Australia

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A long, hard trip...

No, this isn't a shot of Oz. As usual, we begin our passage with a parting shot, this one being a sunrise over the lovely Solomon Island of Nggatokae.

After pondering how to get to Bundaberg, Australia from the Solomons, we decided we'd have to head east a ways in order to have a reasonable angle to the wind, known to sailors as a good "point of sail". So, we left from Marovo Lagoon and motored east until we arrived at Guadalcanal then headed south.

We had paid a weather router to advise us on when to leave; we should have saved our money. We were told we'd have a day or two of gale-force winds owing to a "squash zone" between the tropics and a high pressure area just departing the Australian coast into the Tasman Sea. We ended up having 5 such days. Our wind instrument being broken, we could only estimate wind speed from the noise, but we can attest that when the wind reaches gale force (34 knots) it gets very noisy in a unique way. Very noisy. We also had breaking seas of 3-4m (9-12') which pounded the hull and washed over the deck, showing us new and exciting leaks. We finally retreated to living below decks, crawling along at 2-3 knots into the crashing waves. No fun.

This is Old Glory after 5 days of winds to 40 knots. The flag looked fine when we started. For readers who wonder why we didn't take it down, what you can't see is that the line used to raise it is broken and the only way to retrieve it would have been to drop the rigging it's attached to - not feasible in a gale.

The other tidbit probably surprising to landlubbers is that the sky can be clear and sunny and still it blows like hell - for days. Sometimes you just crawl into a hole and hope nothing breaks before it eases. One thing that did break was the staysail. First the hanks, brass hooks used to hold the sail onto the forestay, started breaking, then the shackle on the halyard came loose, causing the halyard to fly up to the sheave (pulley) high on the mast. Climb up there in 3-4m seas? No way. So, you improvise, letting out just a little bit of main jib so it will sail in a balanced way. Then you crawl back into your hole.

Anyway, like the rest of our "adventures" we survived to tell the tale. Join us as well begin our time in Australia.

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