We continue to keep ourselves occupied but time is passing oh so slowly and our moods fluctuate a lot! Our saving during this waiting period is that we are social at Yarra’s Edge. Thanks go to sailors and friends who have come to keep us company, drawn us away from the marina or rang us to chat. You know who you are, we appreciate your support.

We have lived through a mix of wild weather conditions in the past weeks: stinking hot days with parching sun, violent storms complete with hail and strong wind, huge flooding downpours. From shorts and T-shirts, to umbrellas and raincoats and even Ugg boots and polar fleeces, it is a time of extremes. That’s Melbourne for you, even worse with climate change! Further on the Eastern seaboard parched paddocks are drenched, flash flooding causes havoc, fires are drowned as record-breaking rains are falling. If the blazes did not get you, the floods might! What a crazy world we are in!

Here is a slideshow taking you through some of the points of view, times of day and moods of our immediate surroundings. Thank you to Tam and Dee for allowing us to get a look at Yarra’s Edge from a vantage point not many people get to see for a few of these shots.

Thunder & Lightning

The massive storms that have hit Melbourne and various other localities in New South Wales and Queensland have increased in frequency and intensity. Of all the weather events on the water we have experienced, the most frightening has to be a Lightning Storm. If it hits the boat it can fry the electrics, destroy the navigation system, blow a hole through the hulls. Basically when a vessel gets struck, lightning is trying to find its way to the water. In a sailboat, one of the paths it takes is down the mast; typically anything that happens to be close by on the way down can be wrecked.

So let’s talk about lightning protection! We can hear you ask, does that really exist? Well possibly not, but you’ve gotta give yourself the best chance of surviving a hit, particularly when you are on the boat that often has the tallest mast around! In the last bout of thunderstorms, friends of ours got struck by lightning and suffered major damage, and we heard of another yacht peppered with small holes and making a great impersonation of a sieve. Although Anui has serious grounding plates underwater on the inside of each hull connected to a lightning rod at the top of the mast, Wade is still very concerned – you can hear him mumble “thunder and lightning, very very frightening”! Some of you might remember a certain contraption at the top of Take It Easy’s mast designed to deflect lightning.

We called it Hocus Pocus, but others called it the dandelion, the bottle brush, the dunny brush and other less than respectful terms… all reflecting not only its look, but the general lack of conviction of its effectiveness. Well regardless, Wade decided to get Anui its own Hocus Pocus. Yap, in our total paranoia, we have ordered a “Lightning Master Static Dissipator” from Forespar. This is the same technology which is successfully employed to protect commercial broadcast and television towers from direct lightning strikes. If we can reduce the incidence of a strike, and at the same discourage those wretched birds from landing at the top, it might appease us!