Roar said...
Does anyone just ship their gear across with a courier a few days before they go then pick it up on the other side.
I know you can do Depot to depot shipping where they will hold it at their storage facility till you get there,
This would be pretty cool as you wont have to drag it thru airports and deal with all the asociated headaches plus gives you plenty of time to go sort out transport at other end before you go and collect it.
For the last 2 years for my sailing holiday in WA, I have shipped 4 or 5 sails across via a courier and taken the boards,masts, and booms on the plane.
With the sails, I have found you can wrap 3 together to make them more durable and then I go crazy and wrap them in marine carpet, or something heavy. The volume is how they charge for them, so the extra weight from the carpet adds nothing to the cost, but makes it just about bullet proof.
I have some really nice and helpful friends in WA (thanks again!) that accept the delivery of these sails, and it makes life so much easier. The important thing that I do is to insure the sails for the maximum $1k to make sure the courier doesn't 'lose them'.
You could just as easily ship them to the depot and pick them up from there. It's cheaper that way too.
Boards take up too much volume and are too delicate to ship easily to WA. I wouldn't do it normally.
I have wondered about making up a wooden crate and adding all the gear and getting it shipped via rail to WA. That would be ideal as long as it was cheap enough.
