KatieKat 2002 Cruise Chapter Ten

This webpage contains the photos of our brief stay at Lord Howe Island during our passage from Australia to New Zealand. As an adjunct, I am including (on a separate webpage) the daily passage reports which I had sent out via HF SailMail - Click here to read the Passage Reports.

This is the tenth webpage of our cruise covering the year 2002. This is one long continuous page, and clicking on any of the underlined dates above should jump your screen to the appropriate section on this page (or you can use the scrollbar on the right to navigate up and down this page). Joe Siudzinski

23 November, 2002 -- Lord Howe Island

Lord Howe Island is a World Heritage site, and everything is carefully protected and regulated. For example, anchoring is prohibited in the main lagoon, and one is assigned mooring buoys by harbormaster Clive Wilson, whose family has been active on the island for a century. Clive talked us through the pass and onto the mooring in the VERY SHALLOW lagoon, and we could then finally say that we had arrived! The first photo below shows Kathy still wearing her headphones (for communication when picking up the mooring) when a local ray came out to greet us. What a nice welcome!

Kathy meets the ray.

Prior to shutting down the instruments, I usually make a note of all their information at the end of a passage. For example, maximum windspeed and maximum boatspeed are kept in the instruments' memory. Imagine my surprise at the following readings:

And pilots are told to trust their instruments...
BTW, the 2.7ft depth reading is what we had under the keel in the lagoon.

This is where we tied up to the mooring buoy. Is this what results from saying your prayers as a child?

The first thing we did was jump into the wonderfully-clear water to check things out - too far south for Salties (salt water crocs) and we hadn't heard about any significant sharks - besides, we needed a bath! Adam put his digital camera into a zip-lock bag and took the following wonderful underwater photos while simply swimming in the vicinity of our moored boat.

That's KatieKat and not an upside-down submarine. Note how close we are to the bottom.

Note the water clarity.

We unshipped BikeBoat (our pedal-powered SeaCycle catamaran) and went ashore for a walk on the beach

Unloading our carefully-preserved non-biodegradeable trash off BikeBoat for recycling.
Sorry to do this to you, Lord Howe, but I guess that's what part of the $30/person landing charge is for.

Walking along the overcrowded beaches of Lord Howe Island.

Scenes of traffic congestion, industrial pollution, and overcrowding.
In the right photo, that speck in the middle is KatieKat.

That ray became quite attached to Kathy and followed her around. In the middle photo, you can see it just above the pedal under the dock.

Photos of the deadly lionfish (at least, I was told it is deadly) looking straight down at it from the dock

Those two mounds are called ... uh, the left one is Mount Lidgbird (yes, that's the way it is spelled) - 776m - and the right one is Mount Gower - 874m. In the right photo you can see one of the black containers in which we were ferrying water to the boat. The black marks on the side of BikeBoat are tar residue off the dock pilings - poor BikeBoat took the worst beating she ever had - the bottom is also badly gouged.

Now we know where Nessie went.

Island Trader is the small supply ship which comes every couple of weeks. It enters at high tide and ties up to the pier, but is then left high and dry when the tide goes out.

How do you take a telephoto shot of KatieKat? Why, if you're Adam, you just stick the digital camera behind the binocular - amazing clarity, considering.

Enough, already! As you can see, we enjoyed ourselves and wished we could have stayed longer.

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