2008 in review

Hi and best wishes to all.

So now comes the time to write up the goings on of the year. As most of you who read this would be aware Last November I (Colin) sailed Reflections into her home port, concluding an eight year journey.

The year started with Liz and the girls flying back to Phuket to finish the school year. I started working back at TAFE NSW in the same IT department I left eight years previous. This has been a very surreal experience, with so many familiar faces comng up to me to welcome me back. Some knew our whole story and had followed the web pages that tracked our progress, while others tried to guess how long I'd been gone (average guess 2-4 years) and one guy who never realised I'd left!

My working year has gone well and am now a permanent employee again. The department I work for supplies IT support for 14 TAFE campuses, 300 primary & high schools, and with a massive amount of funding due to arrive soon to supply a notebook computer for every student fromYear 9 and up, interesting times are definitely afoot.

At the same time as work started, I began to move back into our house at Nords Wharf which is on the southern end of Lake Macquarie, just south of Newcastle. The house was rented out while we were gone, with all our furniture and stuff stored in a large area underneath. It was quite a relief to find the house in good repair and all of our stuff in remarkably good condition after such a long time in storage.

Slowly I unpacked the necessities of life and opened the 'time capsules' that showed where our lives where at when we set off on our adventure in 2000. This was a bittersweet experience, as missing the family was amplified as the toys, drawings and house decorations where dusted off and reinstated.

In April I made a short trip back to Phuket for just over a week. Stepping back into hot and steamy SE Asia felt as much like going home as stepping back off the plane in Sydney - if that makes sense. It was wonderful to be back with all my girls and enjoy the easy lifestyle of an expat in Phuket. Back in Australia the days grew shorter and colder and after eight years of tropical life, a moderate winter in Newcastle was pretty hard to bear.,

July arrives and school is finished in Phuket. A week later I am collecting two shivering girls at Sydney airport. Liz's sister Virginia, joined her in Phuket and they set off on a great holiday together, visiting Bangkok, Kuching in Sarawak for the World Music Festival, the Perhentan Islands on the east coast of Malaysia, and VIP guests at the Singapore music festival SingFest.

Courtney completed her International General Certificate of Secondary Education, or IGCSE, which is the equivalent of the NSW School Certificate. This meant that she didn't need to return to school untill the start of the new school year in Jan 2009. She really enjoyed doing drama at British International, Phuket and applied to go to the selective school for performing arts in Newcastle. She was successful and is really looking forward to starting. She looked around for work and gained first hand experience of the frustration of handing out inumerable resumes and asking around the shopping centres for work. Eventually an ad appeared for McDonalds and she has now been working at the nearby Swansea outlet for over six weeks. She absolutely loves it and appears to show great skill for keeping busy, backing up the other workers and cleaning. Liz and I are at a complete loss as to where she gained these skills as we've seen little evidence of this at home!

Anna started Year 8 at Swansea High and has settled in well. She was placed in the academic high achievers group and finished the year with a good report card. Given the huge difference between life at Swansea High ,an average public high school, and British International, Phuket a private school with a wide international mix of students, I think that Anna has coped really well. She was only six when we left, and the return home has been quite a culture shock. She has made friends and seems to be enjoying life in her own manic way.

After her deserved break from the family, travelling with her sister, Liz arrived back in mid August. Finally we were all together again! As with Courtney & Anna, I now watched Liz go through the culture shock of returning and slowly acclimatising back into life here. She spent many hours unpacking more of our things that were stored underneath that I had not yet unearthed, and again when we collected ten cubic metres of items that were shipped back from Phuket. The search for work was complicated by the requirement by TAFE NSW for all teachers to hold a Certificate in Assement & Training. While she struggled through gathering the required information to gain recognition towards this, she contacted the University of Newcastle, and gained an immediate start teaching English as a Second Language to foreign students who come over to complete the ten week courses. She has found the Univeristy an enjoyable place to work.

The final addition to our family has been two little dogs, Maltese ShiTzu's named Pip and Pepper. They are only six months old and do all the adorable and not so adorable things that pups do. Being two boys from the same litter they test each other regularly to be the dominant one, have the habit of standing on their hind legs while they knash each other around the mouth and neck. But most of the time they lay round and sleep, pursuing the dog's life. We all love them!

And how is Reflections IV? She sits on a mooring a few hundred metres from our house and has far more visits from seagulls than from us. Each day when I get close to the house on our way home from work, I glance through a gap in the trees & houses to see the mast that gives the reassurrance that she is still there. With a few days off over christmas she will get some TLC and maybe even take the family out for lunch.

Occasionaly I am asked if we plan to go sailing again. I can't ever bring myself to say no, but the reality reply is 'I doubt it'. We have a new, not so exciting, plan now. The girls have schooling to finish, Liz and I both have work that is satisfying and holds promise, and equally important we are doing this in our comfortable environment, surrounded by our friends and family. I think I can say that we all carry an inner glow that is sustained by recalling the incredible experiences we've had together over the last eight years.

So this year's newsletter is not was not full of strange lands, series of "once in a lifetime" experiences,or of life on a foreign shore. It's been a year of returns, finding our way back into a mainstream lifestyle. and working our way through the culture shock of returning to life in the western world.

So I hope this message finds you all well and happy in whatever you are doing. Please all keep in touch. I promise a reply to any message recieved!

take care and Happy New Year!

Colin, Elizabeth, Courtney and Anna
39 Nords Wharf Road,
NORDS WHARF. 2281. NSW
Australia

Email addresses:
Family: reflectionsiv at hotmail.com
Colin colwoods at gmail.com
Liz : elizabeth.j.woods at gmail.com

Website: http://www.reflectionsiv.com/ Photos at: http://picasaweb.google.com/colwoods

Courtney's story a winner

Courtney put an entry in a junior short story competition hosted by a hotel in Phuket.

And she won! The prize is a three day stay at the hotel, a book from the judging author and the story will be published in a magazine.

This link is to the Mom Tri Boathouse with all the stories and details.

The judge's comments:

Mom Tri's Boathouse Student Writing Contest 2008

What a great first year it was for the Boathouse's student writing contest. The Boathouse got a pile of submissions, and each one of them clearly demonstrated both a genuine enthusiasm for writing in general and the hard work that went into producing these entries in particular.

There was some seriously good writing, too.

The greatest overall strength of the submissions was that every single one of them showed a honest-to-goodness ability to produce prose that is both clear and interesting. If there were a single overall weakness in the entries, it was a limitation in the writers' sense of story development and a lack of structure appropriate to the length of these particular pieces. That problem would, I think, be the result of watching too many movies, trolling the internet too much, sending a whole bunch of text messages, and spending not nearly enough time reading good novels. I have a son about the same age as all of these writers. I recognize the symptoms of failing imagination when I see them.

Anyway, I have to tell you that it was much harder to pick the winners in this category than it was in the adult category of the contest. But that's what the Boathouse asked me to do, so here we go anyway…

FIRST PLACE:

'It's Not About Hamlet,' Courtney Woods -- the most vividly written of all the entries, the most immediate and alive. I could feel Phuket. I could even smell it. The narrative itself advances through a well-struck and emotionally mature balance of dialogue and description that was outstanding, particularly for such a short piece. Really, really nice work.

Here is her story:

First Prize in the Mom Tri's Boathouse Student Short Fiction Contest 2008

"IT'S NOT ABOUT HAMLET"

By Courtney Woods (Age 16)

When Jack Shepherd walked into the Boathouse, it was an unusually warm Thursday night in March and the salty breeze off the Andaman Sea swirled with distant memories. He took a stool at the Galley Bar, ordered a Heineken from the impossibly young-looking man wearing a black bow-tie, and shifted his weight on the stool just enough to look around without being obvious about it.

He and Anita had sat just over there, he thought to himself. That table out at the far edge of the dining room, almost on the beach. Could that really have been just two years ago? It felt like he had lived a lifetime or two since then, and he supposed he had.

He took a long pull from his Heineken and glanced again at the table he and Anita had once shared. Tonight the table was occupied by three men and a woman who didn't seem to be having nearly as much fun as he and Anita had had back then. He started to look away, but then he stopped. His eyes jerked back to the table.

It couldn't be, he told himself. It simply couldn't be. But, and now he had no doubt of it at all, it clearly was.

Jack turned back to the bar - not too quickly, that might draw Roland's attention. As he sipped automatically at his Heineken, he considered his options. He could pay now and leave, or wait until he had the chance to move to a table in some shadowy corner - No! He shook his head, smiling a little bitterly. There was no reason to run. No reason to hide. Phuket was a popular vacation destination. There was no mystery, no conspiracy. Jack sighed quietly and traced convoluting paths on the bar top, the water pooling at the base of the bottle following his finger as he made a Venice of tiny puddles and canals.

He remained there, staring blindly at the wall as he slowly drank his beer, mind drifting to other subjects but always, always aware of who was sitting just edging the beach. He was shaken from his reverie by the sound of Roland's voice - so like Anita's, Jack thought sourly - and the cacophony of chairs being pushed back simultaneously. He waited. A moment, two moments. He dared to peer over his shoulder at the door, seeing, with no little relief, the shock of hair leave through the restaurant doors, heading for the street. Even the bartender seemed to notice as he deflated, the tension visibly leaving him. Catching the bartender's curious eye, he gestured for the bill, swigging back the remains of the Heineken as he extracted his wallet from his back pocket. He'd go home now. A narrowly avoided encounter like that was enough excitement for him for the night. He would head back to the hotel, collapse on the bed and fall asleep watching old movies. He rubbed his face with a hand still slightly damp with sweat and condensation, and moved out onto the beach.

The night tasted heavy with salt, a breath of wind forming the otherwise calm water into little ripples. Jack walked the waterline, his feet sinking a little into the wet sand. The stars were invisible, obscured by the eternally bright lights of the town, but the moon shone balefully down on the yachts that swung aimlessly in the changing tide.

Jack walked.

He trudged along the beach, in no hurry at all. His hotel was at the other end of the beach and he had all night to get there. He had only gone to the Boathouse for a beer and bucket of sobering memories.

Ahead of him was a throng of teenagers - just kids, really - sitting around and on a fleet of tin and inflatable dinghies. Glass Coke bottles with something probably not Coke were being passed around. Thankfully, they ignored Jack as he passed. Not far now, he mused. Just another two, three hundred meters.

"Jack."

Jack kept walking. Just his imagination trying to scare him.

"Come on now, Jack."

He kept walking, with a sense of impending- something. Doom? He gave a dry chuckle at his newfound melodrama.

"Quit being an idiot and stop."

He stopped. He turned. He looked.

"Hey," Jack deadpanned. Roland's smile was lopsided and had a hint of defeat at its corners.

"Hey."

"On vacation?"

"I'm tracking down a friend. He's lost his way."

Jack's eyes narrowed. The breeze grew with his tension. Roland paused, lips parted. Then the smile faded and his brow, so ghostly pale, furrowed. The picture of seriousness. Jack felt like laughing at the familiar expression.

"Why are you here, Jack?"

Jack shrugged.

"Phuket's a nice place. I've been here before. It's a good place for a vacation."

"People going on vacation don't leave without telling anyone."

"Did my mother send you to find me? Because I sent her an email."

"…"

"Even told her which beach on Phuket I was at. But not the hotel. I don't need to tell her everything."

"I'm not here because of your mother."

"Is it Hamlet? Is he dead? You know you could have just sent me an email."

Irritation on Roland's face now.

"I've been following you since Madrid - why would I follow you halfway around the world because of - Jack, I'm not here about your

bloody dog."

The waves rolled in placidly, soaking their feet, now barely two metres apart. Jack was silent, side-on to Roland, facing the sea. Roland's fists were clenched. A moment. They unclenched. The defeat returned to his face, but there was no smile.

"I've followed you since Madrid," he said with quiet sorrow. "I bet you visited that gallery, right? Anita's big break. We were all so proud. Her first big exhibition. She was so happy."

"…"

His hair glinted gold as Roland tilted his head back.

"After that Paris. Then Copenhagen. In Berlin, I was going to talk to you, but that's when I got behind. Arrived the day you left. Heh, we probably passed each other in airport. Thought you were going to stay longer, but I suppose it was too painful."

He turned, now shoulder-to-shoulder with Jack, but facing the street. His face was lit up by a neon karaoke bar sign, alternately blue then red.

"And then here. Phuket."

A sigh.

"She loved this place," Jack whispered. "The heat of the tropics…the life, so easy and yet not…the Boathouse…our last anniversary…"

"I figured that'd be where I'd find you," Roland rejoined. "She told me about it, by phone. I could hear how happy she was. How happy you made her. And I was so

damn glad that you married her." He tilted his head back and sideways, watching Jack's shadowed face. "She wouldn't want this."

"…"

"It's such a cliché, but - you've got to move on. Two years since- since what happened, and you're still not back on your feet."

"I-"

"No, don't," Roland firmly interrupted. "If after 18 months of everyone thinking you're surviving- grieving, yes, but surviving- you then up and run to every city that you two ever had a good time in…that is not moving on."

Jack's cheeks were wet.

"Why did you come after me?" he choked out, hands in fists and stuffed in his pockets.

"Because I didn't really think you were surviving, and I owed it to you and my sister to help you. You were my best mate - still are as far as I'm concerned." Roland grabbed Jack's shoulder. "You need to pull yourself together and get on with life. You're at the end of memory lane, and I reckon another trip's likely to kill you."

"I can't go back."

"I'm not asking you to. You can go wherever you want. Just don't go there because it was where Anita had some gallery opening, or because she always planned to go there."

Jack looked at Roland, half his face lit, the other half in shadow. Roland didn't look angry. He didn't look like he was about to cry. Instead, everything about him was a hand, reaching out to him. Offering to pull him free. He looked back to the sea. The yachts floated and bobbed, their mast lights stars lying low in the sky. The sea sighed. The town behind him pounded to the beats of a thousand songs. He raised his hands and scrubbed at his cheeks like a child who had scraped his knee. Roland's hand slipped off his shoulder. The teenagers down the beach danced.

"So then…" Roland mused, his tone now light as a feather. "What're you going to do, Jack?"

Jack was silent. A drying smile.

"I'm going back to my hotel and watching old movies," he announced to the yachts in the bay. "Or maybe I'll head out for a drink." A sideways glance, a sidelong smirk. "Care to join me?"

The End....

Woods family reunited - for a week in Phuket

After three months back working at TAFE I was eligible for a week's leave so I took off to see my girls. It was so great to be back together and in the 'so-familiar' surroundings of Phuket.

School is on the final term break of two weeks, so we had plenty of time together. During the time we went to the regular sailing day on Sunday. Anna has a lesson each Sunday and as members of the club we can use the private beach and facilities when we please. More photos here

Another day Liz and I went into Phuket town to our favourite haunt: Thalang and Romanee roads which are the classic examples of the Sino-Portuguese housing that shows Phukets significance as a trading port. Again, more photos here

We also went up to see the still under construction 45 metre Big Buddha. Set on the hils that overlook Chalong Bay. the view is great and the buddha, once covered in marble, will be quite a site. More photos here

With the aid of some credit card points Liz and I were able to have a night away in a upmarket hotel on the south eastern corner of the island. The Evason Phuket is set on the waterfront and has many pools and water features that have 'water edges that blend into the water front view. A very beautiful development. We spent the second day on the island the hotel has, just off the coast. more photos here.

The week passed all too quickly and I found myself loaded up with lots of things to take home and flew back to chilly Nords Wharf. The final renunion will happen in July, when the girls finish school.

Nords Wharf

Now anchored at Nords Wharf, but not out the front of our house of course, and catching up with friends. My mobile number is 0437821206.

Lake Macquarie - home!

This journey started in Kota Kinabalu in July when Liz and the girls joined me after I put the boat back in the water after it sat waiting in the shipyard in Kudat for many months. The first two months saw us, as a family (as it always should be) sail around Sabah then across most of Indonesia and down to Darwin.

From there I sailed Reflections to Cairns on my own, experiencing all that solo sailing in contrary condition could have to offer. From Cairns I had the company of young travellers and without their knowledge of how good the conditions really were, ripped down the east cost of Australia.

So now I am back where we started from. I feel pleased that I was able to deliver her back here safely and intact. Now I wait to be reunited with my girls in December.

Love to all who read this...

Esmeralda Cove, Broughton Island

The wind and current has really pushed us along, with the boat sitting on 9-11 knots for a lot of the last 24 hours. I wanted to arrive at Swansea entrance at first light but the extra speed has put us too close so I decided to anchor here for the night and then arrive at the entrance for the higher early afternoon tide.

The strong northerly wind may make the bar a bit of a hazard, so its best to pick a better tide in full daylight.

Looking forward to a full nights sleep.

Hard to believe that tomorrow Reflections IV will be back in Lake Macquarie after leaving in April 2000. I so wish Liz and the girls were with me to do this final run home.

Passing Cape Byron

Half way from Bundy to Swansea!

After the lumpy start motor sailing out across Hervey Bay we found, in 200+ metre deep water, the south setting current and turned south to find an easterly wind around 15-20 knots and away we went. And that's been the story ever since. Sailing the boat slowly with the cutter and full main we've averaged 6.5 knots since leaving Bundaberg.

Being 25 miles offshore and in deep water the sea/swell has been gentle and the boat is moving very comfortably. The current has picked as we pass the eastern most point of the coast and the boat has been doing 8-10 knots for the last six hours.

The forecast looks good for continuing through to Lake Macquarie (the finish line!)and ETA is sometime on Monday.