10 days to fly out date. I can start counting down on my fingers*.
Received notification today that I passed the Marine Radio Certificate of Competency (including MF, HF and VHF) exam that I sat last Thursday. Now ... if I only had a Marine Radio.
Bought a used laptop for $100 last night. After much agonising I decided to buy an old one and leave my shiny new (ish) one with my Mum to use while I'm away. As I commented earlier, exposing Laptops to humid salty air isn't a great way to prolong their usable life, so I figure if this one packs it in, or I drop it overboard or somesuch, I wont be terribly agitated. Not as much as I would be if it was the newer one anyway.
Tomorrow I'm off to spend another small bucket of dollars on an EPIRB. For the non-nautical types that's an acronym for Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. In the case of disaster one activates this little beastie, and it sends out a pre-coded distress message (via satellite) that alerts the search and rescue people, and gives them a location to start searching. I had thought I'd wait till I was in the US and buy one there, but then I read of possible difficulties getting OS models registered with the Australian system, and decided to buy it here. Of course, that means that I have to make sure that it's rated as safe for air transport**. Nothing is ever as simple as it first seems.
So , I said I'd fill in some 'big picture' stuff about the project, and I haven't done that yet. Here goes.
It started with a casual thought years ago. I had been browsing boat ads in Australia, just as a daydreaming exercise. Somehow I ended up looking at some US ads and thinking that the prices for comparable boats were a lot lower. Traditional wisdom though is that import duty and taxes and all that stuff make it uneconomical. Then as the US economy went a bit pear shaped around the GFC, there were lots of boats much cheaper. Then the exchange rate got better, and I got curious. With no real intention of following it through, I did some research on the tax and duties and all that other stuff. Sure enough, they add up to thousands of dollars. But ... not as much as I had been led to believe.
This then is the plan. I'll travel to the US, and look at what's available on my very small (in terms of the blue water yacht market) budget. If I find what seems to be a boat of suitable condition for a trans-pacific voyage in my price range, I'll then attempt to placate the ravenous beast that is the bureaucracy related to these sort of exercises. Even before departing US waters, I need to register the vessel as an Australian ship with AMSA, which apart from costing over a thousand dollars, requires a metric crap load of forms and original papers to be lodged with the Australian office of AMSA. They then send me some more documents, which I then send back. While all this goes on I'll still be paying through the nose for accommodation. Time is not my friend. If all that goes to plan, I then have to satisfy the US exit process.
At this point I should state that I will be trying very hard to not get carried away and attempt the journey back in an unsuitable boat, just because I've invested so much in getting to the stage where I'm looking at a boat that is in my price range. I'll need to assert a great deal of self-discipline to accept that it isn't going to happen, cut my losses, and count the exercise as a learning experience with a bonus sojourn in the USA. At least it will have gotten me out of the house for a while.
Assuming I do get through that, where to next? My plan at this stage will be to head somewhat south, with first landfall at The Marquesas Islands. In yacht cruising one hopes to manage about one hundred nautical miles per day. This means the first leg will take about 24 days at sea. From there, hopefully getting a push along from the South Equatorial Current, the second landfall, after about the same time at sea, I have to choose between Fiji or Tonga. From there it's a mere 20 odd days to Townsville, back home in sunny Australia.
Now, all that sounds quite simple if I write it like that. I don't really think it will be that simple. Even if the weather is remarkably kind to me, and I have no reason to believe that it will be, it entails spending 3 weeks on each leg with a ration of about 2 litres of water per day, to do everything, and probably no refrigeration worth speaking of. Even moderate weather will entail very large lumps of water moving towards the boat and trying to get inside it, or at least push it around. If something, even me, breaks in any way then I either fix it or do without it. Communication with the world at large will be very limited, mainly by cost, and communicating that something has gone very wrong in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is not like calling for a tow truck if your car breaks down. People die doing this stuff.
Then begins phase two of the bureaucratic nightmare: Importing a Ship. (Even little boats are called ships by The System.) Fortunately much of the paperwork that turns up at this stage can be fed the same documents that were used in the earlier bout. But it takes more than three times as much money to overcome the beast this time.
Some time after all that I try to sell the boat. Hopefully for what I paid for it plus what it cost me to get it here. Even if I fall short of totally recovering the costs, I hope to get close enough that I've had a big adventure for a moderate financial loss, comparable to paying for a three month holiday. If I make a profit on the exercise, I just might do it again. Ask me about that later, right now I've got more Stuff to do!
Cheers
* OK, fingers and thumbs. Whatever.
** Apparently some of them use batteries that are rated as 'hazardous materials' and can't be taken on aircraft.
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