Bulletin No 1. Departure Date Approaching
Dear Friends and Fellow Sailors
We’re in the final countdown prior to Courtesan’s departure date late February for her next series of adventures. The list of things to do is keeping us awake at night but is slowly but surely diminishing. The major improvement has been the installation of a gen set and dive compressor, a tricky engineering feat to fit the assembly into the limited space available in the lazurette. Other improvements have included new cockpit refrigeration, new cockpit cushions, a printer and two new mountain bikes to squeeze onto the boat somewhere. The boat has been out of the water to have its bottom scraped, the life raft has been serviced and repositioned, and Heather has done a Navigation Course and a Safety and Sea Survival Course (with practical experience deploying, righting and climbing into a life raft, as well as a simulated helicopter rescue!)
Still to do…..Order $1800 of new charts (ouch!), install a cappuccino machine (essential), finalise our communications systems including AIS (Automatic Identification System to identify ships on the plotter by VHF - it gives more information than radar and lets the ship know where we are too), and fit out the boat with dental equipment and supplies to enable David to trade dentistry for coconuts on the remote islands.
And here is the Grand Plan…The trusty but true crew of two will leave about February 23rd for Refuge Cove and Deal Island, then perhaps spend a night behind Gabo Island and visit the iconic lighthouse, before moving on to Eden. From there we will strike out for Lord Howe Island, about 400 nautical miles east of Sydney. We’ll stay there for 2 or 3 weeks before heading back to the coast to explore the nooks and crannies we’ve often not had the time to investigate. We’ll leave the Queensland coast mid may for New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands, then return to Vanuatu to visit many of the islands (such as Tanna with its notorious volcano) that we missed last time. We’ll head north to the remote Banks Group and up to the Solomon Islands, and perhaps stop in at the Louisiades (part of PNG) on our return South in October.
