Good-bye to Maia

We said good-bye to Maia yesterday (sigh). Thanks to Sonya's help, the move went smoothly. We drove up to Airlie yesterday afternoon and plan to stay near the Whitsundays until we take off for Sydney tomorrow. Things are changing pretty quick in our world. (Unfortunately, we are back to using the internet at public spots, so no pictures for this post.) It is great to be back near so many of our sailing friends, but weird not to have our little floating home. We made our transition a little easier today by mailing home a big box of boat gear that we won't need while couch surfing.

Although our time on the boat has ended (sniff) we are still traveling. Before we head home we're set to visit Noumea, New Caledonia, starting Sept 23 and Honolulu Oct 2. We'll be back home on the 9th, ready to go back to work on Oct 15.

Thanks to all of our friends and family for supporting us through yet another transition. We have enjoyed our sailing time, but are looking forward to being home to see friends, get to work, and get back to the sights, sounds and tastes of California.

Return Cruise

We're back in MacKay, preparing Maia for the sales block. She's got a web page now with our broker here. Much has happened in the few days since we last hit the dock, from showing the boat to the broker, arranging for caretakers in our absence, to doing major paint work on the boat, including the entire mast, dodger, most of the decks, the cockpit, the chain locker and more. We've been hard at work since there are possible buyers scheduling to come see Maia, so we've got deadlines. There are stories to be told for our last days cruising that we look forward to writing up, once we get Maia fairly prepared in a couple days.

Crew member extra-ordinaire Dave is leaving for home tomorrow. It turns out that flying on September 11 is still quite a bit cheaper than other days. Go figure. We really benefited from Dave's help, good spirits and camaraderie for Maia's adventure. We won't have long to miss it though because we plan to leave the boat just a week after Dave does. As soon as we return, we are looking forward to sailing with Dave and Colin back in the SF Bay on their boat Pacific High.

In the mean time, here's a couple pics from our return trip with Moves Afoot, a Wharram design Tiki 38 catamaran. We had a great couple weeks with them before we had to say good bye.

Heading South

Just a quick note to say that we're about to start heading South, for the first time, back to MacKay. We're planning to take at least a week to get there, and we have friends on their catamaran Moves Afoot to buddy boat with for a little while. This will be our last time in the Whitsundays for the trip, and some of the last sails we take on Maia. We will soon have a listing up with our broker, and are already starting to making preparations to leave the boat. Craig and Evvy are hot the trail to find plane tickets home; we are looking forward to seeing our old friends scattered around the Pacific on our way home. Internet and phone connections come back to us when we reach MacKay late next week.

The Whitsundays continue

The crew of Maia have taken a few side-trips on other people's boats to some of the islands. On Wednesday, our friends Ralph and Jen on El Misty were motoring around on a calm day because they needed to charge their batteries and offered to take us over to Daydream Island. We checked out the resort, had a walk on the trail and went for a snorckle in Lovers Bay. Like so many of the island resorts this one is top-notch. As such, it has its obligatory art work:


Dave, Jen and Craig smile as Ralph demonstrates how to best enjoy the statuary.

The resort has the best mini-golf course we have ever seen. The theme is different places in Australia. Jen clued us in that Australians don't have "shrimp on the barbie", they call shrimp prawns, and it isn't common to bbq them.





On Friday we piled on to our friend Warren's 40 foot catamaran Odyssey to head out to an enormous party on Whitehaven Beach on Whitsunday Island.


Mind you, there are NO facilities on Whitsunday, it is a national park with pristine beaches. Well, for this one, they brought out big tents, a huge sound system for the band, 4-5 kitchen set ups, all on a few trucks they brought in by barge. About 300 boats gathered for a real Australian style bash. We had an excellent time swimming and walking on the beach.


This was a close call with the first croc we've seen.

On our sail home we starting racing a large tug boat. Skipper Warren pulled up the big spinnaker and we sailed away from them - no dinosaur bones needed.


The big spinnaker with the boxing kangaroo is a favorite. We've heard that this is the logo for a very cheap fluffy white bread, like Wonder, called "Tip Top". This particular one came from a boat called Australia II, which won the America's cup. Unfortunately, a few minutes after this photo was taken, the spinnaker split and now needs to be repaired.

We have been having a great time in Airlie Beach. The weather is warm, so we have plenty of opportunities for swimming. The boat is safely at anchor, which keeps expenses low, and we are surrounded by friends. Our friends Dan and Jenny inspired us to stay up late and visit all of the nightclubs in town. Good news for Darrin, I don't think your lifetime ban is on the books, a decade can bring a lot of forgiving and forgetting. Unfortunately, we also do not see any tourist trimarans here, so yours must by plying other waters now.

The Shire Council for Airlie is trying to keep up with the resorts, so they added this enhancement to intimidate the men in the public urinals. Dan and Craig demonstrate



Here's the scoop on our exit plan. We took a big step towards home: we have decided to leave Maia with a broker in MacKay. We will be there sometime in early September, or just about 10 days from now. Dave has bought his ticket home, flying on September 11, so we figure we should be situated about that time. Evvy has a friend, Sonya, who is coming to visit about a week later. Then we'll be heading home in late September. Rather than rush home we're looking at making some stops on the way home in Sydney, New Caledonia, and Honolulu - all places where we have friends.

On the Hook in Airlie

Craig and mom Gayle on a hike on Hamilton Island.

Gayle and Richard took off from MacKay last night (Aug 15), on their way to Melbourne for a few days’ visit before they head for home. Maia is now on the hook in Airlie Beach, a tourist town, backpacker haven, and great calm harbor with easy dinghy access to town. Craig and Evvy rented a car to drive Gayle and Richard down to the larger airport in MacKay. This trip also had the advantage of making a car tour of the coastal area here in the Whitsunday area, and most importantly - allowed us to retrieve our passports.

Let me back up a bit and catch up on some developments of our trip. On the day we received our U.S. Coast Guard documentation, July 19, we sent off our passports to the Consulate for Papua New Guinea (PNG) in Brisbane in order get permission to enter the country. At that time we were in the Keppel Bay Marina, planning to make our next stop off at a town in MacKay. We sent the package overnight express, and hoped to get it back by July 30, for a possible rendezvous with Gayle and Richard in PNG. Craig called the MacKay marina to make sure they expected it and to confirm the address to use from their website. Recalling the fiasco of renting a car to track down our EPIRB, we didn’t want any mistakes this time.

Paperwork trouble reared its head again, as our passports did not turn up in MacKay, and we could not get any information from the PNG consulate. We asked the MacKay Marina every day for this package, but finally left without our passports. By the time we reached Hamilton Island, August 8, we had been without the passports for 3 weeks, and finally got word from the PNG Consulate that allowed us to get post office tracking confirming delivery in MacKay. Craig talked to the MacKay marina again and told them that the package must be somewhere in their complex – which is rather large and includes real estate brokers, ship yard facilities, and a number of other shops and restaurants - but the marina office did not lift a finger to track down our mail. We seemed at a dead end, so were beginning the process of getting new passports. Then a few days ago we got a call from the shipyard in MacKay saying they have had a package for us for weeks but didn’t know who we were. Our phone # was written on the package, but we were just happy to finally locate our passports and get them back.

This passport loss for nearly a month has put the prospects of traveling to PNG out of range. Evvy is anxious to return home for work, and we don’t have enough weeks left to allow a window to make this part of the trip. There are lots of preparations required, and we may be at sea for weeks only to spend a few days in PNG, looking for a weather window to return to Australia again. We have decided that we have pushed enough on our vacation and we will slow down and enjoy the Whitsundays for a couple weeks. It is just that little bit of time before we need to get the boat ready to sale, and move our lives back into a couple duffel bags for the trip home.

Poor us, stuck in the most beutiful part of the world. Enjoying some of the best sailing and spending every evening witnessing sunsets like this one on Brampton Island. The mechanism on the bottom of the picture is our self-steering "magic fish".

The other major development is that Dave is now cruising with a friend of ours, Warren on his home-built 40’ catamaran called Odessy. We first met Warren in Keppel Bay, and he caught up with us again a few hundred miles later on the island of Brampton. While coming back from our walk on Brampton August 5, we saw Odessy pull into the anchorage. We took our dinghy by his boat, caught up and invited Warren over for dinner. While eating Evvy’s great pasta creation and breaking out an actual bottle of red wine (not from a box or more gently put here, a ‘cask’), we learned that Warren is a bit tired of sailing his big catamaran alone, he would really like to have crew. Craig was all ready to sail on that big, fast cat catamaran, that regularly sails as speeds above 15 knots, where if Maia goes over 7 knots we’re really going way too fast and need to slow her down. Realistically, though it was Dave who was the potential crew. With encouragement from Craig and Evvy to take this new adventure, Dave decided to meet up with us in a few days at Hamilton Island, or further on at Airlie Beach. So the next day, after more than 3 months living with Craig and Evvy on a 32’ boat, Dave got a chance to have a 40’ hull of a catamaran all to himself.

Dave sailing off with Warren from Brampton Island

We met back up with Dave and Warren at Hamilton Island, and they are having a great time cruising together. They decided to keep going, as long as we are both in the same area. Dave has had the chance to learn a whole new boat, try out “the dark side,” as many sailors call catamarans, and have the life of two single guys. Maia and Odessy are now anchored right near each other in front of Airlie Beach, and we’re planning to take a trip all together in few days back out to the Islands.

That’s all the big news for now. Evvy sends out a big thanks for all the warm birthday wishes. Here's one more pic:

Craig and Evvy enjoying the pool at the Whitsunda Moorings Bed and Breakfast in Airlie Beach where Gayle and Richard were staying. The Bed and Breakfast is surrounded by lush landscaping enjoyed by many species of birds.

Reef Tourists

Thanks to a special treat from Gayle and Richard, the four of us just returned from a day trip to the Great Barrier Reef, at a spot called Knuckle Reef. The trip offered snorkling, a water slide, a underwater observatory and a semi-submersible boat to check out the reef. For Evvy's birthday Craig went even further and got a tourist scuba dive option. Here's a few pics to stand in for a couple thousand words for today. The fish's name is Wally. He is very friendly and let us give him a pet.




Gayle and Richard depart tomorrow via MacKay, so the four of us are driving down to town. The Weather has warmed up considerably. Craig even complained of being too hot even while wearing shorts and a t-shirt. The temperatures are still below average, but very comfortable.

We are looking forward to getting back on the cruising track and spending more time in the Whitsundays. So many wonderful places to see. For those of you using google earth our coordinates are Latitude 20 15.5S Longitude 148 43.2E at Airlie Beach, the outer Great Barrier Reef (including Knuckle) are located north and east of the Whitsundays.

Marguerite's Pics

Evvy' s Mom Marguerite took about 100 great photos with comments and posted it to her web site.

[ http://www.mlstivers.shutterfly.com ]

The password is downunder

Thanks so much Marguerite for being the proxy for our posting. Craig's Mom Gayle and husband Richard are here for a few more days. We are enjoying Airlie Beach, and just made the final arrangements for their departure in a couple days. Logistics done, we're off to see some more sites in the Whitsundays before they depart.

Maia is now at anchor while we run around town, a new experience for us. Steep hills nearby allow us to keep an eye on her, so we feel secure. Before long we'll have some leisurely days here in Airlie and we'll put up some of our pics too.