The Steamtug Blog

I first met Petri when I joined the commissioning team for the first ever gas plant in Nigeria. Petri was from a refinery in Sweden, so like me, this gas stuff was all new. He had been there already a couple of months and kindly showed me what he had learnt. We became close buddies, always finding some skull duggery together and I even had him running the Hash Runs in Nigeria before I left the project after 5 years together. (continue reading…)

Just arrived home after a week living like the homeless (Hobos of the bay!)on Adaqua visiting places like Portarlington, St Leonards, Rye, South Channel fort and finishing off with a few days in Melbourne’s docklands marina to unwind with luxuries like shore power, hot showers, a washing machine, and an easy place to wash the old boat down before heading home to Geelong. (continue reading…)

I was very lucky to be invited by Mitch (my pilot son) to come flying with him up into the mountain country. He was going to Mansfield to meet up with some of his flying buddies who were all flying in from various airports for lunch at the local pub. (continue reading…)

This week’s project was to construct a new mash tun, which will allow me move away from canned malt extract, and make the whole beer from mashed barley. For quite a while now I have been making what’s known as partial mash beers, using the can but instead of adding sugars, mashing grain in my esky (cooler box) or doing it in a bag on the kitchen stove. (continue reading…)

Avalon Airport, located close to our home town Geelong, is trying to push to become the second international airport for our state of victoria. Every second year it becomes host to the Australian International airshow which Mitch and I were fortunate enough to attend. (continue reading…)

I had a visit from my Russian mate the other day. Jenya worked with me in Russia, and he is also the one with whom I drove a car across Russia with! (See the link to “travel diaries” at the top of this page, and look down the bottom of the page) It’s the second time he has been here!  He was supposed to be here last week, but being the adventure freak he is, decided to start in Perth and drive a car up the north-west coast and back. Unfortunately for him, 2 cyclones hit the region and his car became a small house on a small island!!! (Lol..) (continue reading…)

While reading the paper the other day, I noticed a cruise ship would be visiting Geelong early on Sunday morning, and thought it would be an ideal opportunity to get the crew together for a pancake breakfast on the bay. We have almost finished the worst summer I can remember with only one hot day this year, but Sunday morning looked fantastic!

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The summer weather has been pretty pathetic. As we watched half of Australia under flood water yet again, us here in the South pondered the fact that we never get any rain down here. We have just come through the worst drought ever recorded up until some decent rainfall towards the end of last year which was the first time we have had normal or above average in more than 10 years. But then the sky opened and it didn’t stop raining here for 5 days! Luckily we don’t have any flooding here, but we know plenty of people who are worried. And when I woke up the other morning and looked out my window, I was shocked to see water lapping at my door….

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You can’t plan anything to do with your boat with a specific date attached. It happens almost everytime when a date on the calendar is selected, the weather will be fantastic the day before, crap on the day, and good again the day after. Take for example the underwater hockey break up party where we recently upset everybody’s plans by moving the date to the day before when the weather was perfect. It happened again with the family Boxing day sail down to Portarlington, and now again.

With perfect weather the day before new year’s eve, the big important day saw winds from the North West at 30 knots, gusting up to 50, driving temperatures up to 43 degrees and making not white caps on the water, but almost surf! But undeterred, we ventured down to the boat and set up everything ready for the big New Year’s Eve party. (continue reading…)

Since I am the president of the Under Water Hockey club, I took the team out on the boat for our annual break up party. We have done this the last few years and sometimes, the weather has not been great. This was going to be the case this time too, but looking at the forecast, I could not help noticing the perfect conditions the night before. So after lots of worry about who would miss out, I changed the night for Tuesday instead of the Wednesday. And the weather turned out to be just fantastic!!! Sorry to those who missed out. (continue reading…)