Eddystone Point

[Kyle]It was a beautiful, flat calm morning in Binalong Bay. By the time we were finished with breakfast, a light breeze was blowing in from the north. We dropped our mooring and were soon tacking up the Bay of Fires.

It started pleasantly enough. Then the wind increased, we sped up and it got a little boisterous. That’s fine. We were expecting that.

The passage was made delightful with a LOT of dolphins passing and leaping about (not so easy to capture by camera)

Then the wind continued to build and build until we were eventually down to two reefs in each sail and punching into two-meter seas. What I had thought would be a long, but pleasant trip up the coast was turning into something we both just wanted to get over with. Oh, I am really starting to get sick of all of the wind in Tasmania being double the forecast (I should really know better by now).

On the last tack, we finally sailed into the lee of Eddystone Point, where the wind halved and the seas died off to a nice, slow swell. Wow! Eddystone is really pretty, with the bright white paint of the lighthouse standing over orange boulders that rise above the blue sea. It looked like the perfect place to explore, but the surf on the beach was still too rough to want to risk landing the dinghy.

It looks calm, but no such luck on the beach itself

We had originally planned to stay at Eddystone at least a couple of nights, get ashore to see the lighthouse up close, and then maybe sail north to the Furneaux Group, but a check of the weather was making it pretty clear that the ONLY chance we had of not beating to windward the entire way to Queensland over the next couple of weeks would be if we left for Queensland in the morning. We would still have to be close-hauled for a third of the way, but the wind would be far enough to the east for us to be able to stay on one tack and point where we were going. The rest of the time would be strong tailwinds. Ugh! I wasn’t quite mentally ready to say goodbye to Tasmania just yet, but I also didn’t want to get pinned down for weeks waiting for a weather window that might just be another maybe. I spent the last of the daylight converting the dinghy into lifeboat mode.