My plan was to get out of Lucky Bay early, before the wind woke up. It would have worked, too, if it weren't for that meddling current!
It started out pleasantly enough. We left as soon as it was light enough to see where we were going. It felt a little bit silly putting up the main with two reefs in it in only nine knots of wind, but we weren't taking any chances. We unrolled the jib only to the first reef. In that configuration, we are good to twenty-four knots.
Once we left Lucky Bay and rounded the corner, Things picked up a little. There was fifteen knots of wind out there which, when added to our forward speed, made about twenty over the boat. The seas were still slight enough that we could slice through them with ease.
This is when tacking can actually be kind of pleasant. On a downwind route, we would have sailed a straight course through the deep middle between islands. The scenery would have pleasantly slid by in the distance. When tacking, we really get to see where we are sailing as we bounce back and forth between close-up views of this cliff and that rock and that beach. It's more of a comprehensive tour.
Our tour was going nicely enough, though our progress wasn't nearly as good as we had hoped. There was a generally strong current flowing westward between the islands. That reduced the easterly component of our forward motion even more, reducing our actual progress in that direction to somewhere between one and two knots from the three or four it would have been in calm water.
That meant that by the time we were hoping to be there, which was about an hour before the usual midday wind increase, we had only made it halfway. The initial wind increase was not unwelcome. We rolled up the jib to the next reef and sped up, which helped with our easting. After a lag, the seas arrived that had been heaped up by the new, stronger winds. Then we were stuck between the extra driving power provided by the wind and each wave trying to slow us back down again.
The wind picked up more. We rolled up the jib to the smallest we could get it and still maintain some forward drive. The hulls and cabin were pretty much continuously charging through a cloud of spray kicked up by the bows.
With just six miles to go, the wind picked up even more. It was now steadily above thirty knots and gusting almost ten more. Had we been in the open sea on passage, this is when we would have abandoned trying to sail and would have just pulled down everything until it passed. As it was, our only choices were to keep what little sail we had up, leaving us over-canvassed, or bring them down and resort to the engines. Our engines are small, and even with both going, we would not have been able to push against wind in the upper thirties by more than a knot or knot and a half. It would take us hours to get there. By then, the wind was supposed to be even stronger. We decided our best worst option was to keep the sail up so that we at least had the power to push into the wind.
Even though it was a bright, sunny day, it no longer felt like it was safe to be out there trying to sail in it. Our brisk morning sail had slowly gone to boisterous and then harrowing. Each time a gust would hit, we would grit our teeth and stare at each other, wide-eyed. All non-essential thought vanished. We were both just fixated on covering the distance remaining. We needed to get the hell out of here.
Thus, it was with immense relief that we finally passed into the lee of the hammerhead-shaped peninsula at Victory Boat Harbour. The big bay there encloses a pint-sized little bay. We headed for the smaller one and were amazed by the difference inside. We dropped the anchor in four meters of flat water over clean sand. Our masthead anemometer was only reading fifteen knots now, which was still way more than we were feeling down on at deck level. The juxtaposition between what we had been hanging on through just fifteen minutes earlier could not have been starker. It took us a good two hours before we stopped exclaiming to each other how amazed we each were that it was so calm.
First views of Victory Boat Harbour
Victory Boat Harbour is a bit of a strange name for this place. There is no marina, no moorings, no infrastructure of any kind (no normal 'harbour' facilities). As for boats, we were again the only one and appeared to be the first for some while. It is in reality just a really pretty and remote cove. The only signs of humanity were the few campers tucked away in one corner of the beach. To get there, they all had to endure a torturous 4WD ride from the nearest road.
Kyle squeezed in a trip up the mast before we went ashore
After a night of fitful sleep, we recovered our composure and headed ashore for a walk. The main goal providing our wanderings some structure was the hope that at the top of the big hill (Mt. Belches) looming over the anchorage, we would be able to get a cellular signal from a settlement on the other side. We met some nice locals, who gave us vague directions to the route leading up the hill, the gist of which was that they didn't do much hiking, but they pointed out which 4WD track should get us the closest.
Maryanne duly noted their directions. We climbed a steep incline of soft sand to get above the beach, and then she turned the wrong way. I tapped her and then stabbed a thumb at the hill behind us. She said she knew. She just wanted to see what was this way first.
There were some fun 4WD trails hidden all over
Okay. We followed a track that looked way too rough for a vehicle until we came to the top of a small ridge. There, we could see the rest of the peninsula, with its sand dunes and white beaches all book-ended by a ridge of bare rock. In the immediate foreground, just a little ahead of us. A truck perched high-centered on the edge of a sandy drop-off, its back wheels in the air. We started making our way over there to see if we could help or at least gawk. A woman was walking around with a shovel in the knee-deep sand, digging here and there around the vehicle as necessary. Before we got there, the vehicle pitched over about fifty degrees and then dropped out of sight behind the ridge. It didn't lower. It dropped. Well, this should be interesting!
When we got there, she was busy trying to muscle a couple of portable sand treads out of the track. We peered over the edge and saw the vehicle parked down by the beach. A man was struggling to make his way back up the slope on foot, sinking to his thighs and sliding back to the starting point of each step. We asked her what her plan was now. It was obviously, a: walk to the nearest town to buy a new truck or, 2: hire a barge from Esperance to retrieve it from the beach. Even a bulldozer could not climb back up that hill. She said neither of those things would be necessary. There is a much shallower route back up.
”Okay, but then WHY did you go that way?”
”We thought we would see if we could do it.”
But, of course. The first thing I would do after plunking down sixty grand on a fancy off-road vehicle is check to see if the roll bars and airbags really do work. “Honey, you paid the life insurance bill, right? Okay, then have fun!”
Having witnessed that spectacle, I turned to head back towards Mt. Belches. After a few steps, I looked back and Maryanne was gone. She was mooshing her way down the hill towards the beach. Oh, no! I know where this is going. She is going to get to the beach and then she'll want to go to the far end. Then she'll want to climb the hill behind it. Once we've done that, she'll realize that she still needs a signal and will insist on summiting Mt. Belches. I had only expected to be out for a few pleasant hours, not mounting an all-day expedition. I persuaded her with shouts and big gestures to convert her descent into a traverse to the 'shallow' road so we could continue on with our main goal.
We returned to the beach and then joined the aforementioned 4WD track to the mountain. Mt. Belches is mostly bare rock, so there is no obvious trail. We got to where we only needed to traverse about five meters of scrub to reach the rock and left the track.
From there, climbing was just a matter of finding the shallowest route up the rock face. It was basically like climbing stairs until we got to a tricky bit about two-thirds of the way to the top. There, the slope increased to over forty-five degrees and we had to pick our hand and footholds carefully until it started getting shallower towards the summit.
Up there, it was really windy, but we found our cellular signal. We needed to make one last check on the rules for traveling interstate before heading to South Australia, particularly since we were pretty sure we would not be allowed to reenter Western Australia again.
Once we were finished with our data, Maryanne said she was worried about taking the same route down and started searching for a better way to go. After a while, we found a series of cairns that seemed to indicate a path and followed them.
The cairns were great until the rock ran out. Then we seemed to be left to our own to figure out how to get through the thick underbrush. What trail there was looked very seldom used and could very well have been laid down by kangaroos as far as we knew. We didn't want to go all of the way back up to re-intercept our ascent route, so we pushed on. We were encouraged at subsequent bare spots when we would again sight a cairn or two, indicating that thing we were just on was supposed to be the trail.
Each time we were required to reenter the bush, the growth became thicker and thicker. Eventually, we were sure that we were on kangaroo trails, but we were too far along to go back now, so we just pushed on anyway. As we pushed our way through and under thorny bushes that left the bare skin of our arms and legs crisscrossed with scratches, I kept thinking about that little nugget of bush walking advice that says, 'never step where you can't see your feet'. Crikey! Half the time we couldn't see anything below our chests. Our only hope was that the commotion of two idiots crashing their way through the forest like angry bulls would cause anything dangerous to slither our crawl out of our path before we had a chance to step on it.
After a particularly horrible stretch of wading through brambles higher than we were, we finally emerged onto a relatively bare patch of dirt where we could see a clear route to the road. Woo, hoo!
That's when I decided to take a picture of the backside of Mt. Belches, now looming above us. I reached into my pocket for my phone and got nothing! After an increasingly panicky pat-down, I had to come to the realization that I had lost my phone. I had last used it before leaving the bare rock of the mountain. I was sure it was lost somewhere in the thick growth we had just crawled through.
Super lucky for me, Maryanne had started recording a track on her phone pretty shortly after the one we were walking on had become uncertain. I could use that to find my way back along the way we came. I was sure the phone must have been lost early on. By then I was too tired and dejected to want to spend a couple of hours retracing our steps, but Maryanne convinced me that we at least had to try.
It was only about twenty minutes later before I rounded a corner and saw it hanging from a bush by its little wrist strap. An arboreal pickpocket had slipped it right out of my shorts. WHEW! That wasn't so bad. I retrieved it, zipped it securely in my bum bag and started clawing my way back with Maryanne.
At the same spot as before, I decided to take a picture of the mountain. I unzipped the bum bag and my phone was nowhere to be found. NOOOO!!!! How is that even possible‽
Time to go back in there a third time, this time by myself. At least I knew it could be no more than twenty minutes back. I got almost to where I had found the phone before when I lost the trail. I had been diving under and through so many bushes that once I got to a last familiar spot, I could not remember what I had done from there. One trail dead ended in a bog that Maryanne's phone told me was somewhere I had not been before. Thanks for that, phone. At another spot, too far on the other side of our previous trail, the only possible route took me into a really creepy hollow under a tree that was blocked with interlacing branches, which nothing my size had penetrated recently. Between the two was a wall of growth that I couldn't even part. I tried a dozen times poking here and there for a way through and found myself stymied. I can't believe this! I already found that phone once and now I'm probably going to have to give up while I'm practically on top of it.
As one last move of desperation before giving up, I want back to where the trail should have been and dropped to my hands and knees to scan from that level. Then I saw daylight coming from behind one of the bushes that I could get to by crouching down and tunneling behind it. Surely, I couldn't have come that way before.
Kyle Found his phone (twice) and eventually got the picture he wanted
Indeed I had. I was now back in the slightly more comforting world of broken twigs and branches where I had clearly been before. Ten steps later, there it was. My phone was sitting on the ground right next to the branch it from which it had been hanging the first time. Again, I zipped the phone into the bum bag, which I removed and carefully examined from every angle before putting back on. Then I yanked at the strap, jumped up and down a few times and yanked at the strap again before setting off to an increasingly worried Maryanne. I got that picture the third time!
When we finally emerged from the bush, we both agreed that it had been a long time since we have been so happy to see a graded dirt road. We were now about two-thirds of the way to the backside of the mountain. We still had a long way to go, but we knew we could get back home on the same tracks that delivered the campers to our beach. It was on this part of the walk that we learned just how demanding the driving had been for them. The road had lots of places where it was impossible to see around the corner or over the next drop. I can't imagine anyone could drive it without walking each tricky section at least twice.
After such a day, it was all we could do to rinse off the grime, grab a quick snack and fall into an exhausted sleep.
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