20/10/2008, Sydney
The following were used 0-1 times, thus meeting the criteria of being useless:
2 man collapsible kayak - took too long to assemble/disassemble. Used only once in six months.
Sextant - I had every intention of using it, honest.
BBQ - a solid fuel Cobb stainless thing in a bag.
Symmetrical spinnaker.
Aneroid brass barometer - the digital ones with history are just so much better.
Video camera
Small fishing tackle
Microwave oven - Diomedea had one but I took it off. Not missed.
Books on celestial navigation
A book called South Pacific Anchorages. Everyone had it and nobody ever used it. The information was not helpful.
Seaboots and T-shirts - neither are suitable for the tropics. Get loose button up shirts ("Bula shirts" in Fiji)
Dolphin torches - actually useful but batteries seemed to run out quickly.
Boom brake - its response became very unpredictable and we took it off. Granny around in the ocean in big winds.
Bikes - we didn't have them and could not have used them ever.
Telstra mobile phones - expensive in NZ and no network elsewhere.
Local mobile phones - networks did not offer good service. We used satphone instead.
Alloy collapsible trolley - seemed like a good idea at the time and all the books said I should have it.
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20/10/2008, Sinny
Things that were used frequently and actually worked were:
Watermaker - OpenOcean Watermaker from Opua NZ. Fantastic. Would not cruise without one. I installed it myself, it cost about $6000-00 and produced 120litres per hour.
Genset - Kohler 8KVA. Used for battery charging, watermaker, dive compressor.
Solar panels - 2*80watts. Not nearly enough to meet demand but good to have them.
Forward looking sonar - Interphase 200B model, black box wired via video composite cable to Raymarine E screen at helm. Excellent.
Radar - 24 nm model from Raymarine generally had a range of no more than 10nm but this is plenty.
Different sets of charts - Navionics and C-map charts on completely separate plotters and a good range of paper charts.
Iridium satphone - connected via serial port to small embedded computer on board. Great for emails and GRIBs. Useless for internet.
HF radio- indispensable for skeds, weather, chatting, any form of broadcast. We use ICOM M-802 with DSC.
Big hand held spotlight running off the boat's batteries. Useful for night time anchoring, especially among other yachts.
Hand held depth sounder - Honda? brand from Whitworths. Excellent in the dinghy for sounding out dodgy channels prior to bringing the yacht in.
Fast planing RIB dinghy with 8HP outboard. Often quite big distances and loads to carry.
Medium to large fishing tackle. There are big fish out there.
Diesel jerry cans - 6*20 litres, for fuelling via dinghy. You can't buy them out there!
Petrol jerry cans - 12 and 20 litre
LED head torches
Deckwash pump - ours can use either fresh or salt water. Really useful to wash boat down after wet passages, clothes washing, dive gear etc.
Roving fan - 12V fan mounted on a 20cm*20cm piece of ply with a long cord to move around inside the boat to where you are. Critical.
Good cockpit shade system
IPOD - linked into boat sound system via FM transmitter or dongle.
Books - lots of them for the down times.
DVD player and lots of DVD's - as above
Decent halogen reading lights in comfortable positions.
Vacuum sealer - for food and clothing. Run off 240volt, cost about $250-00
Non-slip mats for various surfaces
Lightweight wind jackets.
Scop patches - mal de mer!
Lonely Planet Guides to every destination. Indispensable but don't take them as gospel.
Bamix blender - for cocktails, soup, dips
Spices - good selection, to make S. Pacific food interesting.
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15/10/2008, Sydney
What coms did we use in the Pacific?
This blog was created using either email or internet. About 99% of the time it was done by email as internet access was very infrequent. Email entries can be done anywhere and anytime so long as you have either HF radio with Pactor modem and computer, or, as we did, Iridium satphone and computer. One is not able to upload pictures via the email, only text. We found the Iridium to be excellent. We used two ISP's for email: Sailmail and UUPlus. The former was good to start with but it became increasingly difficult to maintain connections as time went on. The latter was very reliable. We only sent text on these services as transmitting images was too slow and was going to be very expensive in terms of Iridium air time.
The Iridium was used extensively to obtain weather information, mostly in the form of GRIB files but also in text forecasts in various countries. Of course, regular emails were sent and received. Occasional voice calls were done as well.
HF radio was used to sked with Des Renner of Opua Offshore Communications (formerly Russell Radio) and was good for our entire trip from Sydney. HF was also used to chat with other yachts on passage, and to obtain voice weather forecasts in Tonga and Fiji. We did not use DSC at anytime.
You can now sked with Kordia radio if you have HF with DSC. It is a free service within Navarea X.
VHF radio was useful to chat to other yachts in harbour or if nearby on passage. VHF was used to contact marinas or other random short parties. Generally the marinas were sometimes quite difficult to contact though. There are no VMR's in the SW Pacific although Radio Noumea was good in New Caledonia, if you spoke good French.
Mobile phones were not very useful. In New Zealand, our Telstra phones were very expensive to use but Vodafone was cheap. We used a local phone card instead. Local mobile phones or SIM cards could be obtained in Tonga, Fiji, Vanuatu mostly through a company called Digicell. The cards and phones were cheap and it seemed too good to be true. It was! The networks could not cope with the traffic and getting a connection out was an ordeal. Some networks did not have "agreements" with overseas networks so you could not always call home to say, Britain. Digicell also did not have any facility for data transmission so you could not use the phone as a modem. In the end we used the Iridium phone.
Also in the Pacific we found that our Bigpond email system was a major headache. We could receive emails at internet cafes but not send them through Bigpond, no matter what tricks we tried. We eventually used either our UUPlus email or Gmail to send emails. This was extremely annoying. Due to slow internet access the mailbox filled up and we probably never received all emails.
We had some UHF walkie talkies on board but never used them.
We had two handheld VHF's on board but found their batteries ran out everytime we wanted to talk on them (oregon scientific and an old ICOM).
Internet was available in internet cafes and marinas but overall it was of a far lower standard than you are used to in Australia. Wi-Fi internet was available in the marina in Opua, NZ ("Pacific Wi-Fi") and in the Port Moselle marina, Noumea. Both were subject to slow speeds and dropouts.
Internet in Tonga, Fiji, and Vanuatu was hopeless. Take dial-up and divide by 10! It would typically take 20 minutes to upload a single 200kb picture. However, one could take one's laptop and use at the cafes for banking etc.
Skype was used by some folk with success at the cafes. We used it once or twice with no difficulty but just on audio only, no video due to narrowband.
Overall I thought the Iridium system was fantastic and would not cruise without one. You should obtain a fixed mast antenna as the "hockey puck" antenna is not very useful in bad weather (You, the phone, and the antenna tend to get wet!). I would also not cruise without an HF transceiver.
We do not have internet on board and have no plans to get this as it is still prohibitively expensive for mere mortals like us. Internet domes appeared on yachts from 56ft and upwards.
Satcom C was rarely present on any yachts that I saw.
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