Can’t get enough of Tasmania

The Schooner Maggie B is back at Elizabeth Street Pier in Hobart, Tasmania. This is such a wonderful place we all might desert, just like the stories of the ships that got to San Francisco in 1849, and all, from Captain to Cabin Boy took off for the Gold Fields. But no, we are planning to get underway this Monday, though we may have to use our famous Nova Scotia ice mallet to knock people’s fingers off the pier.

What have we been doing? Just about everything. Certainly Ten Days on the Island - Dream Masons was a marvelous way to start. Since then we have driven all over the island, seeing lovely spots and horribly degraded areas (from sheep, mining or clear cutting). We have camped out on the Bruni Peninsula, we have sailed on the Brigantine Windeward Bound, we have been rowing sculls, we have been up Mount Wellington, gone to Opera, ballet, plays and movies, been to cabaret shows and many music sets, swam in the ocean, toured wineries and distilleries, seen where the convicts were kept, enjoyed wonderful food, went out sailing on the Maggie B with friends and we keep making new friends.

The weather has been just perfect, like the fall in Maine — cool at nights (two blankets!) and t-shirts during the day.

There has been lots of boat work. We aren’t the sort of people who work on the boat instead of sailing it, and we sure don’t plan to be a fixture in a marina, but when we arrived in Hobart we had a list of 21 “to do’s” and as we went over the boat it grew to 34 items. We are now down to seven items and the Maggie B is stronger, safer and more efficient than ever.

On the boat, we have fixed and replaced two bilge pumps and re-routed the drain lines so (hopefully) they don’t ever again fill up the bilges by draining IN instead of OUT. We have changed and cleaned all our fuel and water filters (seven!), we have rebuilt the washdown pump (again), we have replaced our deck cushions, we have rebuilt our boom outhaul sheave, we have replaced several shackles which were worn, we have worked out a method to drain the shower when we are on the starboard tack, we got new electronic and paper charts (from here to Chile!), and we have gone over the rigging top to bottom.

There have been two interesting “discoveries.” One unpleasant discovery when we were at sea was to find the engine room mostly full of water and the bilge pump not working. We fixed the bilge pump, which was “broken” because the float switch cover had come off, which meant it would not work either when it was underwater or when its master switch was on. But the real puzzle was how did the water get in. We puzzled and puzzled, pulling everything out of lockers and crawling around to look for hidden openings. In the end the answer was painful.

We have a big (100 gallons per minute) emergency pump that can double as a fire hose. The deck fittings are two inches across and can have a variety of hoses snapped on, ready for any emergency. The two deck fittings also, unfortunately, worked perfectly to drain all the cockpit water right into the engine room when the cockpit partially filled when we were on starboard tack. They are now closed off.

The second interesting discovery was “dip.” Basically, a compass that is perfect in Nova Scotia doesn’t work in Tasmania. The magnetic fields are different. Big ships have vertical magnets that are flipped for the northern or southern hemisphere. Not so for little ships. Supposedly Danforth now equips their compasses to be “universal,” but not the one that we have. Our compass can be taken apart and rebalanced for the southern hemisphere, but then it won’t work when we go back north. Most probably we will buy a second “southern” one which will be cheaper that getting our current one “fixed” twice.

Our plans are to sail from Hobart on Monday to go around to Port Davie on the SW coast of Tasmania, which is a world heritage site. But we are watching a very intense low (970 mb!) that is working its way here. We might just end have to stay a little longer. No hardship! Then after Port Davie we are headed to Auckland, which is about 1200 NM or a week or so of sailing.

All is well.