Saturday morning began with a mission: a man overboard. Silver Fern transformed into a movie set, to film a man overboard drill and recovery to use for future training purposes. Rolls were assigned, scripts practiced and we were off! John instructed the whole operation running the foredeck, with Pieter on the halyard as the swimmer, Rob as his helper getting him dressed in his immersion suit, Angie sending out a mayday call then helping Reinhard on the swimmer halyard, Stuart on our casualty halyard back in the cockpit, Brendon in charge of deploying the safety equipment, Shien ready below deck to receive the casualty and treat for hypothermia or other injuries, Mish as our trusty videographer, and yours truly on the helm. Needless to say it takes a village! John’s words of encouragement were “Keep your eyes on the prize!” Well we did just that, the crew was like a well-oiled machine, and we managed to pick up our casualty (a fender in an inflated lifejacket) on our first rolling take.

After our grand performance, feeling very pleased with ourselves, we started heading to our next anchorage, just a quick motor back out the Bathurst channel. As we were puttering along, we heard the dreaded engine alarm go off for overheating. Oh sh*t. Motoring upwind in the narrows of Bathurst channel is not the ideal place to lose your engine, actually it probably wouldn’t make my top 100’s list of places I’d like to lose the engine. Genoa unfurled moments later, and with the help of Brendon, Rob & Reinhard, we tacked our way to a safe anchorage, and sailed onto anchor. After the boat was safe, John and Pieter set to work trying to find the source of the engine alarm, and discovered a shattered impeller. And as impellers always seem to be, it was in such a difficult place in the engine to access, that the next 4 hours was spent trying to pry the old one out and set the new piece in. Reinhard got involved, and the three of them worked together to put the whole system back together.

Our track tacking up the channel and sailing onto anchor

Pieter showing off what an impeller SHOULD look like!

As if all this wasn’t enough excitement for one day, we have been having a series of murders onboard. I started a round of a favorite game of mine: Assassin. Everyone in the crew is assigned at random a target, murder weapon and scene of the crime. When you’ve successfully assassinated your target by handing them the murder weapon in the scene of the crime, you inherit their assignment. Before 7 am, Rob had already had two victims: Reinhard in the bow cabin with a winch handle, and Shien at the chart table with the toaster. Angie managed to kill Rob with a fender in the anchor locker, then Mish with a wine bottle in the mid-cabin. And last but not least, was John’s murder by Brendon, holding a kettle at the helm. Any trust we’ve built amongst the crew the first half of the trip is long gone. It’s officially kill or be killed on Silver Fern.

Sunday morning we dropped off the crew on the beach to hangout on shore, then set off to find some blue water to refill our water tanks. All of the water in Bathurst harbor is an earthy brown from the tannins that flow from the freshwater sources around the harbor, and we didn’t want to put our desalination system through having to filter all that. So we headed west with our happily repaired engine out to Port Davey and anchored for the morning while our water tank refilled. We then sailed back to pick up our team, had another look at the updated weather forecast and decided our best weather window to sail back East was actually that night. The plan was to weigh anchor just before dinner and head for Port Arthur, and that’s just what we did. Back to the open ocean we go!

Major relaxation on the beach from our star crew

Cheers!

Liv

Eyes on the Prize!

Dog Bark Road.

Team Scrum at Mount Rugby Summit