Sailing Taurus NZ
Living aboard a yacht and cruising full time.
Category: Uncategorized
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We sailed into Sydney on Monday the 23rd of February, and headed to Rose Bay. This we knew to be a convenient anchorage: close to the heads, good access to a dinghy dock, showers at the local yacht club, supermarket and liquor store, and a good (and cheap) Thai restaurant. What more could the cruising…
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After a couple of quiet days in Batemans Bay a weather window appeared that would allow us to sail the fifty nautical miles to Jervis Bay, a ten hour trip more or less. We dropped our mooring, re-crossed the bar, and anchored in the north east at Maloneys Bay, ready to leave when the wind…
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After leaving Lakes Entrance we hoisted the sails and sat on a port tack to gain some room from land. This point of sail saw us heading almost due south, so someone watching might have thought that we were heading back to Deal Island. We knew that the wind was going to be light and…
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We arrived at Lakes Entrance on the 22nd of January after crossing the Bass Strait and having spent about a fortnight in and around Flinders Island. As we stepped ashore we felt pretty worn out, a fatigue born of constant movement, incessantly windy anchorages, and sleeping night after night with one eye and one ear…
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Having arrived at Deal Island, Cara and I had a couple of days before the next weather window that would allow us to cross the second half of Bass Strait to the Australian mainland. So, we set out to explore Deal in the time available. Deal is the largest island in the Kent Group, Tasmania’s…
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After a couple of days exploring Preservation Island it was time to get moving. The spell of fine weather that we had enjoyed was about to be abruptly terminated by strong westerlies that were predicted to blow at around forty knots. As with all forecasts, the figure given is the expected sustained wind strength, gusts,…
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After returning to Taurus at Beauty Point we got stuck into finishing a few projects so that we were ready to leave when a weather window presented. Amongst the jobs to do were replacing a couple of original winches with self tailing winches, re-bedding the diesel filler cap in the deck, and replacing our inner…
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The last blog concluded with Taurus in a berth at Beauty Point on the Tamar River. We had a limited amount of time to fill because Cara had been asked to cover a colleague’s work roster in Dunedin for a week. The trip home to help a friend and put some money back in the…
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our last blog post ended with Taurus caught on a foot bridge as we attempted to enter the Seaport Marina. Access to the berth we had been given required that we make a ninety degree turn parallel to the footbridge to enter the fairway, and a second ninety degree turn immediately afterwards. Taurus‘ turning circle…
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As we left Sir John Falls to return up the Gordon River, the rain fell and the temperature seemed to plummet. We had grown used to bright sunshine and still conditions, so this grey, damp, and cold new world muted our enjoyment of the scenery somewhat. We were also apprehensive about our batteries’ charge state…