Thank you to everyone who has been following the Blog it has been fun writing it and putting in the pictures. It was good to know people were reading it and we hope you got some sense of the fun we had this year on the trip. To those of you thinking about doing it, stop thinking about it and get cracking you will not regret it. To those of you who just read it – thanks and we hope you enjoyed it.

Yes, I have been tardy –as a number of you have so sagely pointed out we can’t still be 25 NM from Sydney or Immigration have caught up with us ! We are home. We came through the Heads about 0945 on Monday 7 December and managed to get the 11.30 Spit Bridge opening to have the boat back on the mooring by about midday. Then the “small” job of unloading – god we have a lot of crap aboard. It took most of the rest of the day to unload and get the boat in some sort of shape to be back in Sydney. We are home – that means shops and more bloody shops – we have spent eternity in Bunnings and Chatswoo trying to get the Xmas shopping done. Back to earth with a thump!! So the upshot of all this is pretty simple really. We have had a ball. The places, the people the boats have all been great fun, exciting and interesting, and yes we would do it again. The big question is when would we do it again? I have to also acknowledge Phlat Chat’s Admiral, Chris she has been wonderful in everything she has done on the trip. We would not have made it past Pittwater without her help. I am hugely indebted to her for this (as well as all the other stuff over the last 34 years!!). Stay tuned for more adventures. Here endith the lesson !!!

Well, we are now 25 nm from Sydney Heads. We have travelled through the night with Jim helping us, for which we are most grateful. We are lucky with the wind, while it has now died off to 6 knots we had 15-20 NE all night so it really pushed us long. We hope to be in the heads by lunch time today. The forecast is for NE today but a nasty 30 knot Southerly tomorrow – so we made the right decision to get cracking when we left Laurieton yesterday rather than wait.

Today is a lovely day, we are in Laurieton a lovely little town just south of Port Macquarie resting after two nights at sea. It is also our 34th wedding anniversary today. We left the Gold Coast after 10 days at the Marina Oceanus, which I would recommend to anyone. It was great, very central and the team running it are delightful, thanks “Rooster” and Chris. Our friend Jim Sinclair, from the CCC flew up to help us do the overnight passages, as did James our son. We left on Thursday evening from the Gold Coast to head south. The first night was a bit of a slog, but we made it (a few of the crew did try to berley up some fish for us but as we had no lines out their sacrifice was wasted). Friday was lovely, a nice 15+ knot Northerly breeze and we got a good distance. The night time was a bit different, the odd storm cell, lightening, 30knots but mostly behind us. We got through the storms unscathed, some others were not so lucky with some gear damage reported and I think one lightening strike. We decided to pull into Laurieton to have a break from night sailing and a southerly was forecast and as we all know, “gentlemen do not go to windward”! Also James has work commitments so we needed to ship home faster than 20knots from the south would allow. So we will have a break and head off to sea again on Monday, and hopefully Monday night and Tuesday will see us home.