Back in Sydney

Leaving Soldier Point's marina in the afternoon we knew we would need to negotiate Newcastle ship traffic at night time. We could have waited to leave at sunrise but decided to do a night trip and arrive in Sydney in the morning ahead of a southerly change.  A bit stressful the night sailing as we had lost our Radar the week before, apparently a bad connection inside the display unit, and there is no signs that it can be fixed in the near future.

As we always do around Australia, we logged our sailing plan with VMR and off we went, on a nice weather window, winds from the East first, backing to the North before nightfall. I have to admit we are a bit rusty for sailing and after gathering all stuff we forgot to prepare ahead of time we were happily out at sea again. By nightfall, a bit north of  Newcastle we could see several cargo ships drifting, as they always do around that area. By the time we reached the port entrance it was night already. At our starboard side many lights showed ships at anchor, our port side showed ships drifting, luckily not many of them were moving. The few that were moving got us really confused. Without the radar we couldn't really estimate the distance. One that looked really confusing turned out to be another sailboat going the other way, another ship was showing red light when all of the sudden did a 180 degrees turn (red and green and then just green) and ended up crossing with us, starboard to starboard, too close for comfort. She was big. But soon the busy area was behind us and the rest of the trip was uneventful. The wind started to die by sunrise and completely died 5 miles from destination. By 10.00 AM we were happily at anchor in Middle Harbor and by 3.00 PM we were back in our old place, Cammeray Marina.(www.cammeraymarina.com.au)

Now Zenitude is back in Sydney and we have plenty to do to get her ready, first for a family New Year's Eve party, then for the Summer and after that, well, we have big sailing plans but still some decisions to be made.
G.