Like the 23 boats that left before us we
ran from Lady Musgrave ahead of a 30 knot southerly change. Only
one boat was willing to brave the weather, an experienced couple with over a decade of
cruising under their belt, 120 meters of chain and a 20 tonne steel boat. They called us as we left them, and while
confident, I did note the "it’s very lonely here" tone in his voice. Mother Nature
is both beautiful and terrifying, and that is always in the back of our minds,
even in calm weather. The first reality
check of the cruising life is that ¼ our time is being somewhere between
concerned and downright worried. I get
it now: fair winds, a safe anchorage and good holding = the joyful sleep of
sailors.
So we left Lady Musgrave. It was low tide
and the narrow passage out the reef was transformed into a white water rapid as
a few square kilometres of water emptied through a 20 metre wide channel. I was up the mizzen looking for bommies, Liss
had a confident hand on the helm. I
found myself yelling, “looks good, just run guts!” incongruous words, usually applied
to the white water, where running the most obvious line is straight down the
centre through the biggest waves (through the guts). The boat heaved and hobby-horsed and dipped
her bow in the standing waves until we cleared the outflow. Away from the reef, the team settled into the
mechanics of sailing all day to Cape Capricorn.
Another sailing truism: sailing means wind, and wind (generally speaking)
means waves, and waves mean rocking, either side to side or front to back. I like it; I like the feel of the wind loading
the boat up with power through the keel and her surging forward. The downside
is that it’s a workout, gut muscles tensed a hundred times just to sit still,
getting from cockpit to galley a delicate dance of balance and just missed head
knocks, hands dry and calloused from the spay and working the lines. The ever-present potential for seasickness. I am impressed with all the old silver backs and
doughty women out sailing – it’s a rigorous life and they’re all fit and
hardy. That is the second reality check
of cruising: it is ¼ being exhausted.
8.00am is a pretty regular bedtime.
The cruising guides stated that Cape
Capricorn has good S and SE protection but the wind was tending more SW when we
arrived. We dropped anchor at 3.00pm in the tiny anchorage and
looked and felt and wondered about how it would be if the wind stayed SW
instead of going SE. Liss had stayed at
the lighthouse keeper’s house as a child and really wanted to stay and explore,
but those rocks afforded no sea room, so we sadly decided to move. Yellowpatch is
spitting distance away, but it’s flanked by shallow sand banks, and the only
info we had recommended a shallow water reccy or local knowledge. Sorely lacking in local knowledge, we
informed the tired crew that we’d head for Hummocky Island, 7 miles north. It was a rough ride, but I think we
congratulated ourselves on being increasingly comfortable in 20 knot
winds.
Hummocky is a beautiful island, a curving
bay with rocky slopes plunging in the water surrounding a little sandy
beach. We dropped anchor 30 minutes
before sunset and received a welcome call on the radio from John Barleycorn,
the only other yacht in the bay. A quick
trip to shore ended in rowing over to John Barleycorn when the outboard flooded
and we enjoyed some popcorn, nuts and olives, and gave ourselves an early (and
unwarranted) pat on the back for finding a good anchorage and good
company. Cruising is also this ¼ freedom
and discovery and the wonder of what might be just around the next corner. Kids safely to bed, we tidied up, secured the
deck, tied up the tender. That is another
thing about cruising, it’s prudent to lash everything down in the evening. It’s old fashioned work with an air of
military routine – but it does mean most days end with some hard chores and
heavy lifting, often in the dark. By
10pm bed was calling but the boat was lying strangely and there were new noises.
We know EVERY noise on the boat. Liss
went up on deck for a while to suss it out. The weather had been for developing
strong south-easterly so we expected to lie safely away from the shore all
night, except that now the stern was pointing at the shore and those pretty, “falling
away into the water” cliffs were now looking dangerously close (although it’s
hard to estimate distance from the water with no point of reference.) Then we started to spin. I got up and sat on anchor watch with Liss, which
really means sitting around feeling nervous and trying to tell if the boat is getting
closer to rocks in an environment where it is really hard to gauge
distance. Liss went to bed about 2am and
I stayed on. For myself, the situation
is indicative of our whole cruising adventure: learn on the job and learn fast.
I learnt a lot that long night. I ran
three chart plotters and trusted none of them, I took GPS points every 10
minutes and learnt what I knew already, we were moving a lot but couldn’t tell
if we were dragging closer to the rocks.
Liss and I had discussed upping anchor and resetting it, but the thought
of re-anchoring in the dark, and swell and wind seemed more dangerous than
staying put. Maybe that was a good call,
not sure. I found myself googling “how
can you tell if you anchor is dragging?” and then laughed at how preposterous
that was, like googling how to fix a jet engine as the plane goes down. I gave up and went back to more proactive
ideas. Somehow I hadn’t had time to
change out of my pyjamas (undies), so spent a lot of time in undies and ugg
boats spotlighting the shore, holding the chain and listening for vibration,
looking longingly at John Barleycorn who, inexplicably, wasn’t moving at
all. Later I put pants on as a pro-active
action - you can’t face a crisis in your undies. Another proactive action was downloading an
anchor watch app, which is a program that measures your location from the phone’s
GPS and then lets you know if you drag more than a certain distance. I laughed hard (maybe hysterically at 4.00am)
and picked the one called “drag queen.”
Its alarm is a loud siren, like a count down to nuclear launch. It went off every 10 minutes and was
therefore useless, other than to let me know what I already knew – we were
still spinning. Another part of that ¼ fear is that night time is really disorientating,
distances warp and merge, it’s easy to get turned around 180 degrees. I have been lost in the featureless pindan
scrub on the Kimberley and terror rises surprisingly quickly, triggering
something primal that must be urgently fought down, lest you succumb to panic
and start running around in the heat, taking off your clothes and drinking your
own urine. Ultimately, the spotlight
proved the best tool, and the rocks didn’t appear to be moving closer, unless
it was an incremental creep. I made a mental
note to get more back up batteries.
Another side of cruising: for an exercise immersed in nature it is
utterly dependent on “stuff” – chart plotter GPS, batteries, epirbs, alarms,
apps – not to mention 2 inches of fossil fuel transformed into fibreglass
between our family and the deeps. For a
survivalist at heart I find it a little challenging. If I cruised long term, I would filter them
out, simplify simplify simplify. But for
newbies they are wonderful and they make up where experience falls off. Or perhaps they just allow us to get ourselves
in over our heads. I didn’t sleep that
whole night; I planned how to get the kids out of bed if we ran aground, I
watched every twist and turn of the boat transform into a wavey black line on
the chart plotter, a fractal of current, wind, keel and tide. Eventually a finger nail moon rose over the
cliffs, and east brightened slowly. Liss
came up in the predawn and we drank tea, and the light chased away demons, like
it so often does, and after all that, the cliffs were no closer.
As we drank the tea, we started to figure
out what had happened. Liss pointed out
the north end of the bay where a giant eddy circled, the strong current causing
the bay to be noticeably lower at that end than where we were. For the second time in 24 hours I recognised
the patterns of a white water river, bringing back memories of the high volume
rivers in Canada where the eddy fence can be a foot high and whirl pools can
stand rafts on their end. We were
anchored right in the nexus of all that water, being pushed one way by 20 knots
of wind and the other by current. We
will recognise now the small and gently bubbling wavelets that are thrown up by
wind against tide, and know them as an innocuous warning that significant
forces are at play beneath the surface.
In the morning the kids wanted to climb the
hill, Liss went with them on 2 hours sleep (the power of mums!) I was left pondering cruising, inspired to
provide the other side of blue water blog posts displaying joyous kids. I would sum it up this way: ¼ fun, ¼ exhaustion, ¼ sleep and ¼ something
on the spectrum between caution and fear.
But 6 weeks in, I would rate it worthwhile. Being compelled to live (by
choice or not) in such a range of human emotions feels like living fully.
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| The long night ends |
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| Hot tea + dawn = relief |
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| Top of the hill the next day |
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| Looks innocent,doesn't it? |
