We went to Australia and I got leeched. It wasn’t the only thing to happen in the time we were there but it was memorable and unpleasant in equal measure. It took 36 hours for the “attachment point” to stop bleeding fully. 

We were treated like VIP’s by our Queensland chums. And were entertained by their chickens and goats. We hopefully reciprocated their generosity a small amount by doing some work on the land, clearing trees from a recent storm and also the gutters on their drive way. 

Andrew is a Middlesbrough fan so he and I talked North East football. Carolyn has the energy of a fleet of Duracell bunnies. She is awe inspiring. We walked in the bush, swam in swim holes, had campfires, walked the goats, moved the electric fence goat pens and celebrated the Melbourne Cup with their neighbours. I think we had 5 nights in Australia. I like the area around Kenilworth.

Then on to North Island to near Whangārei first, then the Coromandel peninsula, Tauranga and back to Auckland. All to catch up with sailing friends. Cyril and Janine have 80 acres of bush and paddocks, an impressive lake, a self-built house, endless fruit and veg and a warmth and generosity to impress all although their pet water buffalos are disappointedly no more.  

Brian and Sue continue to inspire. They are about to build a house on a steep section overlooking the ocean.  In decades they are closer to their 8th than than their 7th. We all need to be more B&S. I got to have a go on Brian’s digger. It was a fun but my lack of computer game joystick experience meant I felt consciously incompetent as I nudged piles of earth about.

We’ve been back on South Island for a couple of weeks now. Arriving to the marina, many people said, “welcome home”. Grace was in great shape after six months on her own. Engine started first time, outboard second pull, and the generator wobbled into life after a little persuasion. It’s a Fischer Panda and I think their marketing strap line is ‘Temperamental’. We put Grace back together, sails, running rigging, life raft etc. Dave refreshed some engine parts and our cooker has headed to Auckland to be refurbished. Back to two camping stoves.

Not moving for six months, Grace’s hull had become a minor mussel farm. We hired some dive kit and Dave spent a couple of hours brushing away slime and bivalve molluscs. I bought bright yellow fins as part of his birthday pressies this year and it’s certainly easier to spot him underwater now. 

We had a great summer in the UK. It’s good to back in the NZ summer. 

I asked the AI (Artificial Intelligence) app, ChatGPT to write 200 words to summarise the blog, Graceoflongstone.com. About two seconds later, the following appeared on my screen.

“The blog Grace of Longstone is an intimate sailing‑adventure journal and personal travel chronicle, maintained by a couple (Helen and Dave) who own a Hans Christian 43 yacht named Grace. 

From the “About” page, Helen explains that the blog began as a way to share their preparations and progress in transforming Grace into a live‑aboard vessel for extended voyages.  Helen tends to the narrative, while Dave handles technical and mechanical work, and the posts often blend their roles. 

Throughout the blog’s entries, they document the realities of life aboard: refitting and upgrading the boat, navigating challenging sea passages, dealing with mechanical issues, anchorages in remote bays, and exploring islands and coastal terrain around the globe.  The posts often mix anecdote and humour (for example, stories about sea lions, sail repairs, or the logistics of getting the mast back up) with more serious reflections on values, adventure, and travel. 

Geographically, their journey is wide and shifting: they have spent time in New Zealand, the Pacific islands, the southern seas, and they reference returning to the UK for intervals.  The writing is personal and conversational, addressed partly to “a few select family and friends” (rather than aiming for a wide public audience). 

In summary, Grace of Longstone is a heartfelt and ongoing log of life at sea: the joys, challenges, repairs, travels, and everyday moments of living aboard a sailing yacht, narrated with warmth, honesty, and a sense of adventure.”

All generated by a computer. Electrons scanning online text and “learning”. No need for me to write anything. I think I feel astonishment and concern in equal measures.  I then looked up one definition to try to begin to understand what it’s all about ….”AI aims to replicate and ultimately surpass human capabilities.” Was that definition written by AI or a human? No idea.

Dave and I had a holiday to Cornwall. We were plain humans, walking, climbing, mostly camping but also treats in a lovely pub. It was fabulous. The sun shone and air clarify was sharp. We stopped and called in with a myriad of friends and family on our journey south then north. Thank you, one and all.

I can guarantee that this blog will continue as a human. Maybe with limited capabilities but I’m not having a computer surpass me! 😀

The radio show, The News Quiz is a satirical look back at the week’s news. It’s been off air for its summer break but was back on the airwaves in the UK this week.

The host started the show with a monologue. What with AI and the massive computing power that’s available today, he asked the question of the new BBC News Condenser AI robot, “What’s been happening in World for the last three months while we’ve been off air?”

The sound of a printer chundered away in the background and out came a picture of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream.’  His next comment was…..AI technology has got seriously good now. 😂

I’m not a journalist or a high profile commentator but the World mood is sadly, in my opinion, currently coloured by hyperbole, lies and high profile egotistical men. And I deliberately say men and not women. I won’t name names. I don’t need to.

This intensely concerning situation could not have been further from my warm and uplifting hedgerow walk last weekend. All the photos above were taken on my two hour stroll around a Nottinghamshire Nature Reserve. I know hedgerows aren’t everyone’s pleasure outlet. I will encourage you however to reflect on the richness and amazing thing that nature is. The human race has designed and built amazing things but raw nature will always win in a head to head competition, if I’m the head judge.

I stopped and chatted to a fisherman who was placing battered plastic bottles he’d pulled out of the riverbanks into litter piles by the track. He said “There are piles all the way along the path. I’m going to put them in my car when I drive back and get rid of them appropriately.”

I want to live a world where people are kind and care. I want this man in my club.

60 years or 21,915 days. That’s how long I’d been living here on planet earth on 3rd August this year. My lovely husband took me to a traditional Derbyshire pub. We walked, drank alcoholic beverages in the setting sun and ate well. Turning 60 was supremely tolerable.

Celebrations started the previous weekend when the girls I shared a house with back in student days, reunited as many of us are turning 60 this year. We had a truely fabulous time with cocktails, amazing food, lots of laughs and I had a whizz on Sally’s Batman bike. Those girls have provided me with a background sound track that will hopefully play on for many years.

I have one more week of work left. I’m ready for it to finish. Work gets in the way of life. We have actually been away the last 7 weekends in a row. Can’t miss out now I’m 60. Lots to do, people to see, The UK summer has delivered with many warm sunny days, other than the few days we spent walking part of the Coast to Coast path. 99% of the UK was basking in 28 degrees centigrade but a heavy mist and rain corridor dominated the path. It was the Yorkshire equivalent of the character Pig Peg in Charlie Brown. We planned to camp but the weather was so dire we retreated to an indoor pub option. It’s an easy decision to make when you’re almost 60 and not 20 anymore. 😂

I was asked one day by an eleven year old if I was 75? I wasn’t even 60 at that point!

Once again, there’s been a geographical shift. New Zealand feels forever ago and England has swiftly ensnared us.

Grace is resting quietly in Nelson with a couple of kind friends keeping a watchful eye on her. Her precious possessions are in a lock up where they will await our return in November / December. Sails, running rigging, anchor, canvas, dinghy, outboard etc are all gently stashed, avoiding the southern hemisphere winter.

Dave and I arrived into the UK via JFK airport in NY (still hideous queues, possibility the same one from 1986 so do avoid at all costs). We did a quick whizz to visit family before I started work, 6 days later. I have a 15 week contract working for charity that organises breaks for kids whose lives arn’t as straightforward as perhaps yours and mine.

The money for the sale of our Derbyshire property eventually materialised. So we’ve been looking at land / land with knackered properties. We bid on one at an auction. The auction was in London and it was on a day when we were both unavailable. We wrote our ‘top dollar’ number on a piece of paper and waited to hear. Dave managed to find the auction on line and watched it on his phone, sat in the car on a garage forecourt. They zipped past our number very quickly with the hammer falling £65k beyond our bid. We decided that was a positive. If it’d been £3k we might have felt differently.

June and July are money making months, then after that we will have more time for fun and games. We’ll be ready to catch up and see people. Do please invite us. 😀

Our friend Noa kindly lent us her aging small jeep for a couple of weeks. She was off sailing to some remote islands between Stewart Island and Antarctica with a bunch of scientists, some Petri dishes and an expectation of having to hove to in 70 knot winds.

She proudly calls the car ‘Shit Box’ and I can confirm it’s an appropriate name. But this go kart is also massively fun to drive and has the ABBA ‘Here we go again’ CD, which Dave may possibly be tiring of now. Shit Box has seen us right the last few days with runs to hardware stores, trips to the beach and helping move our sails around.

Yesterday after a few delays, with the help of a mobile crane, a few blokes in high viz vests and a break in the wind, we were able to get the newly rigged mast standing upright and proud again.

It feels like it been a bit of a quest to get to this point. Not as long as completing on our house sale for which we EVENTUALLY have a completion date. The thing about replacing all the standing rigging is it is one of those jobs which looks exactly the same as it did before. Replacing canvas work or upholstery is visually rewarding.

I’m not imagining that we’ll do this job again in our ownership of Grace. It is one of the major overhaul jobs that you can do to your boat. It offers peace of mind, knowing that the stainless steel wires holding your mast up are new and not hiding any corrosion.  And it also keeps the insurance company happy.

Getting the mast up is not the whole job. Dave is currently reconnecting all the wires that run through the mast that provide power to various instruments. Booms need reinstalling. The sails need to be put back on, likewise the running rigging (ropes). I’ve done odd bits of sewing maintenance on the cockpit tent.

Noa is now back from her southern ocean jaunt. She had 10 days at sea and described it as pretty full on. They did manage to get ashore a couple of times which she said was incredible. Penguins just everywhere. And blue cod the size of small children. She told a tale of being on the back of the boat as it was bucking around stupidly as she struggled to bring the fish in. She had an internal dialogue…’Should I save myself or the cod?’

No matter where you are in the world, three B’s bring people together. A barbecue, a few beverages and a bonfire. And as the evening progresses, maybe some singing of dubious quality from most of those participating.

Friends declared an End of Summer party. It’s still 20 degrees in the sun here in Nelson during the day but evenings are now cool, in single digits. There have been two dusting of snow of the tops of the distant hills. But the daytime weather has been stable and bright and sunny. Lovely autumn days.

Getting to their house, probably 3 miles away in a straight line involved…

A.       Going ashore in the dinghy from the mooring, carefully caressing a bowl of food to be shared

B.       Loading our bikes onto the back of a borrowed car

C.      Driving very carefully as the car and the bikes were enduring a somewhat wobbly relationship

D.      Unloading the bikes on arrival

E.        Eating, drinking and socialising

F.        Riding the bikes back in the dark to the dinghy dock (almost exclusively downhill so nice and whizzy whizzy)

G.      Swapping bikes for the dinghy to retrace of wake back to the boat

This morning we’ll need to reverse this travel plan to go and collect the car. Meanwhile Dave is replacing some of the cabinetry in the cupboards. We removed it as part of the rig replacement to check the chain plates.

Our standing rigging is almost to the day 10 years old (the wires that hold up the mast). Our insurance company requires the rig to be less that 10 years old. And it’s generally the industry standard too. We’ve sailed a lot of miles so the whole set up has had lots of use. It looked absolutely fine but gremlins could hide within in the wire, unseen and lurking.

So Grace currently sits on a mooring, mast-less. Much work has been done in the last 3 weeks and by Wednesday, she should be back together again. The boat rocks so much more without the mast on. It’s Sunday morning and lots of ‘fizz boats” (small speed boats) are heading out for a morning’s fishing creating wake. Don’t want to spill the morning cuppa.

Just gratuitous football. So happy. ⚽️🏆

We want to get from Lyttelton to the Marlborough Sounds. It feels like exam preparation doing the passage planning.

We plan to go up on the back of a southerly front which has brought big winds and rain. We’ll need to leave at night, likely with the front still being active. We need to average at least 6.5 knots over the length of the 165-mile sail. Or the tidal gate into the Tory Channel will be closed with a massive 6.5 knot current against us as it’s spring tides. And the winds are due to go north and being in a wind against tide in the Cook Strait will be unpleasant / grim / scary / impossible.

Dave mostly, and me a little, spent the day before studying different weather models and tidal flow diagrams and talking to a local about how the computer generated wind models say one thing but in reality this often means you get this instead.

So it was with some trepidation we left the dock at 8pm at night heading out with about 30 minutes of daylight left.

We motored out towards the head of the bay with darkness falling, at the same time as a bloody cruise ship was leaving. We didn’t want to play tag so dawdled letting it go past before we could duck behind it to start our journey north.

The wind filled in beautifully and with two reefs in the main and full yankee, we cracked along gobbling up the miles.

The full moon was just masssive (yes it deserves an extra s) and it actually didn’t feel like night. Having some light at night makes a such a difference to being on night watch. It proved to be an incredibly positive and enjoyable sail, especially after all the angst we endured planning the trip.

But some good stories occasionally have a ‘dun dun dun” moment, providing jeopardy for the reader. And ours arrived as we entered the bottom of the Cook Strait.

We were both on deck when Dave heard the automatic bilge pump going off. This is a pump which sits at the lowest part of the bilge under the floor boards where any water will collect. A sensor triggers its operation should any water cover its body.

Dave went down the companionway steps and all I heard was “sh*t”. I followed quickly behind him and was greeted with water sloshing on the floor boards. This is not good. Water on the outside of a sail boat works well. The inside is not advisable.

There’s not a heap of time for problem solving when a situation like this confronts you. It’s not a put the kettle on, find a pad to make some notes, mull over the options kind of moment.

Dave quickly determined the water was fresh water, not sea water. This is very good news. The water has emanated from inside the boat, not outside. No holes. And a quick look at where it seems to be coming from suggested the cupboard under the sink.

The story ends with us working out a piece of pipe connecting the water tank to the tap has split. Because the pressurised water system was on at the switch panel, water was being constantly pumped from the tank and deluging itself through the split onto the floor. And into the bilge. Turning the pressurised system off, a bucket, a sponge and an operational bilge pump sorted the immediate problem in 20 minutes.

Today Dave did a temporary fix, chopping and shortening the pipe, before reconnecting it. We now have pressurised water again, that comes out of the taps, rather than flowing unnecessarily onto the floor.

The weather was better than we expected. We didn’t pull into the Tory Channel but continued to the top of the Cook Strait. At 4.30am, over 32 hours after setting off, we picked up a mooring ball in the Marlborough Sounds in bright moonlight, in windless conditions. A passage we’ll remember for a while.

Dave almost stood on a sea lion lion. Not deliberately of course.

Ulva Island is a popular destination for folk visiting Stewart Island. Its trails are clear and well maintained and its claim to be predator free means it attracts people wanting to see and hear native birds. We anchored off a beach, pootled ashore and picked up one of the circular walks. Not far, maybe an hour and half to do a loop.

Dave was spying into the bush, and slowly walking slightly sideways when the air was filled with a stark “Ahhh”. He stopped abruptly, wobbled on one leg, then quickly hopped a couple of steps away from a seemingly camouflaged  lounging female sea-lion that had scrummaged up into the bush from the beach. Neither were injured and we scooted away.

We’ve been on Stewart Island for over a month. Today is the first crappy day weather wise. Incredible in a very good way. We’re a long way south and last year, a front a week came through. The locals say they need rain.

We’ve walked, including Magog, Bald Cone and the Tin Range. We helped cut a new trail for predator control, we’ve fished, and dived for scallops and been given crayfish. The sea lions have delighted and scared us….I had a curious polite one come to nudge my fins when in the water one day. Dave had a big male that was a bit too curious when he was replacing the prop shaft anode underwater so he launched himself into the dinghy quite speedily.

Dave had a seven gill shark, very briefly on the fishing hook. It obviously didn’t like the paltry bait provided and quickly spat it out. Since then we’ve seen a few. The internet tells me this. “The sharpnose sevengill shark is reasonably small and is located in generally deep water, and these characteristics classify this shark as harmless to humans”. In fact, Dave seems to currently have an affinity for animals beginning with s.

Our house sale is still not quite over the line yet so we’ve staying (a day sail) close to a post office in case we need to sign any more documents and mail them back to the UK. It doesn’t feel like a hardship to be here though.