Fremantle here she comes!

Feeling the need to have her closer we decided to use the services of a delivery person. There have been many horror stories of delivery skippers, concerning lack of care. One such skipper delivered a yacht from Asia to Australia, using the new high performance sails rather than the Dacron sails!

After having the boat picked up from, Pittwater, she spent a few days at CYCA without us!

They just managed to leave before the wild weather hit Sydney in early October, taking shelter in Eden until the weather cleared. From there it was a reasonable run for them with a maintenance issue of dirty fuel tanks - turned out we had algae in the tanks! Last fuel up was Pittwater! This is rather surprising as we had cleaned the middle tank out in Galápagos.

We were very dismayed to hear that part of the autopilot broke. They did have big seas but the autopilot is oversized (suited to 50 to 80 foot boat) and is only 4 years old. It has done a lot of miles (around Mexico, down to Central America, across the Pacific and up and down the east coast)  in big seas in that time. Sadly, delivery skippers push the boat and do not understand about having a low response value on the autopilot so the seas can be taken more easily.

We found Peter Neaves, Australian Yacht Deliveries by word of mouth..he had delivered a yacht to FSC. We would recommend him again.

Peter Neaves did comment that he thought the boat sailed well in big seas. That is the very luxury of a Hylas. We found crossing the Pacific, that the production boats around us found the conditions uncomfortable, whilst we did not even notice the sea state. When you are down below on the Hylas it feels as if you are only just moving along, when in fact you are hooning at around 8 knots!

Stolen Kiss is now in Adelaide. Jules and Marg will come with us on our final leg home. Jules sailed our first leg with us, so quite fitting for her to be there for the penultimate leg around to Port Geograph.