Fred Judi Tom Pittwater November 2024

17 Aug, 2025

First time in Pittwater! Meet up with our intrepid yachting mates Fred and Judi on SV Pit Pony. We are down under because they tempted us with the amazing, unexpected invite to circumnavigate Tasmania with them. We got a one-year visa and now had to secure boat insurance. Boat insurance requires a certified marine electrician’s sign off on our lithium battery set up. Fred had a guy lined up to help us with that. While we were in queue to get a guy on the boat we traveled up river to join Fred and Judi for summer time gunk holing and snake-in-the-grass hiking. Fred is the big guy and the fast hiker so he goes first.

He goes first and he goes with a stick and functionally clears the path for us. Hiking paths are called tracks here and they are either overbuilt aesthetically pleasing pro-built trails OR they are NOT any of that. Perhaps there are visual tags mostly weather torn or weather worn OR there are NOT any. At that point consider yourself properly bush whacking. Fred and Judi are so well practiced that nothing deterred us. (I should have been more wary of what was to come.)

We come back to Pittwater for Tom and he comes out to SV Calla Lily. He buzzes up on the over powered tinny and looks 14 years old. He’s the expert. Just so y’all don’t panic, everything on board was safe and in good working order. Tom deemed it “ugly” so to get the needed sign off he would make it look pretty. He set about his work of adding a distributor, changing the orientation of the batteries and realigned some cables for visual symmetry. It took him two days only (or three only because he had to go to school in the middle) ...told you he looked 14. And (bonus!) we got a ride in his very fast work boat: I was grinning ear to ear for the raw speed.

Provisioning is a pleasure in Pittwater. Public transportation covers all towns and makes connections with overlapping schedules and on-time stops. We discovered that we could get all the way to CBD in Sydney within a couple hours! And “what else have we got to do?” as Fred once said to me while circling around deciding exactly where he wanted to drop his anchor. With access in Pittwater to all the trades and supporting marine businesses we took care of one more project that makes my heart smile. We found someone to manufacture an acrylic washboard. The beauty and benefit of this is a secure alternative to the wood washboard that allows light into the saloon. We also opted for a cut that allows us to remove the top 8 inches as a vent. It is a game changer in foul weather and nighttime comfort. We even got a puppy dog fix as a bonus.

I am now well and truly ready to move on!