaving and have been sailing the whole way, which is nice. This morning at sunrise we jibed over to starboard. The winds had shifted from Southeasterly at the start of the trip, through East and are now from the Northeast. Our weather model has them continuing to shift to the left (counterclockwise on the compass) until the move North. They they are supposed to fade, which is a bummer.

As of now we expect to arrive during daylight on Tuesday the 13th, after motoring for the last 24 hours or so of the trip. Too bad at the motoring, but it beats getting your butt kicked in big breeze.

So Kathy’s making bread, the sun is up and the handline is set for the day in hopes of some fresh fish. Another day on the water…and I’m back to bed after catching my communications window.

This will be a brief update, as it’s been an uneventful trip, so far. That is always a good thing.

We finally got clear of Noumea and on our way at 1:40pm on Thursday. Our first 24-hour distance check came in at 197.4 miles. Will was right, we should have put the stay sail up earlier.

Conditions have been good. Breezy, with 20-25 knots from the Southeast. But that was anticipated. Sailing to Australia that puts us on a beam to broad reach, which is right in Evenstar’s sweet spot. So we’ve been pretty fast.

Back at Isle des Pins we too a morning to tune the rig, and a day or so to clean the bottom. It has paid off.

There’s not much more to add. Ou estimated arrival in Brisbane is later Monday or early Tuesday. Again the “no strange harbors at night” rule applies, so if we get in too late Monday we’ll stand off shore and come in when it’s light.

We’re anchored in Nouméa, though we’ve not cleared in yet.

Making the move to the alternate path in was the right move, and it got us to Nouméa just before sunset so we could anchor safely. The last 60 miles or so was motor sailing inside the reef for maximum speed so we could make the anchorage before dark.

We’ve no regular internet yet. The only service that would let me sign up wants a local Nouméa cell phone number, go figure. So for now, this is the update you get.

It’s lovely here, as expected, and we’re looking forward to clearing in tomorrow and exploring the town.

Fortunately, the wind has stayed as predicted. Though a bit stronger than the GRIB model which predicted ESE winds at 16-18 knots. We’ve been seeing more like 22-28 today. The wind has moved more to the East, which works well for us since we are now sailing almost directly at our next waypoint for maybe the first time all trip.

It helps that we moved our waypoint…

Our original plotted course had us entering the Passers De Boulari, which is a series of three breaks in the barrier reefs on the the Southwest side of New Caledonia. It has the advantage of being the closest reef passes to the city of Nouméa, the capital and where all yachts must go to clear into the country.

Looking at our constant inability to go West without also going no North at all, or even slightly South because of the wind, another way occurred to me. On the Southeast corner of New Caledonia is the Ile des Pines, which is on a largish bay surrounded by coral reefs. To the west of the bay is an uncharted area we wouldn’t try to go through, but the bay narrows down to a well charted and marked series of passes that we could follow through to reach Nouméa going inside the barrier reef.

So this is how we’re doing it. It saves us the trouble of sailing another 80 miles or so Westward to get around the uncharted reefs at the Southwest end of the island, and makes the route shorter.

Currently we expect to hit the the opening of the bay near Ile des Pines somewhere around 6:00 to 7:00 in the morning. I’ll slow us down at night if it puts use there before that. I have ZERO interest in being anywhere near any reefs whatsoever before daylight. As of this writing Ile des Pines is 109 miles away, and we’re averaging eight knots, and it’s about 6:00 p.m. So that’s about 13.5 hours to get there. From that point it’s still another fifty-sixty miles of traveling inside the barrier reef to get to Nouméa. We expect that will be in protected flat waters, and barring any bad currents should run another eight hours or so, putting us in Nouméa in the late afternoon. Probably too late to clear in tomorrow, but we’re not unhappy to spend the night sleeping flat, showered, and cleaned up before checking in.

With the increased winds we have been faster today, though the waves have been more confused since the longer swell that was coming in from the West was mixing it up with the wind blow waves from the SE trades. It’s settling down now, and we hope for a quiet evening…if not too fast!

If I put another update out tomorrow it will be brief as we decompress from the trip. It will have taken us a day longer than we hoped, but given the amount of sailing versus motoring we’ve done so far that’s not bad.