We arrived in Rhode Island in springtime to be greeted by daffodils, tulips, pansies, magnolias, blossom trees and the rich red Maple trees. How lucky are we to find ourselves in this beautiful part of America with history staring you in the face everywhere you look.  I love the New England houses, grey and white, weatherboard or shingled, with steep gables, dormer windows, porticos, wooden fretwork, and surrounded by rustic stone fences. Springtime perhaps, but the weather is more variable than Melbourne’s!  It can be 80F one day, and close to freezing at night.  Thank heavens the first thing that David got working on the boat was the “Eberspacher Wasserheizgerat” (hydronic heater). 

 Next it was time to turn our attention to “Sula.” While we’d been home we’d arranged for the saloon cushions to be reupholstered and for cockpit cushions to be made and these look great.  Our first job was scrubbing the teak decks, then scrubbing the dinghy bottom with “Barnacle Buster,” then getting dirty down in the bilges after we nearly sank “Sula” by overfilling the water tanks. The stories about the horrific fogs in these areas prompted us to upgrade the radar and electrical systems straight away.  We have also installed an electrical head for our guests as a high priority.  We’ve been working our way through the 50 plus light bulbs, upgrading them to LED’s, including the ones at the top of the 80 ft mast!  Untold hours have been spent learning which wire leads to what, which pipe goes where, which way stop cocks should be turned…. .  David has had me wielding spanners, screwdrivers, silicon grease, even the electric drill (now that’s scary).  When did I say I believed in equal rights for women?

Culinary Corner: The Lobster Coast

We’re right in the middle of  “The Lobster Coast,” which is a nightmare when sailing and having to avoid lobster pots, but it’s great the rest of the time.  One of our new best friends, Ken, who is of Portuguese extraction, decided we needed to be educated both in terms of Portuguese cuisine and the local seafood. He supplied us with bagfuls of Portuguese sweet bread “Massa” and biscuits.  He invited us to his home and he and his wife Maureen put on a sumptuous seafood banquet for us.  He taught us that “Quahogs” were clams.  We started with “Cherrystone Clams,” slurped raw straight from the shell with a squeeze of lemon and some cocktail sauce.  Next he instructed us how to eat “Steamers.”  You remove the clam from the shell, peel off the membrane while holding the clam by its stalk, then you dunk the clam in broth to cleanse it and finally dip it into melted butter. Finally the aficionados drink the tasty broth in which the clams were steamed. Yum!  But then the piece de la resistance was a 1½ lb lobster each, and a lesson from Ken on how to effectively remove all the flesh from the shell.  Needless to say we’ve also hung out at “The Black Pearl” and “The Red Parrot” in Newport for the occasional fix of Clam Chowder.

We were expecting the coffee scene to be bad in the States, but we came across “Coastal Roasters” in our adopted town of Tiverton.  We purchased an electrical coffee grinder for $16 and a simple Delonghi Espresso machine, which makes good froth as well, for about $60!  It should be more seaworthy than the Krupps was in the Pacific. I’m the barista on board and the coffee is good. To cap it off, we have discovered 90% Lindt chocolate!

I’ll pass you over to “Mr Fix It. Or should that be “Fix it Mister!”

Heather

 It’s polite to let ladies go first so Hez has set the scene and I’m sure you don’t want to hear about my deep bilge experiences as I’ve gotten to know our new Tardis. Suffice to say “It’s complicated” and as I’ve come to find on boats, not necessarily accessible or even logical. This is not to say that the 35 page boat manual hasn’t been helpful in getting me at least in the right part of the bilge, but once there the maze of piping and wires, sans labels, can lead to a new kind of seasickness.  This process of learning every system and understanding how it operates and the maintenance requirements is actually an essential aspect of “Cruising” because the buck is going to stop with us in most places.  Being able to diagnose the problems as they will inevitably arise and make decisions on repairs, parts and back up systems will give us confidence when we eventually head off shore again.

I stood at the helm on our first real hit out the other day and it really came home to me just what we had taken on to get to this point….. to go for a sail: beating to windward in  25-35 knots and then close reaching, seeing 8.5 knots on the log as we trucked close hauled, and then 10-11’s  as we sprung sheets a little. Sula is a SAILING MACHINE, stiff with her 42% ballast ratio (that’s 9.5 tons of lead down in the keel) and the Ron Holland hull has a delightful action through the seas…….am I thrilled?…..was it worth it?…….absolutely.

As you may have gathered we have had a lot on to relocate ourselves and our clobber about as far from Melbourne as you can get on the planet. I’d like to just thank everyone who has helped us make it to this point and particularly Heather, our daughter Jacqui and the wonderful Hall family in Tiverton.