Early departure from Busselton, and a night at Canal Rocks
I say “we”, but in this case, I mean Maryanne. I had thrown-out my back the day before by picking up a Q-tip or something. By morning, I couldn't really move much, so Maryanne had to do all of her regular jobs, plus mine. I tried finding a comfortable position in the helm seat, but I could only manage a few minutes before I had to go inside and lie down. That was where I stayed until ten more helm seat minutes at the end when we set our anchor. Oh, well. Canal rocks is very pretty and it was nice to have a change of scenery through the window.
We left Canal rocks just as early as we had left Busselton the day before. As we exited the bay, we spotted Infinity about five miles behind. Let's see how this goes, shall we? We should be pretty well matched for a 46' monohull.
We were not. Their AIS target had them going fifty percent faster than we were. Even after we shut down the engines and let off of the brakes by feathering the props, we were still two knots slower than they were. We were going faster than we needed to with only one reef in the jib. Technically, we could have put the main up and pushed hard, which should have matched their speed, but probably not beat it. Damn, they were fast! My back wasn't up for running around doing all of that work and I didn't have the heart to ask Maryanne to do it on my behalf, so we just let them go ahead without putting up much of a fight. I kept telling myself we were doing okay, having a nice, easy sail. We would arrive well before the afternoon wind shift. Still, it's hard to sit on a 'fast' catamaran and let a 'slow' monohull go bombing by. Within a couple of hours, they were completely over the horizon. Our clocks were now officially cleaned.
Hamelin Bay to wait for the better winds
They had beaten us to Hamelin Bay, just north of Cape Leeuwin, by an hour and a half. Hamelin Bay is remote, but also surprisingly busy. It's far from any towns, but it hosts a caravan park, which means the beaches are always well populated. As one of the only two anchorages along this coast (the other being Canal Rocks), it has a few boats as well. In addition to Infinity and us, there were two other monohulls and a catamaran, as well as three fishing boats. There is also a launching ramp there, so there is practically an endless stream of tinnies and jet-skis going by. It seems very busy.
I needed another day of light duty (or two) for my back. Maryanne was keen to get out the kayak and explore the rocky islets in the bay. She was foiled by the morning winds. They blew so hard into the bay that a pretty big chop had built. Launching and paddling the kayak would have been rough. Worse than that, Begonia was getting thrown around a lot and the beach was now behind us. Speaking of Italy, eh? Neither of us wanted to leave her unattended in the event she started dragging. It looks like Hamelin Bay will have to be one of those, “looks nice out of the window” anchorages.
In the way that weather forecasts seem to do, our five-day window for going east along the south coast of Australia slowly shrank to three, then two and a half, then forty-two hours. Forecasts get much more reliable the closer in the future they are, so I was relieved to see all of the various models coalescing into agreement with only three days to go. I was worried the window would vanish altogether like the last one did, but it seemed to still be on, only getting slightly shorter with each update.
By the time we left Hamelin Bay, we had only a four-hour window to start the passage. Any earlier and we would be beating into headwinds at the start of the trip. We were already looking at headwinds for the far end, but if we left too late, we would be fighting them halfway, instead of just a few miles at the end. With all of this in mind, we decided the best time to leave the anchorage was at one a.m.. Ouch.
Sailing along around the SW Coast of Australia
Once we cleared the rocks enclosing the bay, we encountered the last of the evening headwinds as they were dying off. There was just enough to keep us moving three or four knots in the right direction and since the air was angling off of the land, it was warm enough to sit the rest of the night watch in t-shirt and shorts. Knobby Head Lighthouse came into view and once we were a little further away from the headlands, we could see the great flash of Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse sweeping past us eight times a minute. Even though it was the farther of the two, it stood higher and shone brighter. Cape Leeuwin is surrounded by rocky shoals that extend five miles from shore, so it was important to make it visible at a great distance.
It was a bit chilly, AND Kyle had to jury-rig the autopilot when its bracket broke.
I know I say stuff like this all of the time, but it was amazing to be sitting there at the helm of my own boat in the middle of the night, like it was a normal sail, except that I was watching the Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse warn me to stay back – THE actual Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse. This is nuts! On the other side of that thing is the Southern Ocean, renowned for cold and storms and hardship. “Hey, Honey, let's go sailing in the Southern Ocean! I'll put on a t-shirt.”
To be fair, Cape Leeuwin is about as far south as Los Angeles is north. The scary part of the Southern Ocean doesn't really start until about forty degrees south, especially in summer. There, powerful storms rip along with nothing to stop them all of the way between South America and, um, South America. Occasionally, one of these storms pushes northward from its watery domain and gives the southern coast of Australia a smack before heading back towards Antarctica.
It was just one of these weather systems that we were planning to ride the very northern edge of as it pushed the prevailing easterlies inland over the Nullarbor plain. This was not going to be much fun, but it was still going be better than beating upwind for four hundred miles. For now, the warm calm before the storm made for unexpectedly nice sailing. Off in the distance, over the horizon, a wall of clouds lit by almost continuous lightning signaled what was coming. They looked close by, maybe five or ten miles, but I couldn't see anything closer than fifty with the radar. There was almost no thunder, either, so I decided I must have been seeing the top third of what must have been some pretty well developed cells.
Later in the day, we had a few minutes of frustration as the wind disappeared and started swinging all over the place. Then the new wind arrived from the southwest, along with low clouds and enough drizzle to smear around the accumulated dust on deck, but not wash it overboard. The thunderstorms from before had dissipated, so we at least didn't have to worry about lightning.
The onset of the wind was slow enough that we didn't have any need to run out and scramble to yank the sails down. It just built and built, so that every couple of hours, we realized it was getting a bit strong and one or the other of us would go put in the next reef. The main thing we noticed was that the new wind was COLD! That air had been blowing over icebergs a week ago and hasn't had much of a chance to warm up since. I wore three layers on my next night watch and was still cold enough in the morning to realize I had underdone it. Subsequent watches, both day and night, involved laboriously putting on the whole foul weather outfit with lots of fluffy layers underneath. Then I could sit out at the helm seat all roasty-toasty in a sealed environment, with only my exposed nose to carry away any excess body heat.
The wind built until it was hovering just above thirty knots. Luckily, it was from our starboard quarter, so our speed took away some of its punch. The swell built to three meters or so from the same direction, so we were soon surfing down their faces. We had one twenty-four hour period where we managed 203 nautical miles. We tend to sail pretty conservatively, so we have only done that very few times. Even now, we were reefed for ten knots more wind than we had. It was the surfing that was doing it. I spent a whole hour watching our speed through the water bounce between nine and twelve knots. At one point, it hit 17.7 and at another on Maryanne's watch, she hit 18.3. When this happens, both bows throw up huge wakes, which the wind then catches and blows forward over them. It looks like we mounted a fountain under our trampoline. At least the forward part of the boat finally got enough of a soaking to rinse Busselton's dust off.
As a hedge against the coming headwinds, we shaped a curving course towards Esperance that would allow us to bend with, or almost with, the wind as we approached. We eventually ended up sailing the last few miles to the north in southeast winds. We didn't have to start tacking until the last twenty miles through the Recherche Archipelago.
All of our earlier speed was enough that we could have just made it to our anchorage by nightfall if we aimed directly for it. However, there is a large unsurveyed area over a hundred miles long that lies in a band between the islands nearest the shore and the continental shelf. The chart has dire warnings in the notes about uncharted rocks and the folly of going in there without local knowledge. In the old days, they would have said, “There be monsters!”.
On a calm day with good light and recent satellite imagery, we might have tried it, but not going fast in big waves and not with the prospect of running out of light before we are across. Instead, once we were inside the uncharted zone, it became mostly Maryanne's job to tack between islands in the charted area through the dark, moonless night.
In preparation for this, I had pored over both our charts and our most recent satellite imagery for discrepancies. There was stuff on the chart that didn't show on the sat photos, but not the other way around and all of the positions of the shoals and islets along the way were concordant. Therefore, we determined that it should be safe to navigate using our chartplotter.
Still, it was unnerving, to say the least. It was one day before the new moon, so only the slightest sliver would come over the horizon just before the sun did. The night was so dark that almost nothing could be seen beyond the glow of the instruments, even with them at their lowest brightness setting.
The clouds finally parted, so Maryanne was able to identify islands ahead of us by the silhouettes they made against the stars. The noise of her first two tacks woke me. This had me grabbing for my phone to see where we were and how the tack had gone. After that, I must have been too tired, because I didn't stir again until she woke me at midnight. We were almost there.
During my watch, I only had to do three tacks to get us to Rossiter Bay. Once there, I doused the main, rolled the jib up to three reefs and turned downwind for a very slow sail to reach our anchorage at Lucky Bay.
The first hint of twilight started brightening the eastern sky, accompanied by both the rising moon and Venus breaking the horizon together. The black silhouettes of the rocks ahead turned dark-gray and then, slowly, color and definition bled into them, revealing smooth mounds of red rock partially covered with olive green scrub. The sky turned salmon and then red, making the colors pop out even more. We rounded the corner into Lucky Bay and headed toward a crook at the end of a mile-long white beach and dropped the anchor there into beautiful turquoise water. At our end of the beach, the white sand starts alternating with mounds of smooth red rock. As the swell hits the rocks, the waves are diffused into a smooth fan that spreads across the stone and runs down the other side. The beach repeatedly appeared and disappeared behind fairly sizable surf.
That surf was going to be a problem. It looked like there would be no way to get the dinghy through it without getting rolled or at least swamped. Oh, but the beach looked so inviting!
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