The voyage from Darwin to Lombok, Indonesia, went smoothly until the last 20 miles when my engine developed a major leak in the exhaust elbow of the seawater cooling system. On marine engines generally seawater is pumped through the engine to cool it and then is combined with the engine exhaust gases in an exhaust elbow.  The combination is then sent overboard.

After arriving in Lombok and staying one night near a marina where I thought I could complete the Clearing In process for entering Indonesia (it turns out  they lost their permit to do this) , I started out motoring the next morning to Medana Bay Marina on the northwest side of the island where I was certain I could complete Entry Formalities.  After a few hours I noticed an unusual dribble of water on the cabin floor.  Opening hatches to the bilge, I was shocked to find the bilge full of water. I immediately turned on the bilge pumps which successfully started drawing down the water level.  Investigating further, I found a substantial jet of water coming from the underside of the exhaust elbow .  The only way to stop it was to shut down the engine which I did for a while because there was enough wind to sail.  That wind eventually disappeared so I had no choice but to motor again if I wanted to make Medana Bay by nightfall. The leak returned but now the main bilge pump had failed so it was a race to see if the secondary bilge pump could hold down the water level until I reached the marina.  It did, with a little help from me and a bucket scooping water out of the bilge and dumping it down the sink.

Once at the marina with the engine stopped I had time to assess the situation.  I found that a plug normally in a port on the underside of the elbow had blown out leaving a way for water to escape. As I write this I haven’t found the missing plug in the bilge.  The elbow is made of cast iron which can be TIG welded but it’s a tricky process. I was not confident I could get it successfully welded in a place where there may only bush welders.

The right solution is replacing the elbow with a new one but shipping boat parts into a place like Indonesia is a nightmare, sometimes taking months, even if you’re willing to pay the 40% duty and taxes (which a boat in transit shouldn’t have to pay). I’m not waiting months for anything. Tracking down and ordering the parts I needed in Sydney, Australia, I jumped on the fast ferry from Lombok to Bali last Thursday, caught a red eye flight from Denpasar airport in Bali to Sydney, and spent Friday picking up the parts along with spare bilge pumps and a few other things.  I flew back to Denpasar on Saturday (yesterday) with the parts in my carry-on bag and skated through Customs with no problems.  Returning to Lombok and Medana Bay today on the fast ferry, I’m back where I started with the parts to fix the leak.  I hope to get the new elbow installed tomorrow and get going again by the end of the week.

What’s surprising about this problem is that the engine is only 2 years old with less than 1300 hours. Even with the leak it continue to run smoothly and the seawater and exhaust was still being ejected overboard. A failure like this should never have happened with such a relatively young engine.  I’m worried there is an undiscovered collateral problem that led to this failure. That might come to light when we pull the failed elbow off and examine it.

I arrived back in Darwin, Australia, on April 19 after a long flight from Seattle and an almost missed connection out of Brisbane. Fortunately, Immigration for many incoming foreigners is done at a machine – scan passport, pose for photo, take printout, done. Many machines were available, no waiting. Fortunately, Customs was also quick – they didn’t open any bags.

I had a lot of work to do to get Phywave ready to sail again – putting all the sails back on, top off the diesel jerry cans (I emptied them to fill the boat’s main diesel tank in December), top off the water tank, buy provisions, and arrange for clearing out of Australia (5 day notification lead time required to get an exit appointment at the Customs jetty).

When I arrived in November I removed the dodger because there were many zipper slides that had corroded to the point I could no longer move them. I had to cut some zippers lose to get the dodger off the frame. The bimini and connector panel had already been removed and stowed below long ago after they were damaged in heavy winds sailing south through the Atlantic. I didn’t have either in place since leaving the ad hoc anchorage behind a tall cliff near the east entrance to the Strait of Magellan. I took the lot – dodger, bimini, connector panel – to The Canopy Man, recommended as the best canvas guy in Darwin. I told him I’d be back in April to pick up everything repaired so he had plenty of time to do the work. I picked it up on April 22 and installed it on the boat, a multi-hour effort because the canvas is stretched tight across the frame and takes some pulling and cursing to get it all connected. Everything went back together OK except 2 forward window panels on the dodger that each had one zipper reversed. I immediately took them back to Nick, the canopy man, to have the zippers flipped. As I write this on Sunday I’m hoping to get them back tomorrow. Last Thursday was a holiday here, their Veterans Day, and on Friday Nick was closed.

There is some urgency to get the fixed panels back since I told Australia Border Force (ABF) I would clear out at 1100 am on Wednesday, May 1.

I have made a major change to my route. After watching the weather going north to India for months while at home, and seeing nothing good, I decided to make my Asia continent landing in Indonesia on the island Lombok, just east of Bali where I landed my plane in 2011. Lombok has some good anchorages and a marina. My only purpose in going to India was to claim I’d sail to the continent of Asia. After spending some time at home researching it, I couldn’t find any authority that argued Indonesia was not consider part of Asia even though it is an island country and not attached to what we consider to be the Asia mainland. The change in routing will keep me in the southeast trade wind zone and make most of my India Ocean crossing downwind.

One thing I forgot to do while at home is make a “boat stamp”. Many countries, like Indonesia, are enamored of stamping paperwork of all kinds. Documents are “official” when they have been stamped and signed, stamped by them and stamped by me with my boat stamp. If I’d jumped on it when I arrived in Darwin I could have had one made here but I didn’t remember until yesterday while reading some Indonesia clearing-in instructions. It’s too late to get one made by my May 1 departure date, but I did find a DIY rubber stamp kit at Officeworks, the local version of Staples. DIY (do it yourself) means using tweezers to pluck individual tiny rubber letters and numbers from a tray and placing them in the grooves in the stamp. It’s sort of like old fashion typesetting. After losing a few letters to ham-handed tweezer work, I finally had assembled 3 rows of basic information the stamp should include. It looks like crap but I think it will suffice. No choice at this point.

I finally took out the drone after more than a year, charged the batteries, and made a short video of Phywave in Cullen Bay Marina. My drone flying skills are very rusty. I hope to use the drone more at future anchorages.

I returned home in early December, leaving my sailboat Phywave in a marina in Darwin for protection during the tropical cyclone season. I’ll return to Darwin in April to resume my voyage west when the season ends.

While home I’ve spent some time involved with preparations for the First World Flight Centennial celebration.

The first flight around the world occured in 1924. Four planes, Douglas World Cruisers, took off from Sand Point on Lake Washington in Seattle on April 6. Only two were able to complete the entire flight, arriving back in Seattle on September 28, 1924. 

There will be centennial celebration of this flight in Seattle this September. The website is:

https://www.firstworldflightcentennial.org/

As a pilot who has flown solo around the world twice, over the North Pole, and to Antarctica, I have been invited to participate in the centennial as one of six light aircraft pilots who will have their planes on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight and do a fly-by of the celebration venue.

I’ll interrupt my sailing voyage around the world and return in September to do my part in this great event.

While at home I need to get my plane “un-pickled” from long term storage and ready to fly again so it will be ready to go in September. The “pickling” process involves replacing the engine oil with special preservative oil, removing the battery, replacing the spark plugs with special dissicant plugs, and sealing up openings to the engine, like exhaust, so moisture can’t get in. Once that is all undone, I’ll need to get the legally required annual inspection done.

The final step is for me to get back in the plane with an instructor (CFI) for a Flight Review. To be current and fly solo, pilots are required to have a Flight Review every 24 calendar months. My last review was in the spring of 2020 so I’m overdue, but since I’ve been sailing and not flying it really didn’t matter until now. The Flight Review only takes a couple of hours, one on the ground and one in the air. It’s not a test but a review to make sure a pilot is still competent enough to fly safely.

After sailing west passed the Great Barrier Reef it was after midnight and I had a straight run of about 25 nm into and across the inside shipping channels.  I decided to take it slow and use the opportunity to get some sleep so I set the sails to give me about 4 – 4.5 knots. This would put me close to York Point (the northernmost point in Australia) and York Island around sunrise.  I planned to stop near there and anchor to wait for favorable west-setting tidal currents in the channel running by Thursday Island.  No ships were showing on the AIS in the shipping channels so I was actually able to get a few hours of solid sleep, waking an hour before first light a 6 am.

I cruised passed York Island early and realized, after rechecking the tide tables at Thursday Island, there was a slack tide at 1035 following a (west-setting) flood tide.  I could easily make that one if I used the engine.  I never want to hang around at anchor just killing time if I can keep moving. The timing worked about right, though I was surprised to get hit with about 3 knots of counter-current in the channel west of the town of Thursday Island.   It may have been an eddy current in the complicated channel.

I pushed on into the Arafura Sea which at that point is really pretty shallow – about 10-20 meters. It’s easy to see how a land bridge could have connected Australia and Papua New Guinea in the distant past.  I got some useful wind on the stern letting me wing out the mainsail and genoa set on the whisker pole.  That comfortable cruising west across the Arafura Sea last a few days but I knew from the weather forecasts the doldrums were coming, and they were brutal.   Except for some interludes with useful wind that lasted only a few hours, I had to start motoring even before turning south through the Dundas Strait toward Cape Don. The temperature rose, and with no breeze, I was getting cooked by temperatures over 100 degrees F. 

The route to Darwin through the Dundas Strait passed Abbot Shoal, Rooper Rock, and then the Howard Channel into Clarence Strait has its own challenging tidal current conditions.  I had the predictions for the current speeds and directions but with that long a route it’s not possible to hit it all at the right time because the tidal current reverses every 6 hours, generally.   I had to make some compromises in my calculations so it would average out reasonably well.  As I wrote down my numbers I remember sweat dripping off my head onto the paper smearing what I had just written. I also started to develop a heat rash – a first for me. Having fun now!

The water along this route was also shallow, about 20 meters, making the water a pretty turquoise over a sand bottom.  With the excessive heat, though,  it was like motoring across the surface of a giant hot tub. I did manage to hit the strongest current spot in the Howard Channel with a following current well after dark, and was now trying to figure out a place where I could get some sleep.  I wanted to arrive at the entrance to Darwin Harbour, where several big ships were anchored, at daylight and reasonably well-rested because I would have to maneuver my way passed them.  From the Clarence Strait I had about 16 nm left sailing (motoring) south to the harbor entrance.  I pointed the boat in that direction, throttle back to almost idle so I was only going about 2-3 knots, and went to bed setting the alarm for around sunrise.  There were no other ships around at that time so I counted on any that might show up to avoid me.  Keeping a consistent course and speed, even if slow, makes it easier for them to do that. Trying to get some sleep in busy waterways, or in areas with reefs or land to avoid, has turned out to be one of the bigger challenges of solo sailing.

The timing worked out about right.  I was still a few miles from the harbor entrance and big ships when I woke up an hour before first light.  I could see the bright lights on the big ships in front of me and a faint glow of Darwin lights  on the eastern horizon.

My final timing issue was entering the Cullen Bay Marina.  The marinas in Darwin, and generally in this part of Australia, are behind locks because of the significant tidal changes that occur here, sometimes  6-8 meters. However, the locks at the entrances to the marinas inhibit the normal exchange of water that happens between the marina and the sea so the marina water is relatively stagnant promoting the growth of water born pests of various types brought in on yachts arriving from foreign places. In the past, this has led to some highly polluted marinas with substantial clean-up costs.

To mitigate the problem, the department of Aquatic Biosecurity now requires yachts arriving from foreign locations to have their sea water systems treated with a chemical to kill the pests.  I needed an appointment for this treatment that’s done at the pontoon just outside the lock into the marina.  I couldn’t get a time until the afternoon of my arrival so after making my way down the shipping channel toward the marina I diverted to the north and anchored in Fannie Bay.  It’s not well-protected but the holding is great in shallow water (about 3 meters at low tide when I was there).  I upped anchor in the afternoon and motored about a mile to the pontoon where the treatment was completed by a diver injecting the chemical up into the seawater systems through the seacocks in the hull. It didn’t cost me anything but they told me they may start charging yachts for it in the future.  Once the chemical was in the systems I had to leave it for 10 hours so I couldn’t start my engine and go anywhere.  Ten hours ended at 1 am, but I was comfortable tied to the pontoon and wouldn’t go through the lock into the marina until the next morning.  I could get off the boat, however, wander around exploring the Cullen Bay area and have dinner at one of the restaurants there (crocodile carbonara that first night).

Moving to my berth through the lock the next morning was a new experience but made easier with a local sailor I met on the pontoon who offered to come by at 0800 to help me with mooring lines.  Phywave is now securely tied up in berth A14 at the Cullen Bay Marina where it will stay for the next several months.

I have a long list of maintenance items I compiled while sailing that I want to complete while here.  Some can be done in the next 2-3 weeks, and others like repairs to the dodger and bimini, will take longer. I will also be sending my mainsail away to an ace sail maker in Sydney for a more permanent repair to replace the temporary patches I’ve been living with.  I expect to fly home in early December and return to the boat in the Spring to resume my voyage.  I have a lot of weather research to do on how best to land someplace in Asia (for continent #6) and then continue across the Indian Ocean to South Africa.

After completing Australia entry formalities at Cairns (they made me dispose of all my eggs and meat for “Biosecurity”), my next challenge was to sail north, cross the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), then sail west through the Torres Strait, a collection of narrow waterways connecting the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

From Cairns many yachts follow the inside route to the Torres Strait along the Queensland coast.  This foute is also an active shipping channel and full of islands and reefs. For me, sailing solo, it’s a poor choice because I would have to stop and anchor somewhere every night to get some sleep. I’m much more comfortable far offshore where there’s nothing to run into and I can let the autopilot drive the boat while I sleep.

Leaving Cairns I went back outside the reef at Grafton Passage and turned straight north to Raine Island, 350 nm away, the point where I would start my passage across the GBR. I first learned about this route from a book published some years by Ken Hellewell. The route he describes in the book is very detailed with more than 30 GPS waypoints. After studying the charts I decided I could come up with something much simplier that worked as well.  I chose route legs by trying to stay in water that was at least 20 meters deep. As I sailed this route, in fact, the shallowest depth I saw on the depth sounder was 19 meters.  As a point of reference, that’s more than deep enough to handle a hugh cruise ship. The Cairns Channel which routinely handles such big ships is only dredged to a depth of 12-13 meters. If someone were to accept charted depths as shallow as 10 meters, my route across the GBR could be simplified still further.

I set up my route waypoints in the chartplotter on the boat and instructed the autopilot to drive the whole thing, which it did perfectly. I only had to adjust the sails when the course direction changed.  Because the winds were light (10-12 kts), I motorsailed part of the route to make sure I could get past the trickiest parts during daylight after starting from Raine Island at about 0730. 

Waypoint 8 sits on a red line which marks the edge of the inside shipping channel so at that point I was home free regarding any reef hazards.  You’ll also see at waypoint 1 a note that says “FORMERLY MINED AREA”.  Hitting a forgotten WW2 mine and getting blown to bits would have been a spectacular conclusion to my voyage!

Hot and sunny, squinting eyes selfie. I finished entry formalities so I can now leave the boat and enjoy the many nearby restaurants. I’ll push on to Darwin in 3 or 4 days. Clearing-In here gives me more flexibility on my route north and through the Great Barrier Reef.

I can download a number of weather forecast maps based on different forecast models but the two I mainly use are the ECMWF model (known as the European model) and the GFS model (known as the American model). I’ve tended to rely on the European model because it can offer somewhat higher resolution and seems to have been a little more accurate when comparing the forecast conditions to the conditions I’m actually experiencing. All the model forecasts tend to converge as you get closer to a forecast day and time, as you might expect. 

The ECMWF and GFS models provide forecast out to 10 days. I usually want to see that so I have as much notice as possible on what to expect and can make adjustments to my sailing plan as early as possible. When I was flying my plane around the world  I didn’t need such long term warnings. My flight legs were typically only 5-6 hours long so I was just looking for suitable weather windows to keep moving forward. Otherwise, the plane is safe on the ground if bad weather arrives.

As I start out westward across the Coral Sea I’ve looked at the forecasts from the ECMWF and GFS models 10 days out , as shown in these screen captures. The GFS model shows a  typhoon moving south westward over the Solomon Islands while the ECMWF model shows a benign low pressure system in the same place. The websites that specifically track South Pacific tropical cyclones (typhoons) have no alerts about tropical depressions or waves that could develop into cyclones.

What to believe? If the typhoon is real, it is moving westward toward the Torres Strait where I plan to be about the same time. That’s an untenable situation. So in case it’s real I need an alternate plan. That alternate plan is to now steer for a point just north of a tiny island/reef called Sand Cay, a course slightly south of the course directly to Torres Strait. From the Sand Cay waypoint I would be only about 200 nm from Cairns, Australia. That’s about 1.5 days in the boat so if I need to run for shelter that will be my plan. If no storm develops I can just turn north and head for Torres Strait, and of course alter my course at any time if it becomes clear no storm will develop. 

There is also the option to heave-to and just drift around south of the storm track, then resume my course to Torres Strait once it has passed.

I will eagerly download each new set of forecasts as they’re produced every 12 hours to see what’s happening. A typhoon this early (October) would be very rare. The tropical storm season here officially runs from November to April with most cyclones occuring from December to March.

Planning for contigencies like this days in advance is an element of sailing the oceans that I didn’t experience when flying across the oceans. Let’s hope the GFS-forecast typhoon never materializes.

If you think crossing 180 degrees west longitude is crossing the international dateline you’d pretty much be wrong. The international dateline is a politically-hatched snake that slithers its way north-south across the Pacific Ocean. For example, in Tonga (officially, the “Kingdom of Tonga”) local time is GMT+13.  The higher math I know says that’s the same thing as GMT-12. Yes, but Tonga has very close ties to New Zealand. In fact, the shop and restaurant owners I got to know in Neiafu complained they couldn’t find local workers because they all went to New Zealand to pick fruit! Tonga wants to be on the same day as New Zealand so they invented GMT+13. 

Then you have places that aren’t satisfied with being an even hour difference from GMT.  They have half hour (Marquesas) or even quarter hour differences. There can be no rational explanation for this except sheer bloody mindedness. 

When I was hitchhiking around Africa in 1975 with backpack and guitar I got to know Swahili time in Kenya, on the equator. Zero o’clock was when the sun rose, consistently at about the same time. I remember bus schedules written in chalk on blackboards listing departures in Swahili time, which itself was an optimistic fiction because a bus rarely left until it was full of people, luggage, livestock, etc. It would drive all over town scooping up willing passengers to fill it.

On the boat I keep clocks and the log in GMT, except my watch which is set for my best guess at a local time. The weather forecasts are all in GMT so I need to convert to a local time to understand if the bad weather is going to hit me in the middle of the day or the middle of the night. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter much what time it is. The sun comes up then goes down, called daytime, the rest being nighttime which is routinely forecast to be dark. Then there’s the morning you wake up and realize it’s been tomorrow since yesterday. 

I never flew on the supersonic Concorde but I’m told you could take off from Paris at 10 am and arrive in New York at 9 am.  If you kept going around the world that way you’d never get old.  We need to bring that back.

I’m including a few more photoss from Vava’u as I leave there and head due west toward Vanuatu, crossing 180 degrees west longitude into the Eastern Hemisphere for the first time in Phywave.

After an unplanned stop in Papeete for 10 days to have some essential repairs done on my mainsail, I had a fairly uneven crossing to Vava’u in Tonga – periods of no winds followed by 4.5 meter waves with 8 second intervals and 30-35 knot winds.  To take a break from these conditions I heaved-to for a while and let the boat drift westward.

Wind and rain greeted me as I finally maneuvered through the outlying islands of the Vava’u group into the narrow channel that leads to the main town of Neiafu.  After tying up to the commercial dock to spend a couple of hours going through the Customs and Immigration clearing-in process I was faced with finding a place to put my boat.  Neiafu is located on Refuge Harbor, a well-protected but fairly deep harbor with abundant coral heads making anchoring there a tricky proposition. 

To accommodate the many yachts that come here, a few companies have installed a number of moorings.  Moorings are basically very heavy weights, like a big block of concrete, sitting on the bottom.  The blocks are attached to heavy duty lines with loops that are pulled to the surface by a buoy or float of some kind. Attaching  the mooring lines to the bow cleats on a boat provides very secure holding even in strong winds, assuming the mooring is in good condition (they need periodic maintenance). 

I faced a couple of issues after clearing-in. I contacted the 2 companies by radio that have essentially all the moorings and both told me they were all taken because last week was the Vava’u Blue Water Festival and a lot of boats showed up to participate. The second problem is that it can be difficult to pick up the moorings lines when sailing solo, especially if it’s windy.  I have to maneuver the boat as close as I can to the mooring buoy, then leave the helm and try to fish the mooring loops out of the water with a boat hook while the boat is now drifting way because no one is at the helm.  Of course, after grabbing the mooring loop you have to be ready to quickly get it tied to something on your boat.  Just trying to pull on it with your boat hook is good way to lose your boat hook.  I have a clever hooking device I can put on the end of my boat hook with a line attached that solves that problem, but not the problem of the boat drifting away. I’ve always been able to grab a mooring with the boat hook eventually but it may take several passes with the boat to get it – a very frustrating process.

Fortunately, some long-time friends I had never actually met solved both problems. I’ve followed a Swedish couple, Lars and Suzanne Hellman, on their boat Sea Wind for more than 18 months after I first spotted them going to Antarctica in 2022 and wanted to keep track of where they anchored.  Since then we’ve traded many emails and I’ve followed their posts on Facebook and YouTube. I knew they were already on a mooring in Neiafu so I sent them a quick email asking if there were any open moorings near them.  Lars immediately came back and said he was headed in to town in his dinghy and would look around for open moorings on the way.  15 minutes later, as I was pulling away from the commercial wharf, Lars came along side in his dinghy and said he found a great mooring very close in to town that just opened up.  He not only led me to it, but when we got there he fished the mooring loops out of the water and put them around my bow cleats.  The boat was hooked up and secure!  Lars and Suzanne are amazing, helpful people who assist many cruisers, organize events, etc.. I had them over to my boat that evening and opened a great bottle of red wine I bought in the Algarve I’d been saving for a special occasion. They had preceded me to Puerto Williams, Antarctica, and Puerto Montt so we knew a lot of the same people in these places and had many stories about similar experiences.

This morning, Sunday, October 1, I was relaxing in the boat’s cockpit with a cup of coffee when I heard music coming from the nearby Catholic Church.  The beautiful voices of the choir had found their way across the water to me and Phywave, a wonderful start to a peaceful morning and my first full day in Tonga.