Dark skies and big waves

We are now back in Sydney and are delighted that the water in Blackwattle Bay is flat; it was anything but as we sailed up the coast from Bermagui. We did two, long day-sails, stopping in Jervis Bay (arriving after dark) and then Cronulla, noticing, with some dismay, the difference that the south-going current made to our speed compared to the trip down the coast in January. The sea swell was also building this week so our dash northwards to get to Sydney before the southerlies switched to northerlies was enlivened by some pretty serious up and down motion, whilst the sky was full of some very foreboding clouds.

These clouds carried plenty of rain, which was preceded by a significant increase in wind. We were kept busy with reefing and un-reefing the sails

The wind was behind us but blew pretty consistently at between 20 and 25 knots, with gusts of around 30. With a steadily increasing SE swell, the waves were pretty impressive but, of course, always look smaller in photos!

As we moved closer up the coast towards Sydney on Thursday, we had a good view of the famous surf beach at Bondi and some valuable real estate that's probably not fully appreciated by its tenants:

The beach at Bondi on a windy and cloudy Thursday. It'll be packed at the weekend when the sun is forecast to return.

A few acres of otherwise prime development land just south of Bondi is the last resting place of early settlers

As we turned into Sydney Heads, the entrance of the huge harbour, we met one of the big Sydney to Manly ferries nosing out into the swell. We're not sure if they do this to avoid being side-on to the waves as they cross the entrance or whether it's the crew getting their kicks from showing nervous passengers how much the ferry can roll!

The ferry rolls as it turns back into the harbour

For the two of us on Maunie, we we were delighted to get into the sheltered waters and we had a brilliant sail up past the Opera House and under the Harbour Bridge, only starting the engine once we were in the lee of the tall buildings near Darling Harbour.

Our sailing under the Harbour Bridge was noticed -
more on another rather unbelievable coincidence that followed to come in the next update

 We'll be here in Sydney for a week or so to catch up on boat jobs and to see some more sights of this vibrant city. Today we combined the two and took the long fast cat ferry ride up river, as far as it's possible to navigate, to Parramatta to drop our SSB radio off for (we hope) a repair. It was a good day out and we were glad to leave the navigation to someone else, for once.

"Push on, Push on. You can sleep when you're dead" - Capt Barbossa, Pirates of the Caribbean

“A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow” – Charlotte Brontë

Well, Miss Brontë, with respect, I suspect that you, living as you did in the land-locked Yorkshire village of Haworth in the mid-1800’s (when it probably wasn’t de-rigeur for Ladies to venture anywhere near sailing boats), never experienced a pillow as restless as the ones on Maunie for the past 3 days.

We are now safely in the fishing town of Bermagui after the 3 day passage from Tassie. Bermagui (pronounced, of course, with a rising inflection at the end) is probably known as Bermie to the locals. It’s an Australian habit to shorten words and give them an ‘”ee” sounding ending (Tassie for instance); we watched the TV news when we first arrived here and were slightly perplexed when the reporter told us that the Firies had attended a nasty car crash somewhere. Firies? What the feck are Firies? Ah, yes, I see: firefighters….

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, the passage went as well as we could hope for in terms of weather – great sailing for the first 24 hours up the east coast of Tasmania, then 14 hours of motor-sailing through the high pressure ridge, where the wind was just enough to give the engine some assistance, and then excellent broad reaching and running up the SE corner of the mainland. The south-running current was a pain, as expected, flowing at up to 2 knots at times so, in spite of boat speed of around 7 knots (very happy with that) we seemed to be crawling northwards at times against a travellator switched to go the wrong way. The challenge for us, though, was the waves.

The Bass Strait is notorious not only for the wild Roaring Forties winds which can whistle through it if one picks the wrong moment, but also for the confused and uncomfortable seas it delivers as an added benefit to miserable seafarers. It’s shallow, you see, and is subject to sea swells refracting around the top of Tassie, as well as current-driven, short-interval waves. The maritime weather forecasts here give no less than three wave patterns at the same time: the First Swell is the main direction of the big waves, usually from the Southern Ocean, then there’s a Second Swell, often at 90 degrees to the First Swell, and then finally there are the Seas, the wind-driven waves which can often run in an entirely different direction to either of the Swells. So for, example, today’s forecast for the waters here is:

1st Swell: Southeasterly 1 to 1.5 metres, increasing to 1.5 to 2 metres.

2nd Swell: East to northeasterly below 1 metre, increasing to 1 to 1.5 metres

Seas: 2 to 3 metres.

This kind of mix made life interesting aboard Maunie.

“Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking” – Clifton Fadiman

For this passage, of course, we didn’t have the luxury of crew to break up the night watches into an eminently-sensible 2 hours on, six hours off arrangement – Suzie and Roald, where were you when we needed you? With just the two of us, we were back to 4 on, 4 off at night which means that, by the time you’ve done a watch handover and got in to bed (and allowing for the need to be up 10 minutes before the next watch), the off watch gives you only three and a half hours to get some sleep. 

Oh yes, get some sleep, with the boat bouncing in three directions, the water rushing past the hull beside your head and various creaks, groans and rattles emanating from various parts of the hull. “Must get some sleep, must get some sleep!” you tell yourself but, by then, your mind is churning through all sorts of subjects. I found myself thinking about boat maintenance jobs, the plans of how to leave Maunie safely tied up to the pontoon when we fly home in April, the jobs that need to be done on the cottage when we return and, uh, oh, what was that funny noise just then? “Just stop thinking!!” I tried but, as Mr Fadiman said, that very act seems to require concentration that diverts the mind from the concept of accepting the oblivion of deep sleep.

So we both lived the half-life of sleep deprivation for most of the voyage and it was surprisingly debilitating. It also had some distinctly odd side effects – when we did manage to sleep we woke (or were woken at the end of the too-short off-watch) from that period of sleep that creates maximum dreams. We both refrained from sharing too much detail for fear of scaring the other but Graham did admit to a lurid dream of going to visit our storage unit for our furniture back in Somerset to find it transformed into some kind of subterranean grotto with small but vicious purple-winged bats hanging from the ceiling! To make him feel better, Di shared her dream of visiting various bakeries in an Australian town to check that they each had the right amount of cream cakes; if not, she made sure more were delivered. Ummm?!

Even when awake, the tiredness delivered some odd moments, chief among which is the moment when you Hear the Voices. We should point out at this moment, lest you think we’ve completely lost the plot, that we not alone in Hearing the Voices on board a boat; other sailing friends have admitted it too. It’s still quite disconcerting, though. What happens is that, typically, you are up in the cockpit and from somewhere deep in the boat, you can just hear a noise that sounds just like a conversation but without being quite able to make it out. In the past we have both called down to the off-watch partner, thinking that they were the source but, since that wakes them up from their half-sleep and makes them even more grumpy, we now wait, come below to check that the radio hasn’t suddenly burst into life and then realise that it’s just a pan squeaking against its neighbour in the galley locker and, apparently, saying “honestly, I just don’t know how they cope”.

So, arrival into Bermie was a blessing and we celebrated, Aussie-style, with a Sunday lunch of pie, peas and prosecco.

We’re tied up alongside a 60ft fishing vessel undergoing a refit and her crew were very friendly and helpful as we came alongside. 

We had planned to head off early this morning to head further up the coast whilst the southerly winds prevail but today’s forecast is for strong winds and big seas so we decided a lie-in and some general recuperation would be more important. At least, that’s what the voices in the galley locker told us, and who are we to argue?

Leaving Tasmania (if we get past the guard dogs!)

We are very sad to be leaving Tassie after a wonderful four and a half weeks. We've only scratched the surface of the place and the summer (which the locals all rated as 'poor' when we arrived) has now decided to deliver the goods. However, we have an eye on the calendar and another on the weather forecast and it looks as though the next few days will present us with a good window to cross the Bass Strait.

Our anchorage tonight is a slightly eerie place called Eaglehawk Neck. The view from the masthead this afternoon, as we completed a rig safety check, showed a glimpse of the open ocean across a narrow spit of land:

Looking due east towards Eaglehawk Neck

However, when you have a look at the place on Google Earth, its rather macabre history becomes much more understandable. This was once the natural barrier to prevent 19th Century convicts from escaping incarceration.

Maunie is anchored at the yellow square

A closer view of Eaglehawk Neck

To the south of this narrow spit of land is the Tasman Peninsula, which became the home for many hundreds of unhappy convicts. Port Arthur, photos of which we posted a couple of weeks ago, was the main prison and workhouse and lies at the southern end. The narrow neck of land provided the only, easily patrolled, link to the rest of Tasmania and ferocious dogs were chained up across it to deter any would-be freedom-seekers. The waters either side of it would be an option, of course, but the word was put out that they were stiff with sharks and, in any case, in the 1870's most people didn't learn to swim (and certainly not how to swim when manacled with heavy leg irons!).

For Maunie, this is a perfectly sheltered spot to allow us to prepare for the 3-day passage north. Graham has dived under the hull to clean it of speed-reducing weed and barnacles (and reported no sharks, thankfully) whilst the forward fridge is now running as a freezer with some pre-prepared meals already stashed in it. The latest lasagne (a favourite on-passage meal) has a slightly different key ingredient (locally sourced of course):

Tomorrow we head north via a shortcut, rather than having to 'retrace our steps' around the often rough seas of Tasman Island. We are going through the Denison Canal, built in 1905 to give coastal vessels a very welcome alternative route to and from Hobart. Today the entrance to Blackman Bay to the north-east has silted up fairly badly so only small boats can get through - we'll have to wait until a couple of hours after low water and will have to follow the buoyed channel very carefully so we've planned to do it on a rising tide, just in case we get in wrong and touch the mud! We're secretly hoping that we'll be able to follow a local boat!

The hand-dug canal at Dunally is about 900m long and transfers us into Blackman Bay 

The Narrows look as though they might be a bit challenging!!

Once through this little chicane, we'll sail north towards Wineglass Bay, where we first made our Tasmanian landfall, and then north to the SE corner of mainland Australia.

The weather models suggest that we'll get a healthy southerly wind on Thursday night and Friday but then a high pressure ridge will pass over us so there'll be a bit of a wind hole. We are hoping to get the timing right in order to cross that with minimal motoring and then get more ESE winds on the west side of the High (winds go anticlockwise around Highs here, of course) to push us up to the New South Wales coast. We'll see - we seldom get it entirely right but we'll be happy to do some motoring rather than bashing into heavy winds and seas. It'll come as a bit of a shock, as well, to have just the two of us aboard - four-hours-on, four-hours-off night watches won't compare to the two-on, six-off luxury of the sail down with Suzie and Roald!

As ever, we'll be updating our position on yit.nz/yacht/maunieofardwall as we cross.

Hiking to the bottom of Tassie

We were delighted to meet up with Adam and Cindi from Bravo at the Cockle Creek campsite in Recherche Bay. They are travelling in Tojo, their Toyota Land Cruiser, with a roof-top tent and have covered many thousands of kilometres around the more interesting and deserted parts of Australia. Adam has posted some pretty spectacular photos on their blog http://svbravo.blogspot.com.au/ so with him and Kerry around, Graham felt seriously challenged on the photography front! Adam and Cindi joined us aboard Maunie for a pizza night and, after a long break from sailing their own boat, we could see that they are itching to be back afloat; hopefully we have persuaded them to spend 2017/18 cruising the east coast of Australia so that we can spend some more time with them.

We decided to tackle the 5 hour 'easy' South West Bay hike to the southern shore of Tasmania the following morning, in spite of a rather dubious forecast. Sure enough we were rained on pretty heavily and the light wasn't great for photos (Graham getting the excuses in early here) but here are some (with a few of Kerry's added, too).

The mid section of the hike had about 2km of duckboards to protect the fragile wetlands. Still some blue sky at this stage!

Di remains cheerful as the weather begins to change

South West Bay

Di and Cindi. Di less sure about how much fun she's having

Kerry at the cliff edge getting photos - a few of her shots follow

Cindi heading towards the cliffs, photo Kerry Lorimer

The Maunies in wet weather gear. Photo by Kerry

Graham gets some cliff-edge shots. Photo by Kerry

Dramatic coastline under leaden skies. Photo by Kerry

Seaweed treble clef on the rain-pocked sand

A break in the clouds at last, but there was more rain to come

Adam and Cindi in the beautiful woodland. Photo by Kerry

The hiking team at the end of a great day. The End of the Road is the furthest south vehicle access in Australia. Photos by a Passing Stranger

We said farewell to Adam and Cindi and sailed north to Bruny Island, with a very pleasant lunch stop at a winery - the most southerly winery in Australia (they are keen on these superlatives around here). The wine tasting was ok but the cold climate produces lighter wines than we prefer; lunch, however, was excellent!

We are now back in Hobart to restock the food lockers and, of course, to do a few more boat jobs whilst we have the luxury of shore power. We had a final rendezvous with Suzie and Roald before they flew on to Melbourne and they took us in their hire car up to the summit of Mount Wellington for a superb view over Hobart.

Looking East over Hobart

Kerry left us yesterday, too, to fly to Sydney, so it feels slightly strange to have the boat to ourselves again after some great company over the past few weeks. Ah, well, on with the work: 

Removing and re-bedding the fore hatch that was dripping sea water when subjected to big waves across it

Our plan now is to look for a decent weather window to cross the Bass Strait again, then head up the coast towards Sydney. We are hoping that there we'll be able to find a radio specialist to fix our usually-wonderful SSB radio; its speaker has fallen silent, though we have established that it still transmits. Graham took it apart (as much as he dared, at least) in the hope of spotting an obvious loose connection but without joy.

Looks pretty straightforward, eh?

As far south as it's possible to go

After a great week in Hobart we set off to find some more remote bits of Tasmania; it's not a difficult task. Having sailed south down the D'entrecasteaux Channel (named after the French Admiral Bruny D'entrecasteaux, who discovered the place, by accident, when a storm blew his two ships off course in 1792), we came to Recherche Bay (named after one of his ships) to find ourselves, literally, at the end of the road. This is the furthest south that you can drive on Australian soil and the shoreline around the anchorage was pretty dramatic under leaden skies - it's been a cold and rainy few days.

A brief walk to get these photos was followed by a longer hike to South East Cape, the very bottom corner of Tasmania. After that, Antarctica lies only 1100 miles away and made its presence felt by sending icy winds northwards towards us. Photos of that dramatic coastline to follow.....

Big boats at the Wooden Boat Festival

This is the last of 3 posts on the Festival, you may be glad to hear! 

There were some larger and much-larger vessels on the water, with a couple of square-rigged sailing ships that welcomed visitors aboard.

The first was actually a iron-hulled ship (it must have got special dispensation to be part of the Wooden Boat Festival!) called the James Craig. She was built in Sunderland, in the north-east of England, in 1874 and sailed around the Horn 23 times in her heyday. In the early 1900's she was trading between NZ and Australia before a slow decline to become a storage hulk in Tasmania in 1911 then a coal lighter between 1925 and 1932. She was then sunk on a beach in Recherche Bay for 40 years before a long, slow battle to save her began in 1972; she was finally relaunched in 1997 and is based in Sydney at the Australian Maritime Museum and sailed by volunteers.

The James Craig is a three-masted barque, 70m in length 

Halyards and sheets coiled on belaying pins 

Huge wooden blocks (pulleys)

The second tall ship we visited was the 64m Tenacious and she is built of wood. Launched in 2000, she is operated as a training vessel by the Jubilee Sailing Trust for a crew of disabled and able-bodied people. We met a couple of the crew who'd sailed her down from Melbourne, one was blind and the other in a wheelchair and they were both pretty inspirational characters.

More modern sail-handling technology included roller-reefing foresails

Tenacious' belaying pins are stainless steel - a more modern version of the James Craig set-up but doing exactly the same job 

Kerry, Sue and Dianne chat to one of the crew (who came from Cleveleys, just a few miles from where Dianne grew up)

The mess deck, with the laminated wooden ribs and planks 

We are about to start sailing again, after a brilliant week in Hobart. We'll be heading down the Dentrecasteaux Channel towards the south-east tip of Tasmania for a week or so be fore we return, briefly, to Hobart and then start planning the return crossing of the Bass Strait inn early March.