Pacific NW

Expeditions

We’re back on the Trade Wind Gravy Train, slugging back the ocean miles. Unbelievably the GPS is pegged at 8 knots, up to 9 knots of solid, smooth sailing. We’ve got low seas, 18 knots of breeze, and nice puffy little trade wind clouds dotting the sky. Currently the moon is bright and it’s the perfect temperature to carry out the night watch in a pair of underwear. The sails are full and stretched wing-and-wing, and our Monitor steers a true course directly on the rhumb line for Christmas Island, now 800 miles away.

Belowdecks, a nice easy motion promotes a good sleep on the off-watch, and it’s actually smoother now than many of our nights at anchor. Kelsey seared up some fresh Tuna steaks for dinner, and Taz had a good afternoon of running back and forth across the cabin, one hand clutching his bouncy ball and the other hand to steady himself in the seas. He’s got true sea legs now, with nice firm musculature to them, with an anticipation of movement for the next swell ahead.

Spent most of the day listening to music while watching an endless cascade of flying fish leap out of our bow wave.

Basically, this is what it’s all about!

We exited Ashmore Reef this afternoon after a morning snorkel and the usual tidy-up before sea. We quickly dropped away from the Australian continental shelf and into deep water. Our course will take us along the Java Trench, the deepest part of the Indian Ocean where we’ll see depths of 22,000 feet. After the murky Arafura and Timor Sea, we are finally back into the crystal waters again. There were quite a few currents along the shelf and an enormous amount of plastic debris is strung out along the eddy lines as far as the eye can see. Also floating along the eddies were thousands of shark eggs. Hopefully a plastic-eating shark will evolve to take advantage of its new habitat.

A few hours before sunset we spotted a strange object on the horizon and sailed over for a closer look. From a distance it looked like a shipping container floating on its end like a deadhead, half out of the water. Or a submarine conning tower. The mystery intensified as we drew closer, and when we came to within a few boat-lengths panic ensued! It was a white object of which the the top ten feet were out of the water, but it was attached to something heavy and unseen underwater, and the scariest thing was that it appeared to be moving against the current. My first thought was that it was a life raft attached to a ship, but in hindsight I think it was the end of an enormous fishing trawl net. There were no ships on the horizon, though, so perhaps it was one of those 15-mile long nets. Either way, we got the hell away from it as fast as possible. It gives me the willies just writing about it. Approaching any unknown object at sea is tense and creepy, but this thing was moving.

We are taking a very conservative route across the Indian Ocean, pirate-wise. By avoiding the northern Indian Ocean altogether, we basically eliminate the risk. However, we are still taking a few precautions, even if they are a bit romantic. We’ve furled up the Stars and Stripes while at sea so as not to be recognized as a US boat, and we are keeping a large bottle of Jack Daniels and a case of beer near the companionway hatch. Booze is a better gesture than a gun. Also at hand are our canisters of bear spray from Alaska, as a last resort. We keep our radios on and visually conspicuous at the helm, along with the sat phone, so that we can look like we are talking to somebody if approached. It’s all a bit over-reactionary, but we’ve always played it as safe as we can. We’re a US boat sailing near lands that our government has royally screwed.

I’ve put a new air vane on the Monitor. The old one was slightly bent after the thousands upon thousands of miles of steering us, day and night, from Alaska. If we ever have a house, the old air vane will be prominently displayed on the wall.

The perfect breeze has developed and we are sailing along wing-on-wing, making easy miles. At sunset we landed a “6-dinner for 2” Tuna, and at that point in time Kelsey and I reflected on how much work we’ve done to get to this point in our lives–casually setting out across the Indian Ocean as a giant sun melts into the waves, our son sleeping peacefully, tucked behind his lee cloth. We can never lead rational lives after this. It’s too good out here.

July 20-22, 2016 Kelsey

Taz unknowingly did us a huge favor and slept the whole time as we somewhat tensely threaded our way through the entrance to the Ashmore Reef Marine Reserve, then affixed ourselves to a mooring buoy. He must have sensed that the motion had evened out a bit and woke up just as the important business of securing the boat had been tended to. Prepared to slip out of his berth on his backside rather than on his tummy, he declared, “Ready!” We promptly let down the lee cloth and he hit the floor running like a racehorse out of its stall, nostrils flaring.

When flat conditions allow, Taz gallops tirelessly to and fro between main and aft cabin. Wet curls form as his head becomes drenched with sweat. Lately he is keen to announce, “I’m coming!” as he paces back and forth, intermittently throwing his arms up and pausing to jump along the way. He is expert at exhibiting the freedom and joy of uninhibited movement! With a sudden change in current, the boat was soon being tossed about more inside the reef than in outside waters, so Taz was forced to time his transit a bit, lest he lose his footing and end up tossed onto the floor. He managed to continue along his predictable route without incidence as life afloat is getting to be old hat for him.

In these militarized waters it was no surprise to be paid a visit by the Australian Border Force, stationed in the outer reef during the dry (non-cyclone) season. Their tender arrived with a couple of friendly officers who boarded Privateer to have us fill out minimal paperwork and brief us on protocol at the reserve. At our request, the kind (and likely bored-out-of-their-gourd) officers used their tender to help us tie our stern line to a nearby mooring buoy. We were hoping this would ease the uncomfortable motion and, while it did a bit, our concerns turned to the real possibility of the stern line slipping under our rudder as the current shifted. In the end, we moved across the mooring field to a buoy clear of the current.

Four colorful wooden Indonesian fishing boats share the mooring field alongside Privateer, all boarded up. Our neighboring boat has the name “Cha” spray-painted near her bow and its puts a smile on our faces as we think of our friend of the same name. It is strange to have this absentee company but we are glad to be the only humans out here. The confiscated Indonesian boats are being held in limbo as their fate is decided in court for failure to comply with “fishing regulations.” Pete suspects that these boats may be those of asylum seekers from Timor, the presence of which was not uncommon here a few years back.

We note the tell-tale dorsal fin of a shark hunting its way along the nearby reef at low tide. Sea turtles are bountiful, floating close to the surface and occasionally bobbing their lime green heads above water to survey the scene. In all of our past South Pacific wanderings, we’ve seen only a few sea turtles while snorkeling. This reef is remarkable for its turtle population alone, clearly owing to its lack of a human population. Turtles are still a food source for many South Pacific islanders, though the practice of hunting is illegal in many countries now. On our first snorkel here, Pete encountered ten turtles! To see a sea turtle swimming is something special, a serene creature with the most graceful skill at underwater flight! Pete and I take turns snorkeling the bommie (coral head) not far off our bow. We’re glad to finally be dipping into friendlier tropical waters again, as we kept our limbs well within the confines of the boat all the way across northern Australia’s murky, croc infested waters.

Underwater, most fish are familiar but I notice one that seems new to me, with a gingham-like pattern from its head to mid-section, brownish purple tic-tac-toe marks over white skin. I’m lucky enough to glimpse the yellow fish that Pete mentioned-dramatic black circles dotting its face-as it darts out from underneath a ledge, then retreats. Most impressive ia the size of a fish akin to an angel fish, its muted colors and stripes lost on me in lieu of its enormity. It appears a gigantic pancake, a few feet in diameter, and slightly inflated like a hot water bladder.

This reef is a strange and wonderful place. Not far off the boat, we have our own private island (never mind the lurking military presence and the empty fishing boats). Two other scraps of land in the far distance are also cays that barely rise above sea level, lonely strips of sand to the faraway eye. While the lagoon offers us protection, the unobstructed view out onto the big blue tells another story-that we are vulnerably and incomprehensibly anchored in the middle of the ocean. And, in a way, we are. So it is that this place, like the coral atolls of the Tuamotus, plays with your senses.

West Island, the island closest to the boat and the only one where we are permitted to go ashore, begged a visit. We did weigh whether it was worth unpacking the dinghy for the sake of only an hour or two ashore, only to repack it later that night. If you are lucky enough to find yourself in a remote place like this, the answer is always a resounding, “Yes, it is worth it!” In the end we decided to row the dinghy instead of mounting the engine. At low tide, a finger of sand pointed far enough in our direction to make the cumbersome task of rowing an inflatable dinghy do-able.

A flock of vulture-size black birds greeted us ashore. These scant bits of land sustain massive bird populations. The expanse at low tide revealed a scalloped sandy landscape, the pattern of ridges and trenches carved by wavelets. Taz especially loved crouching in the trenches where a bit of water lingered. We were all quite giddy to have this break of passage, to work our toes into the soft, finely ground coral sand and to run about freely in this wide-open space. If only the island offered a speck of shade, we could have arranged to stay all day. From the boat, Taz had been quick to notice the one lone remaining “co-kee-nut palm” on the island, last man standing. A castaway would be remiss to find themselves on this particular tropical island with a sore lack of coconut hydration and sustenance!

The brutal sun not one to contend with, we’d planned a late afternoon visit in line with low tide. As such, the clock ticked as sunset approached and we made haste for a shipwreck in the sand ahead, a blackened wooden carcass that was the remains from an unfortunate story Pete recounted about a Timorian attempt on Australian soil. Up the beach, where sand met sporadic grass and green vegetation, we found gigantic pits with animal tracks clearly leading up to their edges. The use of the pits had us stumped for a bit until we realized the obvious-that sea turtles laid their eggs in these wells. Skirting the island’s edge, we combed the high tide line for treasures. Pete found enormous spiraling nautilus shells, the likes of which we’d never seen. There were thousands of pristine and fragile sand dollars, nearly weightless and appearing as though they’d been blown into little round shapes. Shark eggs, white pucks like flattened footballs that measured 4 or 5 inches, littered the beach.

The interior of the island was off limits to us, a sacred space that is home to Indonesian burial grounds. We did get a glimpse of her at sunset through an opening in the trees, a shockingly expansive savannah teeming with bird life. Even from the beach, we never would have guessed what lay just beyond the line of unassuming scrubby trees. We wished for more time to explore this magical place, an isolated and thriving ecosystem straddling the Timor Sea and Indian Ocean. As darkness descended, we literally had to run back to the dinghy, knowing that the moon would not cast her glow for another two hours.

Before dawn a magnified orange moon dropped from the clouds and dipped into the ocean, in what was the most fantastic moonset I’ve ever seen. It looked like it was melting into the ocean swells. And it was so orange that the unexpected observer would take it for a perfectly formed atomic mushroom cloud–a startling apparition on the horizon. At sunrise a tug passed within a mile of Privateer, towing what appeared to be a large Indonesian fishing boat. Ashmore reef is a popular spot for asylum seekers arriving in Australia, and my guess is that they were towing the boat into Darwin.

Another day of effortless sailing as we glided along at 6 knots. It was rougher in the anchorage in Darwin than it is out here at sea today. Hardly even a whitecap out here. I tried to whistle up a little more wind, but my efforts failed and by midnight the winds dropped to about 3 knots variable direction. Luckily, we are only 15 NM from the entrance to Ashmore Reef. It’s been a great 500 NM sail but all good things must come to an end. We’re currently motoring in 800 foot deep waters at the edge of the Australian continental shelf, making water, and charging up the batteries. We’re moving very slow so that we can time our reef entrance for daylight, when we can see the coral heads underwater.

There are thousands of birds as we near the reef, and we saw a sea snake swimming aggressively along the surface of the water. It was well over a meter long and as thick as my wrist. The sea snake is one of the most venomous snakes, but their fangs cannot pierce human skin easily, so we should be relatively safe. I’m hoping for a good snorkel when we get to Ashmore–we’ve read that the coral is “magnificent” around the reef, and that there is a genetically unique species of Dugong that feeds there.

Taz had a funny moment today when he climbed in between the two lee cloths and cocooned himself in the mesh, suspended. He reclined and got quite comfortable, telling us “night night!” He’s getting 4 new teeth now–must be rough having those things slice through your gums. We gave him some frozen mangoes and yoghurt which he let linger in his mouth to numb the pain. I took the winch drum cover off the mainsail winch today, and confirmed my worst fears when half a broken gear dropped out of the casing. Damn! It would be potentially dangerous to continue using the windlass to hoist the main, especially reefing in bad weather. As necessity is the mother of invention, I jury-rigged the halyard to lead past the broken winch and into the cockpit, using the lazy jib sheet drum to take the tension up on the main halyard. All it took was a few snatch blocks and some spectra webbing and voila! I almost like the setup better than winching it on the mast, which is always kind of awkward. At least we have a working solution to safely reef the mainsail as we cross the Indian Ocean, if we can’t get a part shipped in to Christmas Island or Cocos Keeling. Despite the frustrations of breaking gear, it’s satisfying to come up with an on-board solution. It’s what pioneering (or Privateering) is all about!

We’re going to rest up for a few days at Ashmore reef and wait for some solid trade-winds to develop, so we can have another fast downwind run to Christmas Island, now only 1,000 NM away.

A very pleasant day of sailing today. It was almost too perfect! We had to continually glance at the GPS to believe that we were really making 7 knots of speed over ground…it felt almost like we were standing still. With a gentle 14 knots of wind from behind we only had 7 knots of apparent wind in the cockpit. The sails stayed filled and we enjoyed about 12 hours of broad reaching and 12 hours of wing-on-wing.

Just one more day of sailing now until we clear the continental shelf and get back into deep water again. The Arafura and Timor Sea are so shallow–just a few hundred feet on average. The waters are therefore a disturbing muddy shade, and we long for our electric purple sea. Our watermaker filters will be happier too–we’ve been putting off making water here due to all the biological bits floating around in the water. It looks like our timing on Ashmore Reef might not work out so well, with an ETA at the reef entrance for just after sunset. We don’t necessarily want to heave-to for 12 hours, especially if these sailing conditions continue. The long-range GRIBs look really great and we may just continue on with this relaxing run, under the full moon.

We’ve really gotten into a good sea routine now. This year is all about making the sea miles. On this leg to Christmas Island we’ll pass the 1/3 the way around the world longitudinally from our easternmost point of Oakland, California. However since leaving Alaska we have already covered well over halfway around the world if we were to sail along the equator. And a short month or two from now, we’ll be closer to Alaska if we keep sailing west! It feels really good making the miles out here, with Privateer doing what she does best. Life is good on the long blue highway.

We are away from the land and all the troubles brewing about. We hear that it’s dim times in many corners of the world, and we fell fortunate to be removed from it all and visiting the lands with the friendliest people (Vanuatu, Fiji, Marquesas, etc) where happiness and wealth are measured by the size of the family and not the bank account, and the monetary economy and poverty are just abstract concepts. The ghost of Trump haunts us all and Privateer will be sailing en-route to Africa when America decides whether or not to take the plunge into darkness. Privateer is not only our magic carpet ride but also our escape pod! Perhaps not escaping from America, but bringing some of the “escapism” we’ve learned in the South Pacific back to our own families. The USA desperately needs an escape from the maddening, narrow rut that so much of the world seems stuck in. As one keen observer in Vanuatu asked me–“Why the rush? What happens after you rush?” Our generation is looking for its JFK and Martin Luther King but we are overexposed by the media. We can’t see the diamonds in the rough when each rock and murderer is amplified and sensationalized. We seem to be in such a rush that even bullets aren’t fast enough.

We’re loping along at 3.5 knots in very light winds now and enjoying this pace. Our “rush” today happened when we sailed through a massive school of leaping tuna. We frantically looked for the fishing line but alas it was buried in the locker that we cannot get into when the Monitor wind vane is engaged. Thoughts of fresh sushi tantalized us until we gave up in disgust. We had another visit from the surveillance in the sky again today. This time the plane buzzed us head-on with a radio call afterward. It’s quite odd to be out here in the watery wilderness and suddenly have a very brief and unexpected encounter with another human.

Kelsey and I just found out through the modern marvel of the DeLorme InReach that a few of our friends just had babies! I thought I’d share an essay I wrote awhile back, after Taz was born but before we really started covering the ocean miles with him. –Peter Babies vs. Offshore Sailing

Offshore sailing and caring for the needs of a newborn baby are very close cousins. I’m a new father now, and the captain of our ship. My wife Kelsey is now the captain of our baby (and the Captain of the captain, I might add). Our blue-water sailing adventures have prepared us well for raising a baby. We both perform our respective duties knowing full well the critical role each of us plays toward our ultimate goal-a loving unit, safely sailing together, as a family. The changing of the diapers– to state an obvious similarity–is exactly like making sail changes: it can happen during any one of the 24 hours in the day (worse yet every hour of the day) and it’s usually after you’ve just tucked into your berth, exhausted, for the precious off-watch. You’re liable to get a little wet too. The boat’s now sailing on a more even keel with the new sail plan, which is her way of thanking you for your attention to her needs. Baby’s got a smile with a crisp new nappy, too. You can smile about it all, despite the one odd wave that just soaked your last fresh clean t-shirt while you were wrestling canvas up there on the foredeck. At sea it’s difficult to keep from soiling even yourself, to be honest (and I am talking about #2 here). The marine head is a specially engineered demon, designed to sling your waste right back at you, through any number of devilish ways that only a sailor -or parent with an unruly baby!– can truly understand. A sea captain can never fully relax. Even on a quiet night, every subtle creak of the ship and flutter of the sails keeps them awake and fretting. As your crew-mate snores their way through a deep refreshing slumber, you are left worrying about the tensioning of the rigging or the trim of your sails. A new mother can never fully relax either. She is attuned to her child’s every breath, and will snap to attention at the slightest irregularity. The baby is cold and needs another layer on, or he’s trying to poop. Mama casts a jealous eye at her partner who sleeps through all the crying, all the late-night breast-feeds. That bastard is getting the sleep that I need–how can they sleep through that?! The more carefree attitude of being 2nd in command is not lost on either of us, for we know we are in good hands. The periodic crushing responsibility of being captain of child, or a ship, is recognized by the other as well. Life hangs in the balance of good decision-making after all. The 2nd in command works heartily and seriously in times of stress, placing complete trust and confidence in the captain. We all rely on each other to keep one another safe and comfortable. Every mother’s child is the most perfect, beautiful child in the world. She sees all the love and magic within for what that baby truly is. A sailor will cast a similar eye toward their boat–the beauty of the anchorage. An age-old feeling among mariners is that a ship is so much more than an assembly of fiberglass and wood. The ship has a soul, a memory, she’s a living thing… “Privateer” is a very real member of our family, too. Babies of course have all of these qualities and so much more. Cooking in the galley at sea is often a messy business. Onions fly off counter-tops and silverware flings itself into the bilge because you took your finger off them for 1/8th of a second as you lurch crosswise in the swell. Even when we’re cooking on land (meaning: not weightless-one-second-and-5g-force-the-next-second) a baby can make a pretty good mess of his galley. The physics of an ocean wave and a baby’s exploratory gestures are two separate laws of nature that achieve the same end-they both chuck food across the boat, unpredictably.

Sailing safely on the high seas requires: Love, constant maintenance, 24-hr a day attention, large monetary investments, to have her bottom cleaned often, ability to handle stress, recognizing dangers before they develop, and not least the ability to laugh heartily when suddenly doused with [Circle all answers that apply] salt water, dinner, urine, feces, diesel fuel.

There’s a saying that sailing is 99% boredom punctuated by 1% terror. It doesn’t quite work for us, though, and the poor sap who coined the phrase had a dim imagination. We’re not the type that gets bored. Especially when there’s the endless magic of silently barreling along with the trade-winds week after week, stars above and swirling galaxies of phosphorescence below. I won’t deny the 1% terror part, though– it does happen. But at the end of each voyage, we gold-plate the terror (it always makes for a good story) and fixate instead on the joys of sailing! We happily drink up the bitter moments– it’s all part of the package-because sailing’s got a real smooth aftertaste=85 Substitute “caring for a baby” with “sailing” in the above two paragraphs. Ditto. Were we ready to be parents? Definitely not-even though we thought we were! But I’d say we had a pretty good inkling of what was to come, though. Offshore sailing unwittingly helped us adjust to this new tack, offering a unique portal into the joys and rigors of bringing a new Pirate into this world before it even happened. I like to entertain the idea that Mothering is something close to being in command of a ship. Kelsey certainly knows deep-down what it truly means to be a captain now. She gets to live both sides of the lucky coin. To all mothers: you are all sea captains. And to all prospective parents: go offshore!

We had a good day of sailing in light breezes–sometimes wing-on-wing, sometimes on a beam reach. We’ve had the downwind pole set out to Port ever since leaving Vanuatu and it makes switching the sail plan very easy. We just keep the pole out when we tack the Yankee. It the winds go Easterly, we pull the Yankee out to the pole, and if the winds go southerly, we slip the Yankee back over to the Starboard side of the boat (port tack) leaving the lazy sheet running all the way out to the end of the pole. It looks a bit funny but its very convenient. Right now the winds have gone pretty light and we are ghosting along at about 3 knots. The moon is dazzling, almost like a second daylight, and we can do all of our deck work at night without having to use headlamps or turn on the LED spreader lights.

Over the past few days we’ve had a few very annoying breakages of our gear. One of our dinghy floorboard connectors snapped (thankfully our friend Tom brought 2 spares to NZ for us!) and then one of the Monitor thumb pegs sheared off. I dug around in the spares bag and found an extra one of these too. Both of these pieces of gear are made out of plastic, which is a very poor material to use on anything marine-related as the UV rays quickly make it brittle. But today’s breakage was a bit more serious. As we un-reefed the main and took halyard tension back up, the mainsheet winch made an unpleasant breaking-metal “ka-CHUNK” and ceased working. We quickly improvised by taking a turn around the broken winch and leading the halyard forward to the anchor windlass drum. While Kelsey worked the lever for the windlass I was able to tail the halyard, and we got the Main sail hoisted full again. We will have to do this 2-person process until we anchor on flat water next and I can have a good look at the inside of the winch. Fingers crossed. They say that bad luck comes in sets of three so hopefully that is it for a little while. It dawned on me today just how far we’ve sailed these past few years, and with the intense usage our gear receives, it’s amazing that everything has held up as well as it has (I’m knocking on wood right now).

Today we had our first encounter with the Australian Border Force aircraft. First, a VHF radio call came out of nowhere, and we were asked for our voyage plan details. Then about 5 minutes later, a rather large aircraft flying only 100 feet off the surface of the water buzzed the boat. It was all a bit surreal and a very strange way for me to get woken up from my afternoon nap. I’m sure they snapped some photos of the boat as they whooshed by. If the Border Force wanted to recoup some of the astronomical costs of their surveillance state (aside from the initial sky-high Quarantine entry fees), they could offer to sell the pics to the yachties! I’d buy one for sure. We looked good out there today sailing along wing-on-wing. I made sure to give the pilot the “full view” as I clambered out into the cockpit buck naked 🙂

We are headed out into the fabled Indian Ocean at last!! We are slicing along at 6.5 knots under full sail and flat seas. A friendly almost-full moon will keep us company on this passage. We are standing out into the Indian Ocean and sailing for Christmas Island, 1,500 NM away. In about 450 NM we’ll pass near Ashmore Reef, and may break passage there for a few days if the winds are light. We’ve heard there are sea snakes and dugongs at Ashmore, so hopefully it works out that we can check it out.

We had really wanted to sail the Kimberley coast, but decided against it due to Taz. Aside from feeling like crocodile bait every time we step down into the rubber dinghy, it’s just too difficult and exhausting to day-sail with a baby. Shore-side excursions are complicated when naps, diaper changes, etc come into play. Sometimes it takes us an entire day to spend just an hour or two on shore, once all the Taz prep work and logistics are taken care of. It’s much easier to make big offshore passages, and then spend a few relaxing weeks in one place once we get there, rather than going through the motions of navigating, anchoring, and launching the dinghy every day (all while Taz screams at us from down below because he’s missing out on the action). And so, as a sacrifice in the name of good parenting, we will sail by this incredible coast at our fingertips.

We left Darwin in our wake, and when the low land quickly slipped under the horizon all the that remained was the white condominium skyline of the city, rising out of the Timor Sea like a set of teeth. Also visible were the massive columns of smoke from the many bushfires. Charred grasses fell from the sky and onto Privateer when we sailed away from the coast.

Forecast is for light breezes for the next week, which is hopefully a welcome change from our past few heavy-air passages. If the wind goes too light it wreaks havoc on the sails and rigging as they slat around, and counter-intuitively a light wind passage can almost be more tiring than a heavy weather passage due to all the finicky tweaks and sail changes needed in light air. In heavy weather you can just hoist a scrap of sail and peg the monitor on course and just hold on. But fickle winds demand constant attention, if you want to go anywhere besides in circles.

For now, we’ve just put a reef in the main as the trades are freshening up after dark. During the day the heat of the land sucks in all the air, but at night the ocean pattern re-establishes itself. The trick about reefing is to always do it right away when you first start thinking about it. I don’t mind shaking it back out if I feel I’ve jumped the gun, but that is way better than the feeling you get when the winds build and you wish you’d done it an hour ago, with scary prospects ahead. We’re still making 7 knots now with our reef, and it always makes me feel better to have a reef in after dark. All we need to do is roll in the Yankee and we have our instant small sail plan.

I did 12 hours of hand-steering in ocean swells today and the blisters on my hands to prove it. We pried the anchor out of the clay at Gove at first light, and set sail for Cape Wilberforce. Capes, like freighters, have many very interesting and powerful names. I’d been warned about Cape Wilberforce and the sharp seas that can stack up around it. We gave it a wide berth today and thank god we did. The day started out with light winds but quickly established itself into a brisk 25-knot trade-wind. We stood off the cape by 2 miles and the seas did stack right up. Wilberforce itself looked like a massive wall of crumbling Lego bricks, with waves slamming into piles of square boulders at its base. At the cape is a narrow constriction, our first of three passes for the day. Each pass must be timed correctly for the tides, as great currents up to 12 knots sweep through these lands. The first two passes need to be done on the flood and the third pass, the infamous Gugari Rip a.k.a.”the hole-in-the-wall” must be timed to arrive at exactly during the first hour of the ebb tide. To do so at any other time of day, the guides warn, would “require a change of underpants once you got spit out of the other end”. The Rip is only three boat-lengths wide and one mile long. It cuts right through the long chain of Wessel Islands and its seaward side is exposed to the full fury of the trade winds.

All of this nonsense needs very sober planning and I had spent hours making pages and pages of notes and calculations, and I’d scoured the internet for personal accounts of the passes. Alarmingly, much of the info conflicted, with differing advice on timing the tides. It was a process of sifting the good advice from the bad. I was comforted in the morning when two other sailboats left the anchorage shortly after us, so at least I came to the same conclusions as two other captains.

We shot past Cape Wilberforce with great success and once through the pass, the seas flattened out a bit and we had fantastic sailing. I’ve always wondered what the Wessel Islands looked like=85 The islands are windswept with a few trees here and there clinging on for dear life, with great rusty-red bluffs alternating with lime-green savannah grasses. Like the Torres Islands, they are set in a shallow emerald-color sea. The land and seascape were so surreal, and kind of repeated itself mile after mile, that I felt strangely that we were in a Nintendo game, with Privateer as the player timing the passes. “We’re on level 5” I told Kelse and Taz in the afternoon. Cloud shadows played across the jade waves giving the swells an emerald tiger-stripe appearance.

We sailed through the second pass “a polite miniature of Cape Wilberforce” as our friends on S/V “Tuuletar” called it, with no problem. Soon we were sailing the final 15 miles to the infamous Rip. The other two sailboats tacked to the north to take a wider pass through the Wessels while we pressed on ahead. By my calculations we were about an hour early for the ebb tide, so we hove-to about 4 miles off in front of the Rip. The trades really started cranking again, and we could see that the cliffs in front of the Rip entrance were being throttled by huge breakers exploding upward into mushroom-like clouds. It’s amazing the island is still there at all, given the force of those waves.

We’d been in radio contact all day with the other two sailboats, and as we were hove-to we heard them chatting to each other as they went through their pass to the north–our canaries in the coal mine… It was not good. “So much for the tide…Getting really big!…Massive over-falls=85must be still at full flood but I can’t tell-currents are full against us.” Basically, it was exactly the wrong conversation we wanted to hear as we were hove-to off a lee shore about to enter the Rip. The last thing we wanted was to get pinned in a field of violent over-falls at the base of those cliffs, caught between 12 knots of adverse currents and against a full trade wind. And we wouldn’t know what it would be like until we got right up there into it. If we waited too long, the risk is getting sucked into the channel with such force that it pulls the boat sideways and you have to use forward and reverse gear to keep off the cliffs as they rush by at 12 knots. We had already done that one before in British Columbia, and yes it did require a change of underpants afterward, and also two shots of whiskey at 7am=85 Decisions, decisions=85 I kept us hove-to for another half-hour and sort of split the difference with all the differing tidal calculation prediction advice, with an erring on being slightly into the ebb. Rather get sucked into flat water than chopped up at the entrance. I turned to Kelsey and said “I have faith in my calculations”. We started the engine as an extra precaution, let go the sheets, and made sail for the entrance. We aced the Rip! We sailed past the mushroom-spray breakers and into smooth water at exactly the moment of high-water slack tide. Our timing was perfect, to the minute. Throughout the whole channel we didn’t have a knot of current one way or the other. This was excellent, as the scenery was unreal and we appreciated having the time to enjoy it, rather than shitting our pants. Jagged cliffs of thin layered stone stacked hundreds of layers high. Remarkably the upper layers of stone project outwards in 15-foot overhangs, where the ledges themselves are only about a foot thick. In the lee of the islands we had a flat sea and a perfect sailing breeze. We looked back on broad sandy beaches and saw crocodile tracks crisscrossing the dunes. The croc tracks were unmistakable with the trench where the heavy tail dragged, flanked by massive footprints. It reminded us of the Grizzly bear tracks we see on the beaches of Alaska, but outback style. Crazy country out here! We’ve got a relatively clear sea in front of us now and are back under self-steering with the Monitor. We’ve got a few hundred miles to sail to Port Essington, and if all goes well we should have about two nights at sea before arrival. The trades are supposed to remain fresh and intensify to potentially 30 knots day-after-tomorrow, so we are reefed down and using our trusty “Coral Sea” sail plan. The windy ride continues=85

June 24