We left Vanuatu with a ten-day passage in front of us, about five of which looked good on the forecast. After a few days of nice downwind running we’d get smacked across the face by a front coming at us from the southwest. We hoped it might die down a bit by the time it arrived, and we also hoped it would be the short-lived twenty-four hours long that the forecast was predicting.

The first couple of days were surprisingly lumpy, but it was nice enough to get the Parasailor flying.

This would become a passage filled with boobies.

Calm conditions retired even the Parasailor, eventually.

Then shifted further up to a light beam reach. Overall, a pretty decent passage so far.

The “red skies at night, sailor’s delight” sunsets came one after another.

Boobies love a chance to take a night off to catch up on some sleep. Even if my family would allow me to kick them off the boat, the birds themselves would probably just refuse. They really do not care about you one bit. They also don’t care about crapping in their bed.

We were sailing along in very light winds on about day six when the boat suddenly veered straight up into the wind. I went to the helm, saw that the autopilot was still on, but realized quickly something was wrong. I put the autopilot on standby, grabbed the wheel and spun. There was zero resistance. The wheels clearly weren’t turning the rudders.

I popped open the engine hatch and immediately found this. A steering cable had frayed and snapped right at a ninety-degree wheel block turn (those nuts were leftover from a previous project and were unrelated despite their proximity to the metal shavings).

We quickly dropped the sails and thought over the problem. Being without steering 500 miles from landfall is, let’s say, not a great situation. Especially hours away from the arrival of a storm front.

Fortunately, a solution was fairly easy to come up with. The cable was a short span that went through a couple of blocks and then connected to a thick chain on a sprocket at the wheel. I took some spare dyneema line and set about replacing the cable with that. The most difficult part was actually getting the chain clip off the last link. I eventually had to hacksaw that off, and then, with the cable now removed, it was a simple matter of tying the dyneema on, getting the rudders correctly lined up, and the dyneema cranked down as tight as I could get it. We were up and running again within 30 minutes.

Despite the repair, I still had concerns. First, why had it snapped in the first place? I couldn’t feel any rough edges anywhere and I hadn’t noticed any metal shavings in the engine compartment lately. In addition, the cables had all been replaced during the haulout when we first bought the boat about two years ago. Second, it was difficult to get the dyneema really tight, and I was concerned it might continue to loosen up a bit. The steering already felt quite loose, though it was working. Third, the dyneema I had was really thin leftovers from the new trampoline installation. It’s strong stuff, but it still seemed tiny.

We had left Vanuatu a few hours behind our friends on Harmatana and Mandolyn, so we shot them a message to let them know what had happened. Mandolyn relayed some messages to Harmatana, and it turned out they were only about twenty miles behind us. They also had a thicker strand of dyneema onboard, as well as an adjustable eyebolt contraption (originally carried to plug a hole in a hull in the event of emergency) that would allow me to tie the dyneema as tight as I could by hand and then go even tighter with the eye bolt.

We both altered course a little bit and a couple of hours later I was zooming out to their boat to grab the supplies.

Four hours after first breaking the steering cable we were back underway with the new gear, and what felt like a solid replacement in place. The autopilot took over once again, and it was as if nothing had even happened that afternoon.

By late evening the wind had clocked around a hundred and eighty degrees just as predicted. Over the next few hours it would continue around onto our nose, and settle just off the port side on a close reach as the storm came across to meet us.

The next two or three days we didn’t take a single picture. The seas built up uncomfortably, but the wind did stay just far enough off the nose for us to sail along at a fast clip along our rhumb line. Nobody onboard was happy, but the forecast had been pretty accurate and at least we knew we’d blow out the backside of it fairly soon.

The boobies were happy to keep finding places to rest overnight during the storm. Cleaning up after them became my morning ritual, despite being the one on the boat that would have happily shooed them away.

It’s always something. When you are sailing you immediately notice any change in the noise onboard. We were sailing along in fairly benign conditions after the storm had passed, sitting in the cockpit reading, when our hackles raised. Ali poked her head out and found this. A big U-bolt was meant to attach the sail to the boom, but had managed to work its way loose and pop out. I looked around and was happy to find the pin had landed right in a nest of lines. We didn’t even have to drop the sail to get it attached again.

Last night at sea. One last boobie bird castaway.

Australia on the horizon.

Every cruiser fears Australian Customs. It didn’t used to be this way. Twenty years ago we didn’t give them any thought. They’d board your boat on arrival, grab any food they didn’t want you to bring into the country, and tell you to have fun. These days there are all sorts of horror stories about them charging extra fees for every item of food, but worse, of them finding any reason to demand a fumigation of the boat. In other words, don’t let them find an ant crawling around, or heaven forbid, a cockroach.

By the time we would arrive Ali would have our boat cleaner than the day it was launched.

The longest miles of any passage are the ones that come immediately after first spotting land. The approach to Cairns seemed to go on forever, despite the strong winds and 7.5 knot speeds.

See? It never gets any closer.

The sun set on our starboard side as the full moon rose on our port.

We made our way slowly down the channel into Cairns, eventually dropping anchor a mile outside of town at the end of a long string of boats.

The next morning we were directed into the marina, where Customs, Immigration, and Health would come to clear us in. Whether it was Ali’s preparations, or it was just a bunch of overblown stories to begin with, we were ushered through the process without any issues.

Ali and the kids ran off to get some food, while I washed the boat and filled the water tanks. The marina had seemed nice about it at first, but apparently there is only a two-hour free window. They were calling on the VHF and the phone was ringing off the hook while I was out washing the boat. They wanted us out.

We actually would have been more than happy to pay the exorbitant marina fees in order to stay put, but for the first time anywhere in the world we were met with the condition that all boats must have comprehensive insurance coverage (we’ve never had any comprehensive insurance, which I consider the difference between buying a boat you can afford, and buying a boat that a bank says you can afford) as well as a minimum of $10 million in liability insurance in order to stay there. This seemed like a great way to ensure that no cruisers would stay at the marina, as well as keep half of your slips empty. I was getting the impression that Australia had changed considerably since our last visit. Regulations seemed to be the new norm.

Unsurprisingly, the costs and regulations had caused the anchorage in the river to become incredibly full. We circled around for an hour looking for space before finally deciding to just go back outside to our spot from the night before. It was farther out from the town’s dinghy dock than we would have liked, but at least we didn’t have to be crammed in tight with the other boats swinging up and down the river on the tides.

Anyway, we’re back in Cairns, Australia, a town we first visited twenty years ago and we’ve been telling our kids they are going to love. I hope our memory serves us right.