We tacked out of Prony, dropped the main and turned down the Woodin Channel under jib alone. Like our initial arrival into New Caledonia, it was easy, smooth sailing. p>We turned the corner at the end and sailed north into big, wide, Baie Uie. There, the bottom is gently sloping sand with no hazards. This was perfect! We tacked up into the bay until our depth sounder eased into the four meter range, then Maryanne rounded up into the wind while I released the clutch on our windlass, allowing the anchor to freefall.
When we were done, we backed the main with the preventer. Begonia sailed backwards for a bit and then stopped with a satisfying lurch. Ah, that’s nice! A whole day of sailing and both engines have been cold and unused for days.
The party abruptly ended after that. I was feeling pretty good about our little accomplishment when Maryanne announced that the cabin was filled with flies. I had seen a couple of them in the cockpit on the way in and was hoping they were just errant stragglers.
Oh, no, they were not! There was thirty or more of them swarming all over the cabin. It became necessary to seal ourselves in and spend an hour on a mad killing spree before we could even think about settling down for dinner. My plan for Uie had been a whole day of nothing, which we were in need of after the last few weeks of running around. Shore was a bit too far to bother with, so we were going to sleep in, eat a big breakfast and then nap it off in the cockpit, occasionally surfacing to write some blog before napping that off.
Anchored at Baie Uie (also called Baie Ouie or Baie Ue)
Well, now there was NO WAY we were going to go outside for anything. Our revised plan was to leave and head to the next place first thing in the morning.
A French boat arrived right at sunset and anchored about a quarter of a mile away. We wondered how they were faring over there. I got my answer in the morning when I woke up at five o’clock. They were already long gone.
Despite my strong urge to get the hell out of Flyland at Baie Uie, my middle-of-the-night half-asleep mental peregrinations had got me thinking that we could extend our no-engine streak by leaving under sail. As I said, Uie had no hazards, so it was just a matter of cranking up the anchor by hand and drifting downwind until we could get some sail up for control.
The job isn’t particularly difficult, just tedious. Our windlass retrieves about four inches of chain per swing of the handle. It makes it plenty easy to raise fifty kilos of anchor and chain off of the bottom, but you have to allow thirty minutes to do the job.
Our departure went just as planned. We had no stress at all apart from the harassment of those damn flies. Once we got away from the land, the wind picked up quite a bit more than the forecasts had promised. That made for fast sailing while we were going with it all.
When we got to the other end at Amedee Island, my hope was that we could round up and pick up a mooring under sail. We’ve done the maneuver a few times before and I would classify it as medium difficult. The trick is not so much getting close enough to the ball as judging the speed right so that the boat stops right at the ball. Too soon, you can’t reach it. Too late and it’s going by too fast to grab hold of.
When we got to Amedee, the wind was blowing twenty-five knots. That created two problems for us. The first was that the wind had built up a choppy sea. The balls at Amedee have a big eye at the top that you have to feed a line through before securing the other end to the boat. The chop meant both we and the ball were bouncing all over the place. The second problem with the wind was that twenty-five knots of it slows the boat down pretty fast once the sails are let go. Then we start drifting backwards pretty quickly. The rudders have no effect when there is no water flow, so we also start turning pretty sharply downwind, which makes the bows move backwards even faster than the whole boat in general.
The good news was that Amedee has lots of mooring balls and not a single one of them was occupied when we arrived. This gave us more room to maneuver and we were relieved of the worry of getting too close to any other boats.
Our first attempt was botched. I blew the jib sheet a little too late and the ball was pretty much in the middle of the boat under the bridge deck when we stopped. By the time it was back at the beam, there was no way Maryanne could catch it. I sheeted in the jib for five seconds to get some speed and we headed to the next ball over. Maryanne managed to catch that one with the boat hook, but we slowed down and backed up too fast for her to get a line through the eye. The pull was too much for her and she had to let go of her end of the boathook, leaving it with the ball. On our third attempt, I ran forward from the helm to grab the eye and add my strength to hers. We were actually able to just resist the pull of the wind. Maryanne got a line through the eye. When I tried to pull it through, it wouldn’t budge. It turns out it was pinned under my chest as I was lying on the beam. To make enough space to get it free, I had to let go of the ball. We got the line through and almost fastened before it was pulled out of our hands.
That was the last of the balls in that line, so I ran back, sheeted in the jib and got us moving again. Then we gybed and headed back upwind to start again at the first ball. That gave us a couple of minutes to calm down and regroup before our next attempt.
We managed to grab one of the balls on our second pass through, but in her attempt to get one the first mooring line secured in a hurry, Maryanne ended up feeding it the wrong way, so we had to let it go. On our third pass, We almost caught four different balls and lost our backup boat hook. It sank slowly enough that we were able to chase it down and recover it on our way back around for our fourth pass.
Attempting to pick up a mooring under sail...
Kyle tried multiple attempts before FINALLY conceding
(Before losing all our boat hooks)
By our sixth pass through the mooring field, the wind was even worse and even I was getting annoyed with myself for persisting in our increasingly futile endeavor. I was sure Maryanne’s patience was running even thinner than mine, but to her credit, she bit her tongue, knowing I would surely get there myself soon enough. My dreams of sailing to three different places with the engines acting only as ballast were dashed. We were both exhausted from all of the sail cranking and trying to hold Begonia against the howling wind. That was in addition to the stress from our increasing failure to accomplish the maneuver. The low rumble of the engines was a welcome sound by then.
It took a few minutes to get the engines warmed up enough to run at a level that would overcome the drag of the wind, but once we did, hovering in place to pick up a ball was easy. We were finally secured and looking forward to a restful if slightly bumpy night secured to a stout mooring.
Before we did, though, Maryanne swam the whole length and width of the mooring field in the hopes of finding our good boat hook. She came back empty-handed. Then she decided to have a good look at our mooring and found our hook resting on the bottom in the sand by the big ring of the mooring. Doesn’t that just figure?
Amedee island - famed for its stunning views and picturesque lighthouse
About an hour before sunset, a local catamaran arrived. They passed up all of those empty mooring balls way over there and took the one right next to us. That one was close enough that if we had both been slightly larger boats, we would have bumped every time the current switched. We had to do that thing where we have to pretend we don’t look in that direction, lest they feel like we were snooping. We had to keep our voices to a whisper and cover the windows on that side to keep them from being able to watch us take every bite of our dinner. If the place was full, being check to jowl would be a necessity and we would have to adjust our expectation of privacy accordingly, but all of the other mooring balls were empty. Perhaps the guy’s home mooring field is even more crowded and thus we seemed nice and far away. I suspect he’s the kind of person who would walk into a Men’s Room and then past nineteen open urinals to use the one right next to the guy on the far end, disregarding the normal etiquette of leaving one or two empties in between if possible.
Then right at sunset, another local catamaran arrived and chose the mooring ball right behind us. It was even closer! All we could see from our cockpit was their bows and trampoline. They were actually so close that we slept poorly because every change of wind or water noise had us surfacing to see if we were all still swinging the same way and staying separated. Groan.
After the aforementioned fitful and bumpy night of sleep, we surfaced for a trip to the island to see the big lighthouse thereupon. We arrived just as the daily tour boat did. The island then pretty much instantly went from a quiet little outcrop to Daytona Beach.
Exploring Amedee Lighthouse
What worked in our favor was that the rest of the island’s tourist population was under the direction of one tour company. Apart from a few diehards who just wanted to cook in the sun on the beach, everyone else moved around according to the canned itinerary. Thus, when they were all eating their buffet lunch, we were able to go to the top of the lighthouse pretty much by ourselves. When they went up the lighthouse, we walked the perimeter trail of the island.
Rumor was that the tour company ran the restaurant there and was happy to sell a la carte items to moored boats. We figured we would cap off out day with a dessert and a couple of umbrella drinks. When we talked to them, they told us our only option was to go for the full buffet, which included drinks and dessert for the low, low price of catering a wedding for a small group of a hundred. We love our imaginary daughter, but we were hoping she would elope at Taco Bell.
We eventually found a loophole. The souvenir store that sells $45 baseball hats and $200 sarongs also sold $9 beers, which we decided were $2 beers, plus $7 each for the view. Fine. We ignored the “Beach furniture for tour guests only” signs and found ourselves a couple of chaises with a view of our boat in which to relax and enjoy our two beers.
Once we were finished, we headed to the dinghy for the ride back home. As we were spinning it around to drag it down to the water, one of the sunbathers yelled at us in French to stop. It seems that a fairly large sea snake had taken refuge under the dinghy from the blazing sun and was about to get run over. These guys are very docile and quite harmless unless, of course, they feel threatened, which I’m sure dragging a dinghy over them would do. Their little mouths are supposed to be too small to get any purchase on humans, except maybe on the webbing between fingers or toes. We were barefoot. Since we had been warned to stop, the snake just looked at us and slithered out of the way so we could go about our launching. Then, finding no suitable shade, followed us down to the water to cool off. Now we know to check under the dinghy for snakes before moving it. That is probably a good habit to get into for going to Australia.
Amedee island (see the snake we so very nearly ran over while launching the dinghy?)
Snorkelling Amedee - plenty of turtles to entertain us (along with the odd sea-snake, etc)
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