Passage: Tasmania to Queensland

[Kyle]We made a point of waiting until we could see daylight coming through the hatch above our bed before we left our normal diurnal sleeping pattern behind for a while. Our winds were supposed to be primarily out of the southwest, but they were being funneled through the Banks Strait (the gap between the Tasmanian mainland and the Furneaux group of islands to the north) and were arriving at Eddystone from the northwest. That gave us headwinds for the start, but they gradually backed as they fanned out to the east. Our initial course was northeast. By nightfall, we were sailing fast on a very broad reach in winds that would not stop increasing.

I went forward and clawed down the mainsail entirely, which helped a lot as the forces on it were no longer fighting the rudders. Without it blocking the jib, we could also turn downwind a few degrees to ease the motion.

That only helped a little. The winds ended up in the high thirties, with occasional gusts into the low forties. Two different wave trains were being heaped up and smashing into one another. We were surfing down one of them and slamming into the other. It made for a very stressful and uncomfortable night where neither of us were able to grab more than a few moments of sleep at a time. We felt robbed. Downwind sailing is supposed to be smooth. At least we were going fast.

On our second afternoon, the wind finally started to let up a little. As soon as it hit the maximum for our spinnaker, I rolled up the jib and switched to it. That helped in two ways: We were able to run dead downwind without fear of an accidental gybe and we sped up 30%, which kept the waves from overtaking us as fast. Within a few hours, the wind was in the normal, comfortable range for the sail and we were shushing smoothly over the long swell off of the continental coast. Ahhh, that’s what I’m talking about!

A passage of sky gazing:Moon-Dogs, Sunsets and Sunrises.

This lasted all through the next three watches. The skies were clear, if a little chilly, and we both rapidly caught up with our sleep on our off-watches. We would later remember this as ‘the nice day’.

In the last hour of my Day Three night watch, the wind started backing all of the way around to east. I turned with it to keep from waking Maryanne with all of the noises of me changing back to our white sails. By the time it was her turn, we were sixty degrees off course. I woke her, then went stomping around on deck to get us sailing into the wind again.

By the next day, we had found the three-knot countercurrent to she southbound East Australian Current (EAC). The countercurrent was hovering about a hundred and twenty miles offshore and would give us a much-needed boost northward. The wind turned with us as we arrived, keeping us close-hauled in rough seas as we rocketed north, enjoying double-digit speeds.

The good news was that the water we were in had just changed its mind about going south and had turned around to head back toward the tropics. Within twenty-four hours, I went from sitting my night watch in the full gear, which kept me from freezing, but didn’t exactly keep me warm either, to shorts and a t-shirt, and thinking maybe I should ditch the shirt. Just like that, the winter clothes were no longer necessary. It was as if we had stepped off of a flight from Canada in the Caribbean.

At around the latitude of Coff’s Harbour, our back eddy ended alongside the thinnest, slowest part of the EAC. We changed course to angle across it into the slower current of the shallows just offshore. Because we had to crab into the EAC, we still ended up close-hauled as we crossed. This time, we were doing well if we saw four knots over the bottom. It took us another long day to cross the whole thing. The new forecasts told us that the two days of tailwinds we had been looking forward to would now be more like crosswinds at best. Also, they were going to be a lot stronger. Ugh! Make it stop!

Stronger winds mean bigger seas. Now our destination at the Southport Seaway was starting to look like it may not be safe to enter when we got there. We decided to enact our backup plan and head to the northern end of Moreton Island. The good news is that the extra wind would give us enough extra speed to get us there by dark on the same day.

The extra wind never materialized for our sail up the coast. During my night watch, our ETA at Moreton gradually worsened from where we could just make it by dark to definitely not until pitch-black dark. Time for another change of plan.

Since the rising tide at Southport was not until afternoon and since the weather seems to be milder than forecast, we were now going to slow way down, have a look at Southport and make a decision there.

As my night watch ended, I was feeling like that ant (he’s got HIGH hopes!) These were promptly dashed when I emerged from a nap a couple of hours later in anticipation of our transit through the entrance. The wind had arrived. We had almost no sail up, but it was still too much. The waves were three to three and a half meters, with about every tenth one or so topping four and a half. Aw, crap! We would really have preferred one and a half for this.

We had a phone signal, so I pulled up the Southport bar cam. It had just gone offline. If we were to go towards the bar and decide aginst it, then we'd have to fight strong headwinds and a flood current to escape from the lee shore, it was frustrating that the camera wasn't working so we could 'see' without having to actually divert course. We also knew that tide had yet to turn, so we were expecting some slop (that would reduce and maybe even disappear once the flood started). I called Seaway Tower to ask what it currently looked like at their end. Expecting to hear what height the waves looked like, I got the usual non-committal answers: “We can’t advise you. It’s your decision.”

I know it’s my decision. I just want some information so that I can make one.

After a few pointed questions, I was able to determine that no one had gone in or out for hours, which wasn’t necessarily bad because the entrance had been ebbing all morning and had not yet begun to flood. The woman there also revealed that the entrance was completely spanned by breakers. When I asked about what size (one-meter are fine, five is BAD), I got a, “Not sure”.

”Roughly, I mean.”

”I can’t really tell.”

This probably means “won’t tell”, because someone might sue if they get bad info. I guess it’s better if nobody gets any information. Where’s the St Helen’s guy when I need him? I was then told it would be best if I came in and had a look myself. She even offered to have a couple of rescue boats on standby right inside the entrance if I wanted. Now if they had offered to check it out and tell us all about it, THAT would have been helpful. Since breakers are a lot harder to see from their backs and since by the time we figured out we didn’t like it, trying to turn around would be a really dangerous thing to do, we decided to wait half an hour for the flood to establish and see if things improved. {Maryanne: Once the radio officer suggested rescue boats on stand-by "just-in-case", I was 100% ready to bail. I've no idea if this is policy, or if she thought the conditions required it}.

Half an hour later, standing on deck when Begonia was in the trough, I still couldn’t see over the crest of the approaching wave. Damn! We had both started to be really looking forward to spending the night safely anchored through the approaching night’s grim forecast. Now we would be sailing through it. We turned into the wind, called Seaway Tower and told them we were going around.

The bad weather – the really bad weather that we had to leave Tasmania so early to avoid, had been slowly edging down Australia’s east coast ahead of schedule. Had we made it into Southport, we would have beat it. Now we were about to hit it head on. The very moment I got finished talking to Seaway Tower, she keyed the mic and announced the weather forecast would be broadcast on channel 72.

We listened in. It sounded like the arriving conditions would be pretty dire: Winds 25 to 35 knots, with gusts well above 40. She didn’t say how much, just “well above”, waves three to four meters, with isolated breakers double that height, dangerous surf and flash flooding. Also, extreme rainfall (some places had already seen a month’s worth in a few hours) and widespread lightning.

I let out a sigh of relief. I had been particularly worried about golf-shoe sized hail.

Since we would need to be sailing close to the wind, I went on deck to raise the double-reefed mainsail. I got it about a third of the way up when I felt a familiar and very unwelcome pop in my lower back. I let out a yell, dropped to my hands and knees and gingerly crawled off of the cabin top. Maryanne thought the boom had hit me. I wish. I could have shaken that off. The back thing was going to take me out of commission when I needed to be able to use it the most. Just then, some dolphins surfed over and wanted to play. Bad timing, guys. Come back later.

So Maryanne finished the job for me, cranked in the sheets, and we accelerated toward the wall of black cloud on the horizon. Since it was now technically her off-watch, she left me to it while she attempted in vain to get some rest.

My job didn’t turn out to be that hard. We had the minimum sail up that would allow Begonia to make progress upwind in seas that size – two reefs in the main and three in the jib, about 30% of the total. It was still too much for the wind speed, but any less of either sail would have us slowly coasting to a stop, so we had to just ride it out. All I really had to do was hold on and hope all of the seams and hardware would hold.

The rain arrived and I’m pretty sure it was the heaviest I have ever seen. It didn’t pelt or fall in sheets. It hissed as if someone had tuned the radio to a blank station and then turned the volume up to eleven. It did this continuously for hours. The good thing was that the force of it mashed down the crests of all of the big waves rolling under us.

Had we been farther out to sea, we would normally heave-to in weather like this and wait it out. Here, we didn’t have the option. We didn’t have enough room to leeward for that or even to turn downwind twenty degrees and risk losing our hedge against wind shifts. We stayed as far offshore as we could without tangling with the EAC, but we still ended up fighting half of its full force. We were overpowered and lurching from one wave to the other, but out speed over the bottom was so slow. It was terrifying. All I could think was, ‘We need to get the hell out of here!’

That’s what we were doing, of course. I guess what I really wanted was for the weather to get the hell out of here and leave us alone. It wasn’t going to, which is another reason heaving-to would not have worked. We would just be parked in the middle of it for days.

The wind strengthened more and backed to the east-northeast. That would expose the anchorage at the northern end of Moreton Island to the full force of it and the swell. Well, anchoring there wasn’t going to happen anymore anyway. It would be dark by the time we got there now. No moon and five miles of cloud cover would only make it worse.

There is a channel that runs down the protected western side of the island. It’s the one we have usually taken when arriving to and departing from Moreton Bay to the north. It’s shallow at the entrance, though, and we were worried about the big seas breaking there. In the dark, we would never be able to see them until it was too late. Our safest option was to sail another eighteen miles to the entrance to the deepwater shipping channel and enter the bay there. Then we would have to beat our way back to the protection of Moreton Island.

Maryanne woke me – let me rephrase that – got me out of bed (I wasn’t sleeping) just after making the downwind turn to the shipping channel. Her watch had been like my previous one, except that the lightning had started. She did not have to sail through complete darkness, but instead a kind of horror disco where strobe lights would illuminate scenes of big waves bearing down on her and sideways rain twenty times a minute.

The wind picked up after the turn, so that was no better, but at least we had a smoother angle with the waves. The shipping channel was too narrow and upwind for tacking, especially with my back the way it was, so I rolled up the jib, sheeted the main to the center and started an engine.

At the first upwind turn, it became apparent that wasn’t going to work. The wind stopped us completely and the engine torque pushed us to the side of the channel. Once I got the other engine warmed up, we were making one to two knots against it.

It was a long few hours before it was time to get Maryanne out of bed. The shoals to windward had reduced the waves to about two and a half meters, but it would be another fifteen miles before we would be in the lee of any actual land. In the meantime, the rain continued to strafe us. The visibility hovered between 1/4 and 1/8 of a mile. There was no one on radar or the AIS. We had a good enough signal to check Marine Traffic and we were the only boat within a hundred miles that was underway. Even the heavy shipping was staying hunkered down where they were. At least we weren’t having to doge ships in the channel.

Wind, rain, and lightning striking all around for the last day of the passage.

We made it into the protection of Moreton Island right after daybreak. The wind was still strong and even gustier, but it did get rid of those awful waves for us. I wanted to get as far south in the bay as we could in order to protect us from strong southerlies behind the monster system. We now had the ebb against us, to which was added all of the runoff from the floods. It soon became apparent that we would not make it to the next protected anchorage past Sand Hills before dark.

The winds were still gusting into the mid-thirties when we arrived there, but the water at the anchorage was nice and flat. We both let out huge sighs of relief. It can rain all it wants now, we don’t have to go out in it.

Not so much for everyone else. The radio finally started coming alive. The Brisbane River was flooding and it sounded like the Marine Police had their hands full chasing down floating debris and steering it away from marinas and anchored boats. Someone posted a video of a drifting houseboat that hit a dock and sank in three seconds. There was someone aboard at the time, who managed to be rescued with only minor injuries. The river was full of boats, concrete docks and other flotsam, all bouncing their way downstream. Being underway at night is not going to be a good idea for a while.