We had plenty of control with only one engine, though, so we used that to get us around the corner and through the worst of the chop spanning the Sydney Harbour entrance. At the other side was an eight knot westerly wind. We shut down the engine, but were having a terrible time getting up to speed. The waves reflecting off of the cliffs nearby had turned the sea into a confused mess of washing machine chop.
The wind tapered off a bit to five knots. Ordinarily, in smooth water, we would be able to coax Begonia up to just over three knots in that wind, but today, she just wasn’t having it. The every-direction chop slapped her to a stop and the mast swinging all over the place kept the sails from filling and producing any lift.
Fortunately, the East Australia Current was giving a nice boost. We didn’t have enough control to keep from drifting into half a dozen recreational fishing boats. They were all jammed together over one really special spot. We restarted the motor to get us around them and decided that since it was already running, we would just keep going for a while until we got some real wind.
I went off watch. About an hour later, I half awoke to the sound of the engine alarm as Maryanne shut it down. When I emerged for real, we were on a fast, broad reach in a smooth following swell.
We were now going fast enough to make it to Eden Harbour before dark the next day. That was our original plan, as it was unlikely the forecast would give us a week’s worth of good weather for the double-dogleg through the notorious Bass Strait to Tasmania.
Eden has been hit really hard by bushfires, though. Earlier in the week, we'd received reports that the port had been closed. Maryanne managed (via a facebook group) to get a report from someone that lives there just before we left. They said the fires had burned through and that the port was open, grocery shops fully provisioned, and all is well to visit. They even asked us to PLEASE stop in and spend a few dollars as so many people were now avoiding the area.
I was kind of looking forward to seeing it, but I also knew good weather windows are rare and I didn’t want us to get stuck there for days and days. The forecast I downloaded at midnight looked like it would work for us to keep going, with only a day or two of unwanted moderate headwinds. In the meantime, we had tailwinds, following seas and a favorable current to enjoy. We switched from white sails to our spinnaker and accelerated.
Through the night, we slowly caught up with and then overtook two other boats that had motored past us after leaving Sydney. Take that! They seemed to be heading for Hobart, but just before sunrise, they gybed and headed for Eden {Maryanne: I was so glad to see that some boats were headed there even if we were now going to miss it}.
We still had a perfect wind for the spinnaker as we approached Cape Howe. That’s where the eastern coast of the Australian mainland turns westward to become the southern coast. The wind can really accelerate there, so we switched back to our normal working sails and turned from a run into a broad reach to keep our main from blanketing the jib.
That put us on a course that was too close to the mainland and the off-lying gas wells there. As we neared them, I started gybing to the other tack to take us away.
When I’m alone, I go about the process slowly, one sail at a time. As I got to the middle stage at wing-on-wing, I noticed the boat was behaving remarkably well. Usually this is not the case. Wing-on-wing is terribly temperamental. Three degrees too much to one side or the other will have one of the sails collapsing and refilling too much to be of any use. Any rolling only exacerbates the problem.
This time, the seas were exactly behind us, so there was no rolling, only a slow pitching as the waves passed under us. That allowed us to keep up our speed without having to steer off course to keep the sails filled. I was eager to get through the Bass Strait as quickly as possible in order to minimize exposure to any of its infamous horrors.
At exactly four o’clock the next morning, we passed into the lee of the land. Our unscented sea air turned into the smell of wet earth. That lasted for three minutes. Then the aroma quickly turned to smoke. At first, it was mild, like getting a whiff of a neighbor burning a pile of leaves three blocks over. Within an hour, it was like standing on the wrong side of a big, smoky campfire.
That’s pretty much what it was, except that we were forty miles from the nearest land. Unlike a campfire, there was no way to take five steps and be out of it. It stung our eyes and burned our throats. We got to where we couldn’t stay outside at the helm for more than a few minutes to check the instruments before retreating inside to sit our watches from behind our cabin windows.
Scenes at sea
It was unnerving. The sun was a red orb that only managed to get a small portion of its light through the murk. Even at midday, the brightest it got was like a Martian pre-dawn. The smoke smell that did make it into the cabin made our subconscious minds think some remote part of Begonia was quietly smoldering and was about to burst into flames. Two different ships passed within two miles of us without being visible at all. Ash and half-burned blades of grass left charcoal stains all over our decks.
It wasn’t until we approached Deal Island, off Tasmania’s northeastern tip, that the smoke began to abate. The wind died and then slowly came from the other way to blow it back from where it had come. This was the beginning of our day of headwinds.
It wasn’t so bad. We knew we wouldn’t be able to make much progress against both the wind and the current, so we over-reefed and settled in for a slow day of sailing south, ninety degrees from where we wanted to go. The wind was milder down there and being farther south would give us a better angle when the “good” winds returned.
When the shift came, we tacked to the west northwest, glad to be going mostly in the right direction (west) and looking forward to easing the sails and speeding up.
The wind picked up a bit, so I went out to put in another reef before dinner. I had just started doing the dishes afterward when Maryanne said that our cabin wind repeater had just jumped from fifteen to thirty knots. We had WAY too much sail up for that. I went outside, got Begonia on a downwind heading that blocked the jib and then rolled that sail in. The reefed main was still too much for the wind, so we kept on a downwind heading for the fifteen minutes it took for it to die back to its previous fifteen knots.
The wind never tried that again. By the time Maryanne woke me up for my night watch, she had doused the working sails and deployed the spinnaker. That carried us clear to the northwestern corner of Tasmania, where we had to switch back for the upwind beat down the west coast.
The wind was now out of the south and took on a diurnal pattern of being strong in the afternoons, light in the early mornings. There was no land to windward for thousands of miles and the air was crisp, clean and cold.
As we pushed into the forties, each new degree of latitude required another layer at the helm and another blanket on the bed. A big storm was due to arrive in a couple of days, so we pushed hard to make it into harbor before it arrived.
We made it to Port Davey, the last harbor on the West Coast, in the middle of day seven. Wow! It is surrounded by steep mountains whose bare rock gives way to hearty scrub that has clearly evolved to handle sea spray, punishing winds and brutal cold.
Entering Port Davey
We passed the Breaksea Islands. They form a perpendicular protective barrier to the Bathurst Channel, which leads further into Bathurst Harbour. Once inside, we were in a different world. The sea flattened out completely. The wind, which was now coming over the land, was warm. We even saw someone on an outgoing boat wearing shorts!
A few short miles farther in, we pulled into the bay at Frog Hollow and anchored in the sliver on the chart between the edge of the no-anchoring zone (for wildlife protection) and the unsurveyed region. We had an amazing spot all to ourselves with a view of Mt. Rugby, The region’s highest prominence. Whew! We had made it to Tasmania’s remotest, most undeveloped corner. We were looking forward to seeing more, but now it was time for a recovery day - with a view.
Safely at anchor - and enjoying the views
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