Foster Inlet, Northeastern Tasmania

[Kyle]We had one good day of strong westerlies in a whole two-week forecast. If we were going to move east, we had one chance to do it now. We left the anchorage at Supply Bay in the Tamar in the darkness just before 3am at the start of the ebb. It was a good thing we did. The headwinds were blowing so hard that, with one engine going, we were often slowed to below two knots by it. If it weren't for the following current, it would have taken us a whole day to reach the mouth of the river.

While it was good to have a current in our favor, I must admit that I was more than a little worried about the timing. In order for us to make the best use of the day's wind, and arrive in daylight, we needed to leave the Tamar pretty much at maximum ebb. That would have been fine, but there was thirty knots of wind blowing against it and I was really worried about being swept into dangerous standing waves. We battened down everything as securely as we could, expecting a wild, scary ride. The only reassurance we had was that we had arrived going the other way in basically the same conditions and had lived to tell the tale.

It was not that bad after all {Maryanne: It wasn't nice!}. As we turned into the teeth of the wind on the last, roughest leg, the wind was strong enough to stop us completely from moving through the water. Our rudders lost effectiveness and the force of the single engine gradually started turning us toward the shallows. I had to start the other engine to balance the asymmetric thrust and keep water moving over the rudders. We then had a pretty terrible couple of miles before the current spread and died out and things calmed slightly. Then we turned downwind and down wave and the ride improved dramatically.

We had such a fast sail that we arrived at our anchorage at Foster's Inlet too early. The west facing anchorage was completely exposed to the three-meter swell that had been whipped up by the day's winds. It was forecast to swing to the southeast at sunset. We found a spot just clear of the surf and set in for a few hours of being thrown around. It was definitely 'one hand for the boat' conditions, but by the time it got dark, the wind was blowing off of the beach and the remaining swell decreased to just enough to lull us to sleep.

In the morning, it was flat calm and we had the whole place to ourselves, plus a few campers on the beach. By the time we really got out of bed, two more boats had shown up. We think they had come up the east coast and were waiting for the next wind shift.

We deployed the dinghy and headed ashore for a bit of exercise. The beach was a big beach. We walked its length, plus enough extra to know we don't like having our legs stabbed by spinifex. We then walked the campground's access road past a bunch of huge, impressive wind turbines that put out about a thousand times what Begonia's little model can manage. I think I remember that each one of the big ones can meet all of the power needs of three or for big houses, more on a windy day like this.

Exploring around Lemons Beach, Foster Inlet, Cape Portland

We thought we were mostly putting in the miles for some exercise as there wasn't too much of great interest to see, but at the end, Maryanne spotted a scary, venomous two-meter snake, so we got to see a bit of wildlife other than birds. When she stepped a little closer to see if it was alive (still six or seven meters back), It decided she was close enough and bolted straight in my direction, eventually diving under a crack in the concrete walkway. I was well behind her, so it got nowhere near me, but I did see it long enough to verify that it was a live snake. The thing was going pretty fast, too. I would have been able to outrun it, but not without breaking into at least a fast trot.

The tide had come up by then, so it was necessary for me to wade out to our anchored dinghy. It turned out to be a bit deeper than I had hoped, so I was not able to keep my shorts dry. That water is definitely colder than I would have liked. Oh, my poor bits!

As I approached the dinghy, it became apparent that I needed to take off my shirt and jacket to keep them from getting them wet, too. I pulled them off over my head like a t-shirt. In the process, I lost one of the fly nets that was in one of the pockets. Those things are worth their weight in gold in Australia. It went floating away, but my priority was getting the dinghy into shallow enough water for Maryanne to get in without getting too wet. We thought our net was gone for good, but on the way back to Begonia, she spotted it floating and tried to capture it with a long bamboo stick we had handy. In the process, she probably knocked the last air bubble out of the bag and it sank. Since I was already wet and shirtless, it suddenly became my job to dive down and get it. It took me a few seconds to screw up the courage to jump in and then to submerge my head so that I could retrieve the head net from the sand. I did not like it, but I guess I did end up taking the full plunge in Tasmania, despite my insistence to Mark from Jonathan that I would never do it.