Friday 2nd June

Chris and Angela are having a most wonderful time in France.  I have been reading lovely long descriptive emails while sitting in my office with an inexplicably arctic blast of air-conditioning pouring down on my head.  I am almost transported to prehistoric caves, glorious chateaux, sumptuous restaurants, quaint villages and markets… Almost but not quite because…WHY is it so cold in here??  We have some workmen busily clambering around our heads in the roofspace, installing a new system.  A new FREEZING system, it seems to me.  I am wearing, over my normal wintry work clothes, a very ugly old hooded grey polar fleece and a big thick woolly scarf.  And I am still going brrr… My poor colleagues, Allan, Tim and James, are wandering around rubbing their hands and also going brrrr. 

So it is a wonderful distraction to read about early summer in the French countryside and “…our Michelin Star restaurant which was a 5 minute walk away along a beautiful river bank….was to die for!. Eat your heart out Heston!!!!”

So nice, to be able to share other people’s fabulous travel experiences – ain’t the internet grand??

Thursday 31^st May

When we had our wonderful few days up the Gordon River on the West coast, we spent some time tied up alongside Stormbreaker, the yacht which usually brings white-water rafters back from their energetic Franklin River trips.

This time it had been chartered by Aurora, or the Hydro, or whichever branch of what used to be our state electric company.  Our lovely friend James Butler was on board – I think I wrote about this at the time.  We had met James, most fortuitously, in Honiara, and here he was again, right where we wouldn’t expect to meet anyone we knew.  He and his colleague, Ray, were great company.  They played cards with us late into the night and in daylight hours they took us for a walk along a little track we would never have known about, in to Lake Fidler.  It is a beautiful little lake.  But not beautiful enough (for me…) to justify spending days, weeks, months sitting in a small wooden shelter, not much bigger than a phone box, on a hard bench… And this is what one of our Tasmanian scientists did, year after year, very happily.  I think he took a little tent and slept away happily on a layer of muddy grass.  Then he would wake up and spent the days sitting, cold, damp, uncomfortable, but…happy in his meticulous studies.  I wouldn’t like to get this wrong but I think this was Dr Peter Tyler, from the Botany Department at Tas Uni.  He is a renowned limnologist and I now know, because I looked it up, that:

Limnology also called freshwater science, is the study of inland waters

During my months on 2XS I listened to many podcasts, and to many audiobooks.  I was particular fascinated to learn about the way scientists work.  No I wasn’t downloading too much Learned Information; my information mainly came from the likes of Bill Bryson, David Attenborough, the Science Show on ABC Radio National – information nicely prepared for people who like to go Golly and Gosh and Well I Never without having to strain their brains too much.  ScienceLite, that’s my sort of thing.  I came to realise that dedicated scientists don’t take their own physicals comfort into account at all.  They spend years going to the far ends of the earth, living in extreme climates, never once saying, “Oh no that mattress is too hard, where is my fluffy pillow; how I long for a cup of tea…”  So it’s not all that surprising that Peter Tyler was so happy sitting in his little wooden hideaway, with a thermos of cocoa, nicely laced with rum, I hope, carefully studying his meromitic lake.

And what is a meromictic lake, I hear you cry??  James did explain it to me; I listened carefully and then completely forgot.  I couldn’t even remember the name, only that it began with M.  (Maybe…)  Google is my friend and with a bit of luck and fair weather I found some research papers, and Peter Tyler’s name, so now you too know about meromictic lakes…

Lake Fidler is an ectogenic meromictic lake with a monimolimnion maintained by periodic incursions of brackish water from the lower Gordon River estuary.  A dam across the middle reaches of the Gordon River has restricted these incursions of brackish water and meromictic stability has rapidly declined.

So… Golly and Gosh and Well I Never and I see now why I completely forgot when James explained it all to me…

Wednesday 30th May

On the news today…a great leap forward for the Tasmanian economy…

Salmon farmers today were given the go-ahead to create the largest fish farming area in the country.  The $88 million marine farm expansion in Macquarie Harbour will create 100 jobs and another 160 production and processing positions…

This is expansion from 564 hectares to 926 hectares.  A huge increase!!

I don’t generally like to be too oppositional, or too doom-and-gloom…but is this really a good thing for the waters of Macquarie Harbour??  Or for the poor caged fish, for that matter…much as I like eating them…and much as the population of Strahan, and in fact of the whole of Tasmania, will benefit.

Tuesday 29th May

Live in such a way that if anyone should speak badly of you no-one would believe it

I read this recently on another blog (Maxabella Loves, if you want to go and look…)  It came printed on a lovely square photo, all very pretty, and yes…a great motto to try to live up to… Am not so sure that I have quite achieved this particular stage and status…or ever will I can imagine all manner of people saying, “Well golly and gosh, she always was a frivolous and flighty bit of work, not surprised to hear that at all!”

On a completely different topic – Eurovision is over!  And oh what a spectacle!  I am sad to report that my favourites didn’t do very well.  In fact, they came last and second last in the finals.  And glorious Iceland, so pretty, so tuneful, did slightly better but wasn’t even in the top ten.

It gave me much pleasure and amusement last week to hear not one but two of my very favourite men in the world asking, in all seriousness, why Australia has never entered in this contest.  Ummm…I rather think there is a clue in the name…EUROvision??” 

(Dad?  Pete?  What were you thinking??)

Monday 28^th May

A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away

Or in 1967, in Holland, to be exact, I met my Dutch cousins. They were all great fun and very kind to me.  I very much admired Liesbeth and Carel, glorious twins, very sophisticated, by dint of being a whole 13 months older than I was… (I was 17 in 1967…)  I haven’t seen them since then.  Liesbeth lives in a small town near Lincoln in the UK; Carel lives in Pennsylvania.  In September Dad got an email, in Dutch, from Carel, which he forwarded to me, translated for ease of reading…

Apparently Carel had been reading my blog and had written about a very intrepid sailing trip he undertook when he was in his early 50s:

By the way, I also once , about ten years ago, participated in a long sailing trip in a 30 ft. “zeilboot” (yacht) belonging to a Dutch friend, who sailed from the Netherlands via West Africa, South America (Surinam, Aruba) North America and back to the Netherlands.  It was a very small yacht with four adults aboard.  I was the youngest, so I had the worst watch, from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m.  I joined the tour in Columbia, sailed around Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala and then back to the USA.  Unbelievable trip.  Courageous on my cousin’s part to do that sort of thing in the Pacific.

I actually think it was more courageous on MY cousin’s part, to undertake such a long trip in a 30’ boat…

Sunday 27^th May

During the odd idle moment, I have been reading book reviews.  There is a lot of comment on the internet about Game of Thrones, which is both a weighty book (over 900 pages…) and a lavish TV series.  It is receiving rave reviews, and the still photos I have seen are just astonishing, so beautiful, so creative.  So when my friend Chris said she was reading the book, I was spurred on to download it on my iPad.  900 pages is much too big to read in paper form; so heavy, so unwieldy – I so love my iPad!  As far as I know, Chris never reads fantasy books…so Game of Thrones must be a real winner!

And yes it is very well written, very powerful, with strong characters, intricate plot lines.  My problem is…I just dread returning to it each night.  I pick up my iPad with a faint shudder, and squeeze my eyes a bit shut to prepare myself the fresh drama, intrigue, horror.  I have in fact sopped reading it for the moment; it is still there, on my iPad, open at the page where I left it – the slaughter of Lady the direwolf and of poor little Arya’s raggedy butcher-boy friend, Mycah, is still vivid in my mind…

On our way to work on Wednesday, I told Jeff about my cowardly abandonment of Game of Thrones – when the going gets tough the tough keep reading, surely??  That night he brought me a snippet from the newspaper – something which had appeared on Twitter:

Game of Thrones is like Twitter.  There are 140 characters and something awful is always happening.

Indeed!

Saturday 26th May

To get back to the fascinating idea of paradigms…

I have recently discovered that one of my daughters is living, with her family, in the midst of a clump of Doomsdayers!  They lurk quietly in the foothills of Mt Wellington, leading industrious and worthy lives.  Lovely people, charming and good-looking, educated and intelligent.  They are not of the religious doomsdayer persuasion– I am not sure that they have settled on December 31st 2012, for example, as The End of the World As We Know it.  But they are quietly confident – maybe not the right word – that we are heading for hell in a handbasket.  A combination of global financial crisis and environmental catastrophe is soon to come crashing down upon our heads.

No point in getting a proper job, buying a house, having more babies… My poor family is just a teeny bit crushed by the weight of all of this, although they will probably benefit, when Doomsday comes, because their friends and neighbours are growing vegetables and storing seeds all around them in preparation for The End.

So what do I think??  Well…as I have already written, my role models are Pollyanna and Candide… I think the world is a wonderful and beautiful place, that we will overcome the financial crises (just number crunching, surely?)  And as for the environmental disaster…well from what I have seen of the world, most of it is unpopulated and unpolluted… And all will be well!

Friday 25th May

Sometimes (well, often,) I wonder why I am still writing this blog.

And the main reason is – I am writing it for myself.  I really enjoy thinking about what I am going to write each day.  I don’t actually think too much about my target ‘audience’ because…I have no idea who this is!

I can look at my stats and see that on average fifty people look at this blogsite every day.  But…who are you??  I know that my dear loyal Mum, Dad and Fleur read sailing2XS but who else logs on so faithfully is a Mystery Of The Sea.  Nobody leaves comments – apparently it is extremely difficult; I wouldn’t know because…I don’t leave comments on my own blog…

So I would be very happy if one or two of my mysterious readers were to come out of hiding and send me an email –marguerite.harmsen@gmail.com

Wednesday 23^rd May

It’s all very interesting, listening to the news on the ABC, reading the papers, catching up with this and that on electronic devices.  I have come to realise that we all view life from our own particular paradigm.  Mine tends to be a bit like that of Candide (many MANY years ago I wrote a thesis, in very bad French, on Voltaire, with specific reference to Candide – maybe it has all stuck there, along with my very favourite childhood book, Pollyanna… Play the Glad Game!   All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds…)  So I try to look at everything from a cheery angle.  If possible…

I think I have written in this blog before how very beautiful the whole world is, and how particularly beautiful and PROSPEROUS Australia is.  So last night, when I had trouble sleeping, I listened to Paul (Candide) Clitheroe on Tony Delroi’s Nightlife program.  I won’t go into the details but he said that yes indeed, we are extremely prosperous.  Lots of people, eg 500 QANTAS workers, have lost their jobs, and that is indeed a dreadful thing.  But…unemployment levels are going down – someone must be employing people somewhere.  And is that ever on the news?  Of course not!

Tony D asked him about the terrible problems with regards to our ageing population and Paul said, “Oh yes, how dreadful, we’ve all been given an extra 25 years of life!  How shocking!”  He went on to say that people in the retirement age group are having a great time.  Where in the past they might have gone to an Adult Ed cooking program, or a wine tasting course, now they are going to cooking classes in Vietnam, and wine tasting courses in the Loire Valley.

I perked up considerably, listening to Paul, and was very soon fast asleep with a happy smile.

As an illustration of how well we are all doing, here is a brief rundown of the activities of some of my friends, relations, colleagues:

• The Wakefields are off the Alice Springs and Kakadu in the June holidays
• Chis and Bob have just left for three weeks in Hawaii and San Francisco
• Chris and Angela are spending ten weeks in Europe, with a European Crusie, and time on a canal boat in the Midi
• Richard and Meriloy are away until August, zipping from one fabulous overseas location to another.  At present they are in Turkey.
• Bob and Annie are about to go on a Mediterranean cruise, then Paris, then goodness knows where but it will be wonderful
• James and Colette are off to Europe in August
• Tim and Jan are going to Alaska next year
• Barbara and Pauline are going to New York for three weeks, leaving on Friday
• Later in the year Pauline is going to Malaysia with Elsa
• (Jacqui is going to Vietnam…but this is slightly different…she is going with a school group on a World Challenge…)
• Pete, Andrew and John are flying in a light plane from Port Macquarie to Cape Leveque
• The entire Headlam clan is off to White Sands on the East Coast for a long weekend in July
• Di is off to California to get married
• Catherine is taking her entire family on a Mediterranean cruise and to visit extended family in Croatia
• Cam and Del are caravanning around Australia
• Ron is heading for the South pacific on his yacht; Laura is in Airlie Beach with the grandchildren
• Tim and Jan are going to Alaska next year
• Kerrie and Michael are in Paris and going to a family wedding in a chateau
• Ann-Marie and Philippe are just back from three weeks in Thailand
• Poppy and Matt are just back from The World

And I am sure I have left some people off this very hasty, random list.

I rest my case!

Tuesday 22^nd May

I rang Leanne, from Plan Four, yesterday.  She and Peter are settled back into family life in Devonport.  They are enjoying the return to reality, after two years sailing up and down the east coast of Australia.

But…Leanne misses the pelicans…as I miss the sea eagles and the albatross…

Monday 21^st May

Tasmania seems very prosperous.  Every time we got to a restaurant or pub, it is crowded with cheery drinkers and diners, all looking very well and happy in the crisp autumn air.

The State budget has come out and the newspapers, however, are full of stories of doom, more doom, and gloom.  Lots of big businesses have closed down and people are out of work – K & D brickworks have gone, many forestry businesses, a whole dismal list. 

But one area seems to be thriving – fraud and deception!!  On one of our very pleasant stops as we were coming down the coast of Tasmania, we spent a few days in a beautiful little community of no more than 900 people.  A glorious place, with many small but busy community organisations striving to make it a better, happier place to live.  We were dismayed to hear that one of the small community facilities had been recently swindled, by its very popular, personable director.  She pocketed $30,000, thank you very much.  Worse than this, she did it very cleverly by NOT paying The Tax Man.  Big mistake!  For more than twelve months she squirreled away the superannuation payments for the (already underpaid; this is a very low-earning sector of the workforce, involving , as it does, women and children…) workers.  And now the board of hardworking volunteers is liable to The Tax Man for the money.  I asked whether she had fled and was hiding away in shame.  Oh no, she hasn’t.  She is happily leading her normal life, and was recently seen at the local agricultural show eating a hot dog.

Back in Hobart, I read the Mercury every day and often come across stories involving fraud and theft, mostly from small, vulnerable places life local football clubs.  And…schools.  My friend Kathryn has worked at a local primary school as a teachers aide for many years.  She said the office worker, was very helpful, friendly.  And…generous.  As well she might have been!  When she left, to live and work in a school on the East Coast, the new admin worker found…discrepancies, to the tune of $500,000.  Yes, half a million, carefully siphoned off the Incentive Scheme bonus money.  Her new school only suffered to the tune of $30,000 before all was discovered.

Sigh and sigh again. 

Saturday 19th May

It is the weekend so…I will write a work story.

Why not?

Last week I went over to my former work place, the Commonwealth Law Courts, to do some work for the President of the Commission.  All very intimidating.  The hearing went on and on and, well….on. 

No lunchbreak, just one very brief toilet break…

At the beginning of proceedings I always make a point of reminding people to turn off their phones.  So embarrassing for them, so annoying for the Commissioners, if phones start singing and mooing and baaing in the midst of formal submissions.

I had my own phone with me, on silent, so that I could get messages from Allan back at 144 Macquarie Street.  At about 1.40 I idly picked my phone up and just fiddled with it, just a bit.  And suddenly, raucously, it burst into life.  The Rolling Stones, This Could Be the Last Time.  The whole courtroom woke up with a jolt.  I leapt to my feet, apologising profusely and ran out the door to turn the damn thing off.  I have no idea why it did this; it was on SILENT and should have been SILENT!!!
(And no I did not get the sack; I didn’t even get a teensy bit into trouble…everything continued as if the Rolling Stones had never interrupted us.)

Friday 18^th May

I am back in the groove of knowing and caring what day of the week it is.  My life is now like clockwork – here one day, there the next, at my desk Mon-Fri 8.45-5.06 (more or less…)

Where I was on Sunday was at Pete’s house.  He had gone to Launceston to visit his northern family while I stayed here and got ready for the Mon-Fri 8.45-5.06 thing.  I got up in the morning, locked up the house, went to work…

First thing to go wrong was…I left Pete’s car keys inside, in the special pottery key container.  So when Pete returned early on Thursday morning in a John Deere truck, he was locked out.  And DESPERATE to get in to use the facilities… Fortunately James was able to speed across the hill in his ute, spare key in hand

Second thing was not so much wrong as…weird!  I walked up the hill last night, groceries slung over my shoulder, and was happily reunited with Pete in the late afternoon.  I went upstairs to put my uggboots on – always a happy moment – and Pete followed me.  “So,” he said, smiling benignly.  “Who’s the man?”  WHAT man??  Well…the man who left a thwacking great man’s watch on the windowsill in the en suite bathroom…As far as I know, nobody has been in the house since Monday morning.

So…if you know of anyone who popped into Pete’s Summerhill Road house to have a shower and leave behind a thwacking great watch…please send them to Pete, with an explanation!

Thursday 17^th May

Absolutely glorious autumn weather in Hobart.  The trees seem to be hanging on to their leaves for longer this year.  Some years there is a fierce cold southerly wind which shakes all the leaves off in one fell swoop.  Much nicer to have a gentle drift of gold and red over the autumn weeks.

I catch little glimpses of it – working life is different to 2XS life…

Greg, as I have said, is on his way to Vanuatu, where they don’t have autumn leaves… He asked us about going to Tanna and maybe spending four months in Port Resolution.  Yes (gulp!) four MONTHS.  We loved Tanna and enjoyed Port Resolution, with its brave little yacht club, very much, but we were amazed when Bella and Derek (Pandanus) told us they had spent four weeks there after we left.  We had, I think four or five nights in this lovely anchorage…and we were quite happy to sail on, to Erromango, and then Port Vila.

But we did tell Greg than Tanna is a very wonderful island, and that he would be mightily impressed with the volcano.  He didn’t get it at all.  “You guys know that volcanoes are very dangerous, right?” he said, looking at us a bit anxiously.  (He was the same when talking about smoking.  People smoking, not volcanoes, that is.  “Why would anyone smoke?  They know it’s bad for their health, right?”  Well yes I do think this is common public knowledge…I don’t think any smoker is going to say, “Well golly and gosh, really?  It’s bad for my health?  I’ll stop right away then!”)

Wednesday 16^th May

Pete is using his time as an invalid to track our trip on a GoogleEarth map, using the logbook as his main source of information. We kept such a thorough log; everyone who visited would gasp and stretch their eyes.  “You kept it HOURLY??” they would say, looking at us in disbelief.  “We are lucky if we do it daily!”  I was the real Log Nazi behind the scenes.  It felt all wrong if we missed an hour…

There are many reasons for keeping a log.  One of them is to satisfy the impulses of people like me, who like to know when are where they are at all times.  It is also a good thing to do for purposes of insurance, and safety.  James Headlam looks at our battered book and says, “It’s your Black Box, isn’t it?”  Yes indeed! 

At the beginning of the day we log the temperature and barometric pressure, and thereafter, every hour on the hour we note:

Time

Position (ie latitude and longitude, to several decimal points)

Wind speed and direction

Sea height and direction

Engines port and starboard revs (plus - are they OK or are they heating up and about to EXPLODE because there is seaweed in the filters???)

Instruments port and starboard

Wind angle

(And maybe something else along the way…I haven’t been keeping the log for a few weeks now…)

And then there is my favourite column, which is not quite big enough for someone who likes a lot of detail… But it is where we can say, “Many dolphins!  Albatross!  M is sickety sick!  Both sails are up but we are about to take the mainsail down because…umm because that is what happens when you put sails up; you take them down again…”

So our log is thick and full of information, making it all very easy for Pete to track our progress across nine and a half thousand nautical miles.

Except…he has just a bit of trouble…reading my writing… I am of course quite crushed by this; I try so hard, even when we are wobbling about on the high sea.  But this is no excuse; my writing is almost as bad (well probably just as bad… on dry land.  Which is why the computer is my BFF!!!

Monday 14^th May

Greg is off.  He would have left at 7am, out in the wintry dark of Lindisfarne Bay, next stop - Vanuatu!  I did spare him a thought as I boiled the kettle for my easy, cheery early morning cup of tea, and as I turned up the heat pump for a pleasant half hour reading the paper and eating my breakfast, looking out at the beautiful view from West Hobart.  Life on land is not all bad…

Sunday 13^th May

Cold in Hobart…It was about 6 degrees when we left the house in the evening.  BRRRR!!  But we have no cause for complaint; we have warm clothes, sturdy shoes, nicely heated indoor areas to frolic in.  And, best of all, comfy warm doonas to sleep under.

We had our farewell dinner with Greg, our Canadian lone-sailor friend, who is leaving early on Monday morning.  He will be very cold for quite a few weeks until he hits the tropics.  Alicidae III does have two heaters. One of them is a wood-burning stove, the other diesel powered.  He can get the boat quite warm and toasty when he is in an anchorage, but when he is at sea, all is cold and damp.  He regaled us with stories of his time in the Kerguelen Islands a few months ago.  He managed to heat the interior of the boat to 4 degrees… I am sure Ede, his tabbycat, must have been delighted with the balminess!  Nobody has ever managed to convinced me that sailing in the Southern Ocean would be fun.  Beautiful, yes, and awe-inspiring.  Greg’s face lit up as he described snowstorms way out at sea, and spray freezing as it hits the deck.  “I didn’t need to put my veggies in the fridge!  It was very convenient!” he said, beaming.

He has been very happy during his for weeks in Tasmania.  His impression of Australians had never been very favourable, thus far, but he has been quite overwhelmed with kindness and hospitality.  He had heard horror stories of Australian customs officials in particular, but the officials he came across in Hobart were more than helpful.  When they realised he didn’t have a car or much of an idea how to get to the central office, they said, “Don’t worry, mate, we’ll drop off the forms and pick them up for you.”

He has been sailing for seven and half years now.  His wife, Patricia, joins him for long periods, up to six months, but only when he is close to land.  “Most people don’t like what I do, at sea,” he said.  “In fact I don’t know if I like it much myself, at times!”  We discussed love and romance, and whether he missed all of that aspect of life.  “Well,” he said, thoughtfully, “It’s all very nice but it doesn’t really help you sail to windward, doesn’t it?”

Saturday 12th May

When I got back from St Helens I had a nice hour or so lying on the couch complaining away about my Day Of Pain, and then Pete and I made our way to Fullers for a book launch.  Mike Litzow and his wife Alisa are living on their yacht, Galactic, which is berthed in the Royal Yacht Club at the moment.  Mike has written a book about their trip from Alaska to Australia, with a small baby as crew.  They now have a second baby and are still going strong.

They have a blog – thelifegalactic.blogpsot.com – which you might like to look at.  Beautiful photos, and all very interesting.  Mike has written already about the launch, and has photos of the crowd at Fullers.  In the front row you can see:

Pete - looking unwell (he is still post-op and not his normal cheery self)
me – looking at the camera
Nicky – looking very seriously at Mike

Mike was a bit disconcerted to see a big sign outside the shop, saying: South from Alaska by Simon Litzow!  He thought it might be a bad omen…but it wasn’t.  There was a big crowd in the Afterword Café, and people queued up to buy the book. 

Alisa and Mike are very enterprising sailors.  They have done long ocean passages, up to three weeks and 3,000 miles, far from land.  Nicky introduced me to Alisa after the launch, and she said, “So you must have done some very lovely long passages too?”  Well no…three days and nights… My preferred method of sailing is to start early in the morning (or late if possible!) and to STOP at 4.00.  Being able to island hop, and STOP at night makes it all pleasant and enjoyable for me.  Before we set off on our trip, I was chatting to one of my nieces (who shall be nameless…) who said, “But surely you can just drop anchor, at night?”  Well no…the ocean is very deep, my darling Nameless Niece…

I just found this little interview snippet on the Internet...
RIP Maurice Sendak!!
And on with the wild rumpus....

Friday 11th May

Today’s desk calendar says:

The law of heredity is that all undesirable traits come from the other parent.

Amen to that!

St. Helens stopped being quite so wonderful after lunch on Wednesday… We had a brief adjournment around midday and went to a local café.  Tim very wisely chose a plain hamburger; I FOOLISHY had warm chicken salad.  I should have known…it was described as coming served on a bed of ice-burg lettuce… People who can’t spell iceberg maybe can’t cook in a hygienic manner…

Around 3.30 I started to feel ill.  A bit like seasickness…oh no… By four I was rushing to every nearby toilet, riding myself of every meal I have eaten over the past week.  Agony!  And very much not fun.

By dinner time I thought maybe it had all subsided but…no.  I ordered a bowl of tomato and vegetable soup and had one TINY sip.  RUNRUNRUN!  The waitresses at Tidal Waters were very kind, and very concerned.  One of them laboriously wrote out a list of doctor, ambulance, hospital, for me to take to my room.  I reckon she didn’t want the cleaners to find a corpse in the morning.  She asked me where we had eaten and I said I would rather not say, but that I would let the café people know. “So, what did you eat?”  When I told her, she said, “I know exactly which café that was!  My nana had warm chicken salad there and she was extremely sick.”  Oh good!

I am fine now, but…very empty!

Thursday 10th May

Still in beautiful St Helens…

We should be back in Hobart Thursday afternoon, with a bit of good luck and a fair breeze blowing.

I have spoken to ConvalescentPete who has been having sleepless nights, post-op.  My mother sent me an anxious email message, saying she hopes a nurse is popping in daily to see if he is OK.  Oh how he would love this… A gentle, soothing nurse to ease his pain… But no… He is on his own.

I went to the local op shop in our lunch break and got a supermarket bag stuffed full of lovely board shorts, t-shirts, colourful bras, all for $4.  I, being SO generous, gave them a fiver.  The shop is a fund-raiser for the local school.  Apparently there is one in St Mary’s as well, and they raise, so I am reliably informed, around $1200 per month!

I added a few items from Chickenfeed – embroidery cotton, a bag of small plastic jungle animals, some ribbons – and schlepped the whole lot up to the post office. For my $10 of goods it cost…$53 to send it to Moses in the Louisiades.  But it is money well spent; Moses will be very happy with this bag of loot, and he will distribute it/sell it fairly and wisely around the island.

Wednesday 9^th May

I am in beautiful St Helens on the East Coast.

Sans Pete, sans 2XS…

Also sans the freedom to idle away my time admiring the beauty – I am here for work!  No complaints, I am very lucky to get a work trip, especially to the East Coast…

And while I have been to St Helens with Pete, I haven’t been here on 2XS – the bar is formidable and we skittered on past it on our way north last year.

2XS, however, has been here, with Pete And Crew, in 2010, when he took the boat up to the Whitsundays.  They had to cross the bar, formidable or not, because there was engine trouble.  They were here for quite a few days, getting the issues sorted.  One day they met a raggedy chap who started a cheery conversation.  When he left he said, “Would you like some prawns?”  Well there is only one answer to that, isn’t there??  A few hours later he turned up with a BUCKET full of fresh prawns!  He wouldn’t dream of taking any money, nor did he want a six-pack.  “Me missus and I gave up drinking.  It wasn’t doing us no good,” he said, and went on his way.  Pete And Crew were very happy.

Monday 7^th May

Pete has been in hospital, for what he calls “a bit of maintenance.”  He stayed in a few days longer than expected and had to have blood transfusions and a big dose of morphine.  When I went to pick him up at 4.00 on Saturday, I expected a pale and shaky person to limp out to the car, but no, there was Pete, his usual buoyant self, striding down the corridor.  A very welcome sight!

Pete’s favourite meal in the entire world is…lamb chops with potatoes and broad beans.  I thought very seriously about producing this sort of meal for his Welcome Home but…this is very much the sort of cooking I am not particularly good at.  Much better to try an entirely new recipe for a special seafood risotto with lots of white wine and a bit of sour cream.  I had found this on Kirsty Rice’s blog, Shamozal.  She made it sound so enticing I just had to put on an apron and give it a go.  Fortunately…she was right and yes it was delicious, and probably better for Pete’s delicate convalescent system than lamb chops would have been.

And no he didn’t take it easy enough on Sunday.  We went to lunch at the Crescent Hotel with Greg, and also Dad and Fleur.  Dad and Greg were very much engrossed in a conversation about classical music, and why the Germans have produced so very many of the best composers and scientists in the modern world.  The rest of us ate our lunch and chatted about less elevated matters. 

After lunch we took Greg to MONA – he can’t spend all this time in Tasmania without going there, now can he?  Pete isn’t allowed to drive for a week, and then only for ten minutes a day, so he and Greg had to put up with me as their chauffeur, which I am sure was not entirely pleasant for them, but never mind!  We got there and back without mishap. 

Pete had barely got to the front door when he turned a not entirely pleasing shade of off-white.  MONA has state-of-the-art wheelchairs and he very gratefully sank into one, nicely padded and upholstered in black.  I was very happy; I love having CONTROL.

Later that night Emma, one of Pete’s tenants, popped in while we were cosily ensconced watching MasterChef, so I was able to get a variety of opinions on MONA to present to you:

James Headlam (29), by textmessage: MONA sux

Greg Soraka (62), in person: kinky!  And why this juxtaposition of antiquities and extreme modernity?  Tasmania is…weird!

Emma (23): MONA is amazing!  Wouldn’t it make a GREAT nightclub??

Zeehan

We had an extra day in Strahan because the wind was too ferocious for us to leave on Tuesday.  Ron said, “Keep my car till you leave!  Go up to Zeehan and look through the museum.  A lot of history, up there.”  So…we did!  And yes a very fascinating and well-presented museum.  Lots of old photos and information and interpretation.  And out in the yard there were huge chunks of rusty mine machinery, old locomotives, a replica miner’s hut, pumps, compressors, and enormous bell used by the fire wardens.  We walked around the Gaiety Theatre, all part, now, of the museum complex.  They show old movies every half hour.  We chanced upon one called Stop Thief, about the Kelly gang.  The NFSA (National Film and Sound Archive) have renovated as much as they can of these old films.  Lots of bits were missing, but the music played on bravely.

I said I could NOT go into the museum until I had had a cup of coffee.  “Want! Want! Want! Is all I hear from you”, sighed Pete, in pitiful tones.  But really…I find museums and galleries quite difficulty to negotiate because I can’t stand for long periods of time (Computer Says No; thus speaks my acheybreaky lower back) and the sort of walking one does in a museum or gallery is just a bit too slow (Computer wants to Say No.)  But I did find it all very interesting, a huge achievement for a small West Coast town.

There was, thank heavens, one coffee shop and it was open.  All very warm and cosy inside, which was another blessing.  Later in the museum we were talking to some local blokes and they laughed merrily when we told them we had gone to the café.  “It’s only been open a few months”, said one of them.  “The poor bugger has moved here from the Northern Territory.  He can’t believe how few people there are here, or how cold it gets.”  I do have limited sympathy for the café man.  But really, what was he expecting, in Zeehan??

Craypots

Before we left Strahan, we spent a bit of time with Ron, who had lent us his ute and his big solid mooring in Mill Bay.  Pete went and chatted to him on beautiful Maatsuyker, Ron’s beloved yacht, while I sat on Petuna and talked to Rodney.  Petuna is piled high with great big craypots, so I asked him a bit about them.  Not sure if many people have examined a craypot very carefully but…they are works of art!  They are either made of steel, or of wood which has been steamed and curved around a frame.  The top of the pot, where the crayfish crawl in, is made of woven cane, shaped liked big sunhat with the crown cut out.  Rodney makes his own pots, and the very best of them last a maximum of 20 months.  So he always has a few pots on the go.  It takes him a whole day to make just one.  He has sold a few, and was a bit put out that they companied at the price -$200.  His wife, Louise, calculated his hourly rate - $0.35.  So not really a good idea to sell his pots!

I asked how many crays they would get in each pot, imagining maybe five, or ten… But no – they generally get 200 in each pot!  The crayfish are free to climb in and out of the pots, and every now and then they all evacuate in terror – octopus coming for some fast food!

Rodney gave us a lovely big fillet of fish when we first arrived. I told him how much we had enjoyed it, and how it had lasted for two dinners and two lunches.  “Well I wouldn’t have given it to you if it was no good, would I” he said, gruffly.

Thursday 3^rd May

Pete’s son James thinks Greg pops up everywhere.  On Anzac Day we were invited to the opening of the Good Guys, a big new shop selling electrical goods, in Main Road Moonah.  James’s girlfriend Bron is the manager and it was the Family And Friends day.  Pete and I admired everything, bought nothing, and had a drink or two (cups of tea for me…beer for Pete…I was so very tired I couldn’t even consider a glass of wine; I would have passed out on top of the tasteful display of vacuum cleaners.)  Greg, who had, of course, come with us, trotted up and down the aisles, clucking in amazement at all of the new technology – he hasn’t been in such a shop for seven and a half years.  James, who was idly inspecting the goods, suddenly heard a familiar Canadian voice; “Hello James, what’s a Blu Ray?”  He wheeled around – Greg is everywhere!!

When I was hunting for the coffee maker in Pete’s store room, I rang James to ask if he had seen it.  A few minutes later I sent him a text: Found behind a pile of scungy cushions.  He wrote back, instantly, Who?  Greg?  This running joke is giving James and me hours of enjoyment; I don’t think Pete is finding it anywhere near as funny…

I have to put this in

No nothing at all to do with 2XS, or sailing…

Just maybe to do with my very own one and only phobia - large and hairy…spiders!

This was a haiku in yesterday’s Mercury, by Jason Jordan (@jasonjordan on twitter, Perth WA TV and radio presenter)

By the way in case you are not familiar with the haiku…Traditional Japanese haiku consist of 17 on (also known as morae), in three phrases of 5, 7 and 5 on respectively.  A haiku is supposed to present a juxtaposition of ideas but this one…doesn’t…

It is simply titled:

A Haiku about Spiders:

No No No No No

No No No No No No No

No No No No No

I love it!!!

Wednesday 2^nd May

On Wednesday 25^th April I was very much fast asleep in my cosy warm bunk on 2XS.  At 7.00 Pete, in startlingly chipper tones, said, “Time to go!”  Oh no…I thought he might have forgotten his clearly stated aim of the night before.  To join in the Anzac Day parade…

I didn’t object to this in principle, but in reality I was so tired, and so keen on staying asleep – no need to leap about and get ready for work!  So very bleary-eyed and tottery I was as we walked across to the path leading to the Cenotaph, just a few hundred metres from the marina.  It was cold and bleak and threatening to rain, and amazingly, there were hundreds of people making their way along the path.  Family groups, old codgers, school children.

The service was beautiful, and so familiar – the same hymns, the same words, as we repeated every year in freezing Royal Park when I was at Launceston High.  A pipe band, a brass band, a soprano, a bugler who played most beautifully. 

In the midst of the crowd we spied Greg, our lone-sailor Canadian friend, in his red lumberjack shirt.  He came for dinner the next day and we asked him what he had thought.  “Well,” he said, very seriously, “It was the best service I have ever been to.  Very moving.  Lovely live music - a brass band, for heaven’s sake!  Nice to see so many people with wreaths; a great crowd of all ages.  It was, however, much too religious for me.”  And then, after a bit more thought, “But any amount of religion is too much for me.”