Final decision - we're going back home...

27/06/2020 Only 64 days until we have to get back to work. We have to organise our flight back but that's for tomorrow, first we enjoy a bit of teaching/sailing with our Dinghy Go. 

One more try to catch a mudcrab for lunch ... But there's nothing that likes our leftovers. They're used to being fed real meat here, no fish scraps! 😂

After a wonderful lunch with fresh Tempura and sushi leftovers on Arion, we observe Lieven and Griet on their pleasure crafts and rescue one of them just before the night falls 😎

28/06/2020 The race is on! We're going back to Airlie to stock up on food and prepare our sail back to Brisbane. We'll leave LouiseAnna there while flying back to Belgium.

Only happy faces while we sail out of the bay, as we are accompanied by dolphins 😍

We're anchoring in front of Cannonvale (next to Airlie beach) to try and arrange the move of boxes into a container from the public pontoon. But that's not going to happen. We'll have to wait to Brisbane. Our flight is booked for the 6th of August, but already got cancelled and retarded to the 8th 😶

The next few days it's all about shopping for food and waiting for the perfect weather window to go back South towards Brisbane against the wind ... well you know in the wrong direction! We're planning the importation of LouiseAnna into Australia and as we're on a tight schedule, the evaluation, gas adaptation, importation of our boat, container to move our stuff, ... have to be perfectly planned to make it on our plane on time!

In between stressy moments, we enjoy some rain while looking for Dugongs ...

... the girls started "crochet" and are making rasta hair for their Wallabies ...

... we sail the Dinghy Go one last time, and let the girls slalom in between boats. The motivation? Candy! 

A last visit of Airlie Beach. Life is truly coming back to a normal rythm. We enjoyed the first market since the beginning of the pandemic.

And after one last dinner with our friends, we're off on the 10th of July. 52 days until we go back to work.

It'll take us 5,5 days to cover 800 nm against average 25 knots wind and against the tide at a lot of places... But we're on a mission so we keep going!!! Pretty nice cruising at first. Around 8 knots on average with jib and main sail.

Bye bye Whitsundays!

Lazy morning movie.

Louise and Anna are trying to raise money I think 😍😁

And as we arrived around Bundaberg and Fraser island, it got really really cold!!!

No clear windows anymore, a big layer of salt everywhere! But if you look carefully, you can see ALL boats are going in the opposite direction!!! Typical Geoffrey and me 😏

We arrived on a perfect tide to go through the shoals of Fraser without stopping. The advice was not to cross the "bar" (sandbank at the entrance of Fraser island)  this late in the evening, but we really wanted to get going. A bad weather system was coming and we would be stuck for 4 to 5 days if we didn't kept going. In the last sunlight, we prepared for a bad crossing, had the Gopro all ready to get fantastic adrenaline shaken pictures, but it was sooooo smooth, we hardly moved at all so the video is really boring😂 

Maybe it was better like that, we didn't want to risk breaking anything so close to the end! The last 24 hours were tough, but inside Moreton bay, we had some luck and a favourable wind to smoothly sail into one straight line into the Manly marina around 8 p.m. on the 15th of July! Good thing we had been here before, because it's not that easy to find your way in the dark. 

Still time to plug in the electricity and get our heaters out! OMG it's cold out here!!!

16/07/2020 - 23 days before our flight, 46 days before we get back to work. 

Breakfast is sweet knowing that we arrived on time for all our appointments 😊

First we needed to celebrate our little girl's birthday (it was on the 11th, but not so much fun out on the water!).  Or maybe mummy didn't feel like baking a cake while the boat was moving 😳

And then it's time to get suitcases and boxes. We have some packing to do!

And masks to make! One for the airport, one to sleep comfortably, one to ...

26/07/2020 The International MoveCube of Sevenseas is just on time. The marina let us use one of their storage rooms next to the parking lot, so we could charge in the 60 minute time slot. The whole puzzle in my head was executed even better than planned and Geoffrey quickly went to recuperate our Fatboys and Louise's bike. 800 kg and 6m3 💪

31/07/2020 The leasing company LizMer just gave us a major fright, refusing to let us sell the boat. They're French, understand no other language but French and the whole world except France scares them . The International Maritime advising company, Tourmondeur, that was supposed to guide us is the most incompetent of all and probably never went further than Antibe (very international and we can't stress enough how dumb they are). 

You can imagine getting this call 8 days before our plane takes off is not exactly what we needed! The girls have never heard mum and dad be so angry on the phone before and went into hiding every time we got another call from France 😏. Luckily we are tenacious and worked throughout the night to come up with a year long list of planning, programming, warning and research about a possible sale in Australia. Needless to say Geoffrey countered with enough arguments to let us get through with all our preparations! Luckily he already lost his hair. I only got a few grey ones more!

As if nature knew we needed a bit of a miracle to forget this part, she showed us a ... KOALA!!! We went on a Koala walk and after two hours of looking up into trees Geoffrey saw some fluffy ears 😁

How cute is that?!

01/08/2020 Last sail with LouiseAnna and Katy and Byron (our Australian friends we said goodbye too again 6 months ago😃). Weird, she's so empty, ... but we had a good run, a very good run. Just as perfect as our test runs 2 years ago 😁😓

Still plenty of imagination to play in an empty boat ...

Never too late, for a first 😂

I guess the girls changed a lot since the first time we sailed with LouiseAnna!

Speeding camera's on the water! 

02/08/2020 We drown our sorrows not in the water, but again in nature. We went hiking up Mount Nebo.

Pretty and so close to a very beautiful city. We could really live here ... I wonder ... 😝

That's Brisbane and the Moreton bay back there!

On the way back we met up with Isabelle et Jeff and their two pretty girls (same age) . We met Isabelle, just wondering on the pontoon in Manly. She was on a discovery walk with her girls and moved back from Tahiti in a "Corona" rush not so long ago. We needed to give away stuff and she could use it so a perfect match! Isabelle is a sweet French architect and so the girls had some wonderful playdates to end our two year voyage 😍

04/08/2020 A great evening and dinner with Isabelle and Jeff. Still now at the very end, you keep meeting so many wonderful and interesting people. Quite intense compared to the months in quarantine alone on the islands! They live in Paddington with an amazing view over Brisbane city!

06/08/2020 Two days to go, all packed, everything ready, we already have a car, so we decide to go and visit Mooloolaba since everybody makes a fuss that we didn't stop there by boat. It's about a two hour drive on just a perfect summer-like day! This is a winterday at Noosa on the sunshine coast in Australia! 

It's a place full of hippies, St Tropez shops and die hard 80 year old people carrying their surfboards around! They still look amazing! 😂

It's a beautiful place, a bit crowded but yet not too much. And we saw WHALES !!! A final miracle! 

Last time to feel the Pacific Ocean...

We were surprised about the expensive and so praised Mooloolaba, not a place we would have liked to stay. It's a very expensive marina and good if you like shopping. Otherwise you will not miss a lot...

07/08/2020 We have moved LouiseAnna in a new berth at the Royal Manly Yacht Squadron. She will be looked after by a Yachtsharing company while being on sale. We have a clear conscience and are leaving her in good hands, but then suddenly this weird feeling creeps up on me. It's not the "material" loss of the boat, it's a feeling that our trip is over for good. Life as we had it is finished and I hope we can keep a lot of family habits in tact when professional life will catch up with us...

We were persuaded to have one last dinner the night before our departure with friends we met through Isabelle and Jeff that would like to go on a one year sailing adventure 😎 They also invited a Belgian couple living in Brisbane. It was a great evening in a beautiful typical home with true Belgian waffles!

08/08/2020 😓... off to the airport:

The return to Belgium was weird, an airport where everything is closed, only one big line for the single plane that took off that evening. Apparently we should have weighed the last suitcase better as we had 16 kg of excess luggage 😱💆... 

Instead of a nice line with 1,5m distance between each family we were put through the usual serpentine so all really close one to another. And then just before entering the plane, we received a screen for us and the girls. We had to keep it on during the whole flight as the plane was fuller than full, only 2 empty seats!!! Off course you have your hand luggage, everyone pushing in your back to go on, you have to help your children and there are two "transparent" films on the screen through which you see sh**!!! When the hostess asked me to see my plane ticket she got a whole bunch of swarewords over her and realised that maybe I knew exactly what seat I was appointed. 

They changed our seats though, so now I didn't have my two girls next to me, but a stranger at the window. Sooooo practical with children! The light and tv of that woman was lighting up as a slot machine every 10 minutes so Anna couldn't close an eye (on top of the fact she had to sleep with the Darth Vader screen on!!!) But hey, when the whole plane gets their food at the exact same time, we can take it all of to eat together 😈😡😩🙌

I guess if you imagine yourself being part of a star Wars movie, you can make the trip more fun!

10/08/2020 All by all we had a quick flight back to Belgium, only 28 hours in total. The second plane was a lot better and we had empty seats before and behind us. You still had to wear the screen, but it almost felt as if you could breath! Back in the Belgian airport, they were laughing at us at customs, because we were wearing the screen! "What do you have on your face!", they said 🙈

We were so fortunate to have our family, lending us a car and making sure we were provisioned on food and DUVEL 😂 

We had friends that gave us the keys to their home, while being on holiday. The first thing we enjoyed was a fresh beer, buffalo mozzarella with beef tomatoes, playing hockey and floating stressless in quarantine in the swimming pool. Cheers guys!

And our tenants gave us our house back on time. We still had 5 days before school started to get everything back in place 😏

In the meantime we tried to see our friends to catch up, had to find a car for me, a school rush, first communion of Louise, birthday party of Anna,  difficult quarantine conditions at school and the sale of the boat. So i'm not really looking for an excuse to be late with the blog, but maybe a little bit 😋😳

31/12/2020 I'm writing the final blog on new years day. We have only just received our money from the boat sale. Nerve racking choices had to be made whether to exchange our Australian dollars or not. The 20 minute wait in between the banks request to change the dollars and our decision to go through with it, we gained 900€ and I lost a bit of hair! 

But it's done, it's officially over so here we go for our last words:

Ciao LouiseAnna!

We can officially close a chapter that was both amazingly beautiful as well as a stress-full rollercoaster at certain moments. 

But hey, off course we'll do it again! 

While our memories are now only precious shadows in our heads, new plans have already planted their seeds 😌

Thank you for following us and see you on our next adventure !

If you would like some statistics about this trip as well as the full map you can click here: https://sailinglouiseanna.blogspot.com/p/program.html