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grantmc

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Posts posted by grantmc

  1. Thanks for looking at my post.
    I'm am experienced sailor wishing to sail back to NZ or Oz from Fiji in October.
    I've made the trip several times and have current Sea Survival and Ocean Medic qualifications for Cat 1.
    Flexible with dates and departure/arrival ports.

  2. Not a boat many would wish to own, and certainly not a keel boat I would suggest you aspire to Rick.
    I sailed on an old race boat, very expensive to maintain and lacks creature comforts. Her name now is Nv.

    Nv is an Open 60 (modified for a little more length) with a 4.something mtr keel. Designed by Nándor Fa, she was built to compete in the  Vendée Globe round the world race. 

    She was an Ozzie boat for a long time, renamed The Broomstick, doing charters and races. Here's her entry in the 2001 Sydney to Hobart. The Ozzie owner added a decent galley and toilet, but other than that, she's still pretty basic. 

    My positive comments were in respect to sailing the voyage. Subsequently renamed yet again, currently called Nv, she is very long and provides a very nice ride indeed. We were in no hurray, as any time less than 14 days we had to serve in quarantine, so we sailed conservatively. But it was a good learning for me personally, as I was able to play with some pretty technical gear I'd neve before been exposed to.

    But what made the trip especially pleasant was we had a crew of 7, so only two rotating watches each day. Also we had a couple of very keen and accomplished cooks on board and at every meal we were treated to the most amazing fodder.

    And rhetorically, what makes a long passage a good one? I think a big part to the answer is a crew that gets on together and has lots of laughs. We certainly had that and since the trip we've all been keeping in touch.

    Open 66 NV design by Nandor Fa .jpg

    Joanna and .jpg

    Image10.jpg

    • Upvote 1
  3. I bought a new (to me) aluminium yacht, with mast head, single spreader, cutter rigging. The stays and shrouds all seem to me to be very tight. There’s absolutely no give at all.

    I’m up in Fiji, 200km from a rigger so can’t seek advice. Thoughts? (Yes I can borrow a tensioner.)

  4. Thought I'd close the topic by confirming I cleared into Fiji last Friday at the end of a 7 day quarantine off Denerau. Trip up from BoI was awesome. Fantastic crew (including a couple of highly capable cooks), and a nice comfy quick boat. We had some great laughs, brilliant music, wit only a single day/night of rain. Wind on the nose the entire trip, but you can't have everything.
    Very happy to have finally boarded my own boat here in Savusavu.

     

    • Like 2
    • Upvote 2
  5. 2 hours ago, Steve Pope said:

    An aside re a yacht returning to NZ because a crew member (1st time sailor) couldn't handle being out of sight of land, the yacht and crew were cleared in, but when leaving the 2nd time a few days later they had to re-do Cat 1 although nothing Cat 1 wise had changed.

    Not only if you return. We gained our Cat 1 in Wellington in April  2017, sailed up to BoI for checkout there, but weather window closed and we were stuck at Opua for a couple of weeks. The inspector had only given us an expiry of 1 month from inspection date (or first overseas port). So had to have the Cat 1 redone and of course pay again. 

    As an aside there doesn't seem to be clarity and/or consistency for/between inspectors as to the expiry date of a Category Certificate. Recently crewed on another yacht and the inspector entered the expiry date as 12 months following inspection date (or first port).

  6. On 7/09/2020 at 2:04 PM, wheels said:

    Errrr, surely unless they were already cleared to go, they would not have been able to. Who would have cleared them? If they did get cleared after lock down, then that is a Gvt stuff up.
     I can certainly understand that if a Vessel was ready to go and had clearance, it would be far better to get going. In fact Customs would likely be doing everything they could to get the boat underway. Once a Vessel is cleared, they really have no choice but to go. You are kinda forced to leave by the law. You cannot stop anywhere in NZ. I can only imagine that if for some reason you can't leave, you would have to go through the entire process of being checked back. Which would then mean you would have to go back through the entire process required for leaving NZ once lockdown was lifted.

    I can make a comment on the point made. This has happened to me. 3 years ago I crewed on an Australian registered yacht and we cleared and departed Tauranga. We had all manner of issues with the boat and as you might deduce she wasn't up to the intended overseas passage. It wont help top get in to details, blame etc. But after several days the owner/skipper accepted the only option was to turn back. As it happened, and I think for reasons of anonymity, the Skipper choose Gisborne, and so Customs were radioed and gave permission to enter NZ. Gisborne isn't normally a port of entry. When we berthed the Customs agent was at the wharf to meet us; she'd driven up from Napier that day especially to clear us in.

    The process was very simple, because we'd returned within 14 days of departure (and hadn't actually gone anywhere) they just cancelled our outward clearance from Tauranga. Technically the record states we never left NZ. The Customs Officer told us it happens more often than one might think. With Covid I'd presume we'd have been required to do the 14 days isolation/quarantine, but I don't know that for sure.

    So Customs do have a process for failed departures. I gather it's pretty much the same for planes that need to turn round and return.

     

    • Upvote 1
  7. I didn’t intend to slide off topic again. I added the post about Okak because the village is on the NW passage and suffered enormously from a white man’s disease. Like all the little villages, hamlets and towns in the far north there isn’t much in the way of medical facilities or evacuation options. Even in 2020!

    Irrespective, Wheels and Priscilla have rightly brought up the 1919 flu and the horrific effect for Samoa. But you don’t have to look back very far at all to when another disease rampaged Samoa. Only last year they experienced a measles outbreak that decimated the country.

     August last year, yes 2019, an infected passenger arrived from Auckland. That resulted in an outbreak that killed and killed for months.

    The Lancet reported:
    On Oct 16, 2019, the Samoan Ministry of Health declared a measles outbreak, the first Pacific island country to do so in the current global resurgence of measles. 
    As of Jan 22, 2020, 5707 measles cases and 83 measles-related deaths (estimated attack rate of approximately 285 cases per 10 000 population) have been reported. 
    87% of deaths have been reported as children younger than 5 years, a mortality rate of approximately 25 deaths per 10 000 people in this age group.
    At least 20% of babies aged six to 11 months have contracted measles and one in 150 babies have died.
    As of 20 December, 94% of the population had been vaccinated.

    A state of emergency was declared on 17 November, ordering the closure of all schools, keeping children under 17 away from public events, and vaccination became mandatory. On 2 December 2019, the government imposed a curfew and cancelled all Christmas celebrations and public gatherings. All unvaccinated families were ordered to display a red flag or cloth in front of their homes to warn others and to aid mass vaccination efforts. Some families added messages like “Help!” or “I want to live!”.

    5 and 6 December, the government shut down everything to bring civil servants over to the vaccination campaign. The curfew was lifted on 7 December when the government estimated that 90% of the population had been reached by the vaccination program. On 14 December, the state of emergency was extended to 29 December. Finally, as of 22 December, an estimated 94% of the eligible population had been vaccinated.

    So poor old Samoa went from a horrifying and deadly experience, with the lock down finally ending at Christmas, only to find a new disease threat waiting to hop aboard an Air NZ flight and break out early this year. And of course they’ve had their borders firmly shut since 21 March.

    The lesson is that there are still real risks for people. There’s a dangerous potion when you’ve mixed together some poverty, isolation, minimal medical resources and a lack of any immunity, and yes, to bring us back to the topic, the white man’s greed and arrogance.

    When I read the RNZ article kindly linked by Priscilla II, I couldn’t but postulate that Colonel Robert Logan and Pete Smith must be related; they act with attitudes of such similarity.

     

    • Upvote 1
  8. Not wishing to aggravate the sin or virtues of the voyage. And I hope within the bounds of the original post that I made about sailing the northern extremes of Canada. I thought there might be an interest in the little town of Okak (sometimes spelt Okkak). Kiwi Roa will likely sail past Okak, found in the northern extremes of Labrador, perhaps even stop there as this is well south of the ‘finish line’ of the passage.
    Scientists tell us Okak, an Inuit village, has been constantly settled for over 5,000 years. At the turn of last century Okak held the largest Inuit community in Labrador and was the site of a Moravian mission that had been established in 1776. Twice each year the supply/trade ship Harmony visited both to supply goods and take away Okak’s produce.

    So why is Okak special? Well 4 November 1918 the Harmony visited the little town, where she remained for 4 days before continuing her supply mission up the coast. Within two weeks, 70 residents had died, by the end of December 204 people of the total population of 263 had perished. Not a single male Inuit survived. Many bodies were dismembered and mutilated by the settlement’s starving dogs.

    Here’s a quote from the book Northern Lights by Desmond Holdridge: “And thus, on the Mission bark Harmony,” wrote Holdridge, “had come the pestilence generated on battlefields, three thousand miles away, of a war that had less to do with the destinies of the Eskimo, on the face of it, than Polynesian morals have to do with double-entry bookkeeping.”

    Holdridge quoted at length one Caucasian survivor who described to him the aftermath:

    Dear God, we couldn’t bury them; there weren’t half a dozen able-bodied men in the village to lend a hand. Men I’d known well. Girls. Old ladies that made good boots. And the men and the women, they lay there dying and saying it was the end of the world. They called that thing Spanish influenza, but to me it was that the door to Hell was left ajar for a while and the smoke and stink of it got out to kill people. The dogs got into the houses and ate the bodies; they killed some of the people who were not dead, but too weak to drive them off.


    You’ve seen the mounds around the village; it was where the bodies were so many that we couldn’t take care of them when help came from Nain; we just smashed the houses down on top of them and covered the wreckage with sod. That’s all the grave most of them got. The ice came in for a while and some of the dead we just pushed under it and let them go to sea. And a couple of years later some of them came ashore again. The noses and ears and fingers had been eaten by the fish but otherwise they were all right; I could recognize every one.


    I’ve included a link to a doco from 1985. Just a warning that the film is difficult to watch. https://youtu.be/Ts3hFJOLFuo

    Today Okak is abandoned, so the town’s brass band won’t be there to greet Pete Smith if he happens to call in and look at the site. 
     

    Harmony at Anchor in Okak 1905.jpg

    Harmony Trade Route.jpg

    Okak 1908.jpg

    Okak 2017.jpg

    Okak mission 1908.jpg

    • Upvote 3
  9. 54 minutes ago, 2flit said:

    ... This is also a big deal for Canada because this will become a passage for oil tankers thru a pristine Canadian wilderness area. Just think about what has happened this August with the oil tanker running aground in Mauritius due to operator error and a desire to get closer to land for the crew to use their cell phones!

    Mauritius is too far away to be relevant.
    The Exxon Valdez disaster brings the point home in a more germane way me thinks.

    Until Covid, there'd been considerable concern about cruise liners doing the trip, and that sooner or latter a ship would founder and thousands of people would need evacuation. Something that the area doesn't have the capability to do. 

  10. On 31/08/2020 at 6:48 AM, grantmc said:

    Just thought that to try and keep the thread on track, and perhaps add a little sanity, here's a reminder of the Kiwis who've completed a successful NW passage:
    2000    Evohe (25m yacht)    Stephen Kafka
    2009    Tyhina (10.4m yacht)    Peter Elliot
    2010    Astral Express (12.5m yacht)    Graeme Kendall single handed over two seasons
    2011    Kotuku (12m yacht)    Ian Douglass
    2012    Tokimata (13m yacht)    Peter Garden
    2017    Larissa (13.7m cutter)    Mark Domney
    2017    Tiama (15.2m skoop)    Hank Haazen

    Just to add Australia have had only 6 successes including 3 by Roger Wallis (Philos in 2012 and again 2014, then in 2017 on Abel Tasman).

    Earlier I listed the above table of New Zealand successes. 
    I am stunned and amazed that no one on the forum has picked up on my error.
    Till now some members have been so quick to point and scream at my occasional mistakes and stumbles. 

    But anyway as you'll all know, Peter Elliott is of course a true Aussie battler.
    Whilst his boat Typhina was built in France, Peter flagged her as Australian shortly after buying her off a French family who'd lived on her for 20 odd years. A link to his fascinating web site that tells the story of their two season NW Passage http://www.tyhina.com/index.html 

    So that makes the score Aussies 7 and Kiwis 6, so we really need Pete Evans to do the business and at least equal the score.

    One last, somewhat unrelated point:
    I've always been impressed to find that no matter how remote, or how vicious the weather, there are inevitably people living in the vicinity that sail there on a regular basis. An example is the guy in Greenland who bought Astral Express from Graeme Kendall after he'd completed the NW Passage but found it was too late late for his circumnavigation. The following season, Peter 'borrowed' the boat back to complete his project. The guy in Greenland basically just bought the boat hoping to win a few more round the cans races at his local yacht club in Greenland.

    Peter Elliott has a similar story about Pat Semotiak, the guy that 'looked after' Typhina over the long cold Artic Winter in Nome. Here's an extract from the log that again demonstrates  what may be so difficult a place for us to comprehend is just someone else's 'normal':  'We are now back in Melbourne after a successful summer of sailing. Tyhina waits patiently for us under the watchful eye of our friend Pat Hahn. We met Pat through Peter Semotiak our ice and weather router. Upon hearing of our arrival in Nome harbour Pat came down to the boat and invited us back to his house to for lunch and a long overdue shower. ... Pat grew up in Nome and is also a Northwest Passage maker, only he did it in an umiak (an open walrus skinned boat) in the late 70's with much more ice and far less support. He has worked, fished, skied, hiked and sledded around Nome all his life ...'.
    And needless to say Pat Semotiak isn't credited as having traversed the North West Passage.

  11. 58 minutes ago, Adrianp said:

    This 2h video of a bunch of Kiwis doing the transit is a good Lockdown watch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ80U5VZ5zM&t=1912s
    Whats the the History of this boat? It looks like a sistership to the Sylfia of the Expedition Drenched boat.

    I understand she was originally built in Whangarei. Sistership? don't know.
    She did the Northwest Passage in 2008 with skipper Juan Ribos under Spanish flag.
    And it is that journey that's featured in the Youtube video.

    These days she is a NZ registered yacht and for the last few years she's been sailing around Western Europe.

    Amodino1.jpg

  12. 42 minutes ago, wheels said:

    Does anyone know enough about what the NW passage is like this time of the year?? Will it be clear Ocean, or is it still mostly ice with the chance of a path through it or something like that?

    Vicariously, and from reading/watching, there's never a time when it's clear of ice during the July-Sept cruising season. The issue is the amount of ice and it's interaction with the wind. All sailors take advice and rely on forecasts form the Canadian Ice Service. 

  13. Just thought that to try and keep the thread on track, and perhaps add a little sanity, here's a reminder of the Kiwis who've completed a successful NW passage:
    2000    Evohe (25m yacht)    Stephen Kafka
    2009    Tyhina (10.4m yacht)    Peter Elliot
    2010    Astral Express (12.5m yacht)    Graeme Kendall single handed over two seasons
    2011    Kotuku (12m yacht)    Ian Douglass
    2012    Tokimata (13m yacht)    Peter Garden
    2017    Larissa (13.7m cutter)    Mark Domney
    2017    Tiama (15.2m skoop)    Hank Haazen

    Just to add Australia have had only 6 successes including 3 by Roger Wallis (Philos in 2012 and again 2014, then in 2017 on Abel Tasman).

    Thus it's a very select group that Pete Evans will soon join.
    In total 123 yachts have made a successful transit, the first of course was the Norweigian 21m yacht Gjøa captained by Roald Amundsen in 1903.  
    About 30 of these had to winter over and so took two seasons.

    The journey is arduous and fraught with danger. And the trip has brought many a dream to a cold and premature end.
    I can appreciate the frustration that Pete Evans will have experienced, no doubt that included all manner of preparation and planning; not to ignore considerable expense.
    We can agree here on this forum, I hope, to at least all wish him a safe and successful voyage.

    • Upvote 1
  14. Very much insurance company specific, but given you've no replies so far here's my 2 cents worth.

    For offshore then expect skippers/sailors requirements for Cat 1 as set by YNZ minimum.
    Suggest you refer to the YNZ web site for the Safety Regulations, section 21 and Appendix 6 re Sea Survival.
    Yachting New Zealand safety regulations of sailing 2017-2020
    Mostly very vague I know.

    But some decent blue water miles under the belt, probably looking for Ocean Yachtmaster qualified or equivalent commercial certification. 

    The other aspect is the cruising grounds where the boat will be and plans if these include cyclone areas and who will be sailing the boat.
    If he wants to solo sail it will probably be impossible to get coverage.

    In my own experience having the experience and qualifications doesn't reduce the premiums, it simply means that you might be offered a full comprehensive policy. 

    A good place to deal with is The Marina Shop at Opua.
    Bill is a really helpful, down to earth guy and even if he can't do a deal he'll still help you out.
    He really knows his stuff about pleasure yacht insurance.

    As an aside, it would be really interesting to know what proportion of boats leave NZ without comprehensive policies.
    I think many will have 3rd party only (sufficient for moorage in marinas at most small Pacific island nations). 
    Even if you can qualify for full comprehensive it's (to me) horrifically expensive.

  15. 24 minutes ago, Black Panther said:

    https://news.oceancruisingclub.org/home/index/1386
    Who thinks these guys should ignore the bureaucrats and sail to NZ.

    Suggest you start another thread. 
    BUT ...
    In answer to your question, I think that ignoring the law and just sailing to NZ or Oz would have significant negative consequences. 
    In Oz they'd just be regarded as wealthy 'boat people', their yachts confiscated and lengthy periods in one of the many Immigration camps until they could be repatriated.
    Here in NZ consequences wouldn't be much better. 

     

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