Tapestry  of Ipswich   

These facts and views may be of use to anybody planning a similar voyage

Total distance covered over the ground from Gibraltar so far:  24028 miles

When we could maintain our speed by motorsailing we used to plan our passages using 6 knots as a guide . Now we plan for the longer passages at 5 knots as we cannot use fuel indiscriminately.

Principal passages so far

Average monthly costs so far:

The pound was 25% stronger when we left Gibraltar than it is now

Gear successes:

• Our specially designed downwind headsail (Quantum) which means we can almost keep up with much bigger boats than us

• The duogen which gives us approx 10 amps / hour when towed on passage. In our opinion much better than towgen on a rope. Unfortunately it is not always reliable and we finally ditched it in Thailand.

• The hydrovane wind steering in less extreme conditions. We have worried that we might broach in big seas, so we back it up in big seas with our autohelm at the lowest response rate. This gives us a safety reserve with minimal power consumption

• All of our electronics apart from initial problems with our steering system

• An emergency adjustable fan belt was vital to cool the engine when the alternator hinge bolt failed.

Gear failures so far:

We have always previously had our boat regularly maintained professionally, so we feel unlucky to have had so many issues. All blue water boats have their problems but we did seem to have more than our share initially!

Mechanical (Volvo Penta 2040)

Steering

Electrical

Rigging

Other:

Booby prizes:

4th Place:

Raymarine for the high failure rate of the self steering gear (Both the ram and the ST7001-2). It was offset by the reliability of their other instruments. After buying 2 spare rams and 3 new display units our self steering finally appears to be reliable.

3rd Place:

Fox's of Ipswich for the standing rigging installed in 2005 which failed twice in 2008. At the same time they did not reconnect the VHF aerial when they re-erected the mast! It took us months to discover why our handheld VHF appeared to be more powerful than the fixed VHF.

They also attached our tricolour light facing backwards and plumbed a holding tank so that it would drain into our shower tray.

2nd Place:

Volvo Penta for designing an engine (2040) that needed replacing after 2040 hours use, despite being fully and regularly maintained. And also for the extortionate price of spare parts, which are not available easily worldwide.

The winner:

Fischer Panda UK who provided us with a useless generator spare parts kit even though they knew that we needed it for a circumnavigation. They knew that parts are no longer available for our 12 year old generator and provided us with spare parts for a new one instead! We had to replace our generator in Tahiti because we were unable to replace the parts! It was not only very difficult and expensive to replace it but it also caused us a considerable delay.

Useful Pilot Books

We have so far found these pilot books the best for the area, and often indispensible:

Title	Author	Alternative
World Cruising Handbook	Cornell
Gibraltar Straits Handbook
The ABC Islands	Waterson & Van der Reijden
Cruising Guide to the Leeward Islands	Doyle
The Panama Guide	Bauhaus	Zydler
Pacific Crossing Guide	RCC Pilotage
Guide to Navigation and Tourism in French Polynesia	Bonnette & Deschamps	Charlie's Charts
Cruising Guide to the Vavau Island Group in the Kingdom of Tonga	Moorings
Curly's Fiji Cruising Waypoints (We don't know any good Fiji pilot book)		Migrant cruising notes Fiji
101 Anchorages within the Indonesian Archipelago	Wilson	Expensive, not always accurate but much the best guide
Southeast Asia Pilot	O'Leary & Dowden

Lonely Planet and Eye Witness guides have also been very useful.

Charts

We used C-Map NT+ charts which we found were very good. In many of the smaller islands there is insufficient detail, mainly because the area is unsurveyed! When in doubt we used our radar overlaid on the chart which was easy as our radar plotter is in the cockpit. In Tonga the electronic charts were offset by several hundred yards. In Fiji the charts were very accurate which is important as there are so many coral banks.

We rarely use our paper charts. The Blue Water Rally recommended list is good, although in some places the scale was too small to use for coastal sailing. We used BA folios for the Caribbean. In Fiji there were several unnecessary charts on the BWR list (BA 746,1673,1674) and some important ones were missing (BA 387, 389,441).

It is difficult to find full chart coverage for Indonesia. We augmented our BA charts with some copies of old multinational charts which were sold to us by Colin at Copyit in Darwin. These sheets stamped with "This is not a chart" gave us some extra peace of mind in areas poorly covered by Admiralty charts.

Tips we wish we had been given:

The BWR briefings were very comprehensive but did not include the following:

• Expert advice in the UK is not necessarily correct for blue water sailing even when it comes from a yard used to commissioning ocean sailing vessels. We were talked out of replacing our engine and generator before leaving. If only we had ignored the "professionals"!

• Replace your old style UK driving licence with a new style licence with a photograph. It can often be used for identification instead of a passport.

• Make sure that signatures on credit cards match those on your passport. If they don't then you will not be able to withdraw money from a bank.

• ATMs are often empty, and in any case permitted withdrawal amounts are quite small. Draw money whenever you can.

• Carry several credit cards. Often we have to try three before the card machine accepts one. After a year away our bank suddenly blocked our cards saying (wrongly) that we had not informed them that we would be abroad!

• Before we left the UK we were advised to "unlock" our SSB radio so that we could listen on ham frequencies. We couldn't find out how to unlock our Icom SSB in England. The information can be found on the Icom America website but not the Icom UK site. (For M801 &M802 switch power on with Buttons 2, Mode & Tx already depressed).

• We originally tried emailing by Sailmail through our SSB radio but almost always had difficulty making a connection in the Atlantic. Mailasail emails (through our Iridium phone) work immediately almost every time and are very quick to download. The cost is not high and we soon stopped using Sailmail. Others have however been pleased with Sailmail in the Pacific.

• A very highly regarded gift for people who had been of great assistance were Tapestry embroidered polo shirts. We wished we had brought several more with us. In the San Blas Islands a tarpaulin was very gratefully received, and so was a guide book in Spanish and English. In the poorer villages in Indonesia we found balloons and bubble blowing very popular with the children. Cheap spectacles are very useful as well. We also experienced some very aggressive begging and even petty theft from on board on one occasion, but this was not typical.

• In Indonesia it was not possible to buy meat (including corned beef) east of Lombok except in Ambon. Scrawny chickens are sometimes available but there is very little meat on them. Fishermen will sell small fish but there are no big fish left in the sea except in the national parks. It is necessary to fully provision in Australia on the assumption that only eggs, fresh vegetables and fruit will be available. Many boats almost ran out of food because they had been expecting to stock up regularly.

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