After a busy few weeks of visiting with friends, Christmas 2022 was just the two of us. Megan returned to Brisbane after visiting us in Tweed for a day. Zach left just before Christmas, planning to celebrate it with his family (unfortunately the weather in the US had other plans). Erica’s mom was coming on the 30th, which meant we had one week alone over Christmas before having more company. Our adventure has slowly been turning into a collective “our” with all the friends and family that have been joining us throughout the journey.

This was our first Christmas without anybody around, and the second one on our boat. The day everyone left we rented a car and got busy. We had to get a new fender step (we lost our previous one at sea), do laundry, provision for our Christmas and Christmas Eve dinners.

As previously mentioned, cooking on a boat can be challenging, for the festivities we decided to keep it easy. We got some ready to bake meals from the grocery store that we could easily pop in the oven. They turned out great, we have been really enjoying the selection of what is available at Coles here.

Passage from Tweed Heads to Yamba / Iluka

Sydney is our ultimate goal but our next stop was Yamba/Iluka.

From Tweed Head the “rhumb” line to Iluka is 80 nautical miles. Based on the weather, the best day to sail that direction seemed like it would be the 26th of December. We still had south-easterly wind to go south, which was not the best, but we could manage it. At 6 knots, it would have taken us around 16 hours, however there were two sand bars to navigate (Tweed Heads and the Clarence River), and I wanted to cross them both during the day and during the appropriate tide.

We left during the day and crossed Tweed’s bar easily. The journey was going to be long and 5 hours into it we lost our autopilot. We consider the autopilot to be an additional crew member so this was quite a loss, especially given Erica was not feeling great for most of the trip. It happened during my watch, I could still hear the autopilot hydraulic ram activating but our helm wasn’t moving. It was easy to spot because the boat kept on going into the wind and stalling. Since I was able to manually steer I knew that the our rudder was ok which quickly made me think that the ram was disconnected from the quadrant.

We had discussed needing to practice “heaving to” on several occasions. This is using the sails as a sort of break, to stop the boat from moving forward (or in our case have it move forward very slowly). Obviously this wasn’t for practice, but it was finally time to try. Our technic wasn’t perfect but it allowed us to safely slow the boat and make it move comfortable to work in it.

Accessing the autopilot was another ordeal. Since we transformed one of the cabin into a storage room, I first had to move boxes, toiletry bags and a printer out of the way. I armed myself with two screw drivers and a head lamp, and then started moving things out of the way. Once the hatch was unscrewed, I was able to confirm my diagnostic, the hydraulic ram was not bolted to the quadrant. Miraculously the nut was still balancing on the quadrant and the bolt was hanging from the ram.

To reattach it there were still a few more things that needed to happen. We had to change the direction of our heave to in order for the quadrant to be closer to where I could reach it and I needed some adjustable wrenches. After that I was able to re-secure the bolt, and then move on to the integration testing phase of the project 😇.

We had been trying to come up with some alternate options if we couldn’t fix the autopilot while en-route. Luckily we didn’t have to act on any of them because after testing the autopilot it started to keep its course again. Such a huge relief!

We still had 11 hours to go… We went back into our shift pattern, and for once I had to make dinner on passage since Erica was feeling nauseous. Usually the roles are reversed. We arrived early in the morning as planned, but too early to cross the bar. We decided to heave to once more, and we drifted for 3 hours in the wrong direction. That was enough for us to sail down and pass the bar at the right time.

Iluka & Yamba

We arrived in the anchorage at Iluka and immediately launched our Dinghy to start exploring the city. We only planned to stay there for one day. Thanks to their public pontoon we were able to tie off and walk to shore without needing to get out in the water on the beach, staying dry is always a positive thing. We started to have a walk and came back to have lunch at the fish and chips restaurant right on the beach. Iluka also has a rain forest walk that we briefly walked through, until the mosquitoes started to eat us alive.

On the next day we made it to Yamba marina to get ready for Maureen’s visit.

Both little towns are on the impressive Clarence River. During our check-in at the marina we understood why it’s well cruised and why we had gotten so many recommendations to go there. The marina had a booklet with descriptions of typical cruising spots on the river, where to anchor, where to find the public pontoons, and what to see. The river is almost 400 km long and most of it can be cruised.

We rented a car from Yamba marina and picked up Maureen in Coffs Harbour, which was about 1.5 hours away. She actually arrived before us (but not my much), she managed to get an earlier flight from Sydney and we had to wait for our rental car pickup time. She was here with us for New Year’s eve and 10 more days!

One of the brochures at the marina had a few hikes highlighted and we decided to do the trek along the Angourie back beach as well as explore the blue and green pools.

New year’s eve came and went quickly. We didn’t do anything extravagant, we just had a nice time on the boat watching Sydney fireworks on TV.

One of the recommendations we received was to try a restaurant called Karrikin in Yamba. It has a set menu, which changes every week. We were able to book a table on the 1st of January for the three of us. We enjoyed the scenery, the food was really pretty and played with lots of flavors.

Maclean & Harwood bridges

We had two choices, head to Coffs Harbour early or spend a few days cruising the Clearance River. We chose the later. The main thing to note when cruising up the river was we needed to call the company managing the lifting bridge with at least one days notice. The bridge is too low to go under for most boats with masts and is almost right at the entrance of the river.

After passing the bridge we stayed one day on the public pontoon in Maclean, which was right in the center of town. Unfortunately it wasn’t a great nights sleep, the public pontoon was used all night by teenagers fishing so there was constant noise and chatting.

Passage from Yamba to Coffs Harbour

As always we are dependent on the weather, and it was not delivering what we wanted. We wanted to explore more of the Clarence River and make our way to Coffs Harbour around the 7th of 8th, however, the forecast from the 5th was southerly with strong wind warnings and thunderstorms. Since we had to be in Coffs on the morning of the 10th for Maureen’s flight we decided to leave the river on the 4th. Luckily there was another boat who had arranged to have the bridge lifted in the afternoon on the 3rd, so we didn’t need to give a full days notice.

After one more night anchored in the mouth of the river we left just after first light, about 5:30 am. it was meant to be a good time to pass the sand bar since we were 2 hours away from the high tide. However, the swell was 2.5 meters, and the waves were huge! We had 3 knots of tide against us and we were not going fast enough to avoid sets of waves. We did the best we could but we still had to go through one huge breaking wave. Erica was ready and was pointing our boat into the waves.

Another smaller sailing boat was following us but decided to go the other way off the bar. I couldn’t see breaking waves there but I knew that side was shallower. I was left wandering if that would have been a better option.

The rest of the trip was a lot calmer. We had no wind for 40 out of the 65 nautical miles. That allowed us to navigate safely, but not quietly, through the Solitary islands. Thankfully we saw some north-easterly towards the end of the journey which allowed us to sail, and attracted a pod of dolphins and their calves, which were happily distracted by our quiet boat.

Coffs Harbour

Our first night we anchored in the harbour. The anchorage is known for dragging, and is exposed to easterly swell. Our night was really rolley since we had an easterly swell and northerly wind. Neither Erica nor I managed to get a very restful sleep. On the other end of the boat, Maureen slept fine. In fairness she wasn’t worrying about dragging or the new noises that kept us alert through the night and the thunderstorm.

We made the decision to duck into the marina the following day as they announced a strong wind warning with gusts up to 35 knots. That was the right choice, we were able to relax, have hot showers and nice food. The icing on the cake was that one week in the marina was only $250! That’s the cheapest we have encountered so far.

We even decided to stay 2 weeks. It allowed us to celebrate Erica’s birthday and have some downtime to plan.

1. Sophie and Thomas’ visit from the 4th of February to the 21st.
2. US immigration: For those who had been following, we ultimately want to move to the US. That is not hard for Erica as a US citizen, but for me it is a different story. The process to immigrate to the US has multiple steps, the first one being the longest. Wait time for approval of the first step was estimated as 6 months when we started in Nov 2021, then it went up to 10.5 months…. after waiting almost 14 months the first step in the process finally got approved. On the 6th of January I officially became Erica’s alien relative. Our next steps are with the national visa center and the US embassy in Paris.
3. Sell our lovely boat while we are in Sydney
4. Visit Uluru
5. Leave Australia

The marina in Coffs Harbour is next to a bird sanctuary, a few beaches, and plenty of great restaurants. This also allowed us to comfortably host Maureen, get spoiled, have some time to work on a few projects and celebrate Erica’s 36 birthday.