Sydney to Southport

Another beautiful day on Sydney Harbour to see off the 2010 Sydney to Southport yacht race. You can see Wild Oats X1 making her way to the Eastern Channel leading the fleet out of the heads.

For many of these yachts this is only the first leg with Hamilton Island Race week approaching.

Friends of The Count

After our whale experience this morning we headed back to the harbour and came across a piece of sailing history off Middle Head. There, in all of her glory was KA-3....Gretel II. GII was the Americas Cup challenger in 1970. She is berth at Sydney Wharf. Twelve Metre yachts are the thoroughbreds of the water and GII shows that she only gets better with age.

Thar she blow's!

Another beautiful day on Sydney Harbour. Clear sky, very light winds in the harbour so The Count ventured through the heads to pick up a bit more breeze and sailed south about 1km offshore. Whale watchers were a further 1km offshore.....wrong place. At 1135hrs east of Macquarie Lighthouse a whale breached about 30m off our starboard bow. This whale was one of a pair that decided to get a better look at The Count and both appeared 20m off our starboard beam with a magnificent display by standing their heads out of the water. They fell back into the water towards us and then continued their journey North.

WOW....what a day!....I'm sorry to say, no photos. It was all too exciting to go below to grab the camera. Here's a shot of the day to give you an idea of how nice it was.

It never stops!

The Count may be nice and shiny.....BUT she needs to be looked after. It's amazing the stuff you can apply to your boat. Here we are applying a product called SEMCO that retards the greying of teak.










It's an incredibly time consuming task but the end results are great.








Like so much of this, once you start you're done....every 6 months!

Smile!

Having The Count in the water and available for charter is only one part of the puzzle. Now that we are all operational we've been able to arrange set photos for brochures etc. I can tell you that this is a longer process that you think. John Fotiadis spent the day with The Count to show her at her best.