NYE Sydney Harbour

We spent NYE in Farm Cove, just east of the Opera House. Here are 2 pics of the midnight fireworks. There is an earlier 9pm set, with sporadic short displays in between, and other entertainment filling the gaps. Plus we had plenty of seafood, decent French champagne, steak to bbq, desserts, and good friends on board. Cresta 32/John was anchored upwind of us.
Both fireworks and the trip home were enhanced by mid year bilateral cataract surgery.
We were in place by 1pm and never bored watching anchoring and boat handling issues. An area of seafloor seemed to be a thin layer of mud on top of smooth polished granite. The Sarca held second best to a Hanse sailboat (anchor not sighted but plenty of ss chain and nylon)extending to about 50M of rode out in 8M depth. Wind lifted, we dragged twice at 3:1 (limited space) after initially holding 4 hours, we shifted position, going to 5:1. We saw multiple rode entwinements, in one a sailboat holed a catamaran which left under rescue escort, numerous uncontrolled drifts of boats up to 45ft plus (Crew: "we don`t have any thrusters" Me: "put the port engine in reverse" as it drifted downwind sideways bow first between anchored boats),attempting to anchor in what became a "Bermuda Triangle" of anchoring. Fortunately, it all settled by the time the celebrations started.
Happy New Year!

Pics of 1)damaged cat with Maritime patrol attending, and 2)culprit trying again with claw before booed out of area.

We were off Taronga zoo in 14mtr. Arrived 9am put out all our chain into sand and sat back to watch the fun. Boats kept coming all day and filled in the gaps around us until by 7pm there were not too many left. A couple of boats came in one anchoring with 2mt chain and 15mtr of string, the other one rafted up and then THE FUN did begin. The boats all around us began to swing with the wind and the two rafted up began to drag. There were the boys with arms folded all around this unhappy pair yelling to them to go....somewhere else. The bloke on the boat with the anchor steadfastly looked elsewhere for a couple of minutes but in the end could not stand the pressure so did. About 50 mtr away to repeat his perfomance. This time he stuck we all went back to our prawns and chicken beers and not so French bubbly and enjoyed a great night.