The expected storm was building up outside Port Davey, but it was flat calm as we motored up Bathurst Channel. Even so, we were anticipating 35 knot winds even in these protected waters by lunchtime, so we went deep into the river system toward Bathurst Harbour to find a good anchorage.
On either side of us reared stark rocky hillsides, brushed with startling patches of the white quartzite schist which is a feature of these parts.
Quartzite schist exposures
The water itself is dark brown from the acidic peat of the ubiquitous button-grass, a dark freshwater layer above the salt, forming a shaded haven beneath for species that would normally be confined to the ocean depths. When we arrived, the dark surface had been recently stirred, and was punctuated by white chunks of flocculent bigger than my fist.
The black water is caused by acidic run-off from the button-grass
We anchored in King’s Cove, looking up at the steep slopes of Mount Beattie, which stands a little over 200m above sea level. On the other side of the channel rears Mount Rugby, well over 700m high.
The crew were tired after our night passage, and so after a leisurely breakfast, we relaxed until lunch. Pieter and Shien went for a swim, then Pieter and I pottered around fixing various hinges and catches that had come loose during the passage.
We had read in the anchorage guides that there were trails up both of the nearby mountains, so after lunch, a few of us took the dinghy to shore to tackle the smaller one as a ‘practice run’ for the larger.
Mount Beattie beckons
The path was a bit notional in places, but sloped steadily upwards through the button grass, and stands of flowering honeymirtle and swampheath.
Forging a trailPink SwampheathSilver Fern at anchor in Kings Cove, Bathurst HarbourLooking back from Mt Beattie toward Claytons CornerAt the summit of Mt Beattie, with Mt Rugby in the background
The weather started to bluster, so we scurried back to the boat, made some dinner and opened some wine. Rain set in. We had some more wine. The sky turned angry purple. Liv said she would only put ‘Purple Rain’ on the stereo if we all sang along…
Mount Rugby
We made a gentle start to the morning, eating breakfast and then putting together stuffed wraps for lunch. Up came the anchor, and we motored around to a small bay to the North of Bathurst Channel, which put us within dinghy-strike of the path up Mount Rugby.
The climb is hard and unrelenting, on wet button-grass peat. The path appears to be kept open largely by wombats rather than people, so each step is a choice between putting one foot directly in front of the other in a narrow boggy crack, or of hopping from side-to-side hoping that you don’t slip. Some stretches can only be navigated bent over double through scraggy forest.
A deceptively easy startLiv and John in a copse
Thankfully the hillside was lined with small sturdy trees, so we hauled ourselves up hand-over-hand, slipping and sliding in the treacherous mud, until we reached a small outcrop of quartzite that was level with the summit of yesterday’s Mount Beattie.
With spectacular and unobstructed views of the whole 150-square-kilometre expanse of Port Davey / Bathurst Harbour, we knew that we were the only vessel in this incredible untouched wilderness. It was a surprise, then, to hear an unfamiliar voice and then to see an unfamiliar face. A young couple strode into view. “Where on earth did you come from?” I asked.
They explained that they were the pilots of a charter plane which had just dropped a handful of clients at the Melaleuca airstrip (a short band of crushed quartzite occasionally visible in the distance). They had a few hours to kill and had borrowed a spare boat from their company, and thought that if they made haste they could get up and down the mountain before their clients returned. I stepped off the path to let them through, and off they scampered, making me feel old and slow.
Back in the real world, the going got harder, every foot placement necessarily more intricate. Often the track was obscured by tufts of button grass, so you never knew if your questing foot would encounter solid rock, slippery mud, or a quartzite slurry akin to quicksand. At about a hundred vertical metres from the summit, we stopped for a breather and a bite to eat.
View of the distant anchoragePandaniMountain Needlebush
After that, the trail got really difficult. Every step was steeply upward, either on mud, tree root, or quartzite. Some of the route was bouldering, some genuine rock-climbing, particularly closer to the summit where we were climbing over or crawling under huge fallen boulders.
Attempting an interesting traverse, I encountered the pilots on their way back down. Spreadeagled against the quartzite and reaching for a toe-hold, I glanced up as the lady slid down on her bottom and the man slipped in mud and tumbled down the slope. “I’m getting too old for this shit,” I joked. The man looked ruefully at this mud-stained trousers. “Youth isn’t helping me at all!” he said, before sliding down the next section.
I’d been dawdling, playing on the rocks and taking photos of the plant life, but eventually caught up with the vanguard of our group, who had stopped to rest on a large flat rock. However, the summit was within sight, so I clambered up the final stretch, and found myself standing at the top of the world.
The views were truly astonishing. Most of our crew have travelled extensively, and we all agreed that the 360-degree vista from the top of Mount Rugby was equal to anything we’d seen, anywhere. Click here for a 360 degree movie.
Views from the summit of Mount RugbyThe crew at the summit of Mount Rugby
It had taken us three hours to reach the summit, and it took us another three to get down again. Going down was, arguably, even harder than coming up. Visibility of the steep and occluded path was even worse from above, with the added complication that our feet had stirred up the mud on the way up.
We fell, and fell again. Sitting or lying on the undergrowth and contemplating the sky for the umpteenth time, it was sobering to reflect on how easy it would be to sprain or even to break something, but we made it almost to the bottom in relative safety.
Close to the bottom, just above the anchorage, is a small subsidiary peak. For reasons that remain obscure, John and Rob and I set off to climb it while the others continued on down to the boat.
There was not even the hint of a path, and the going was very hard through low-growing scrub and soft wet peat. We fell, and we bled, and we fell again, but once more the views were rewarding.
Looking back up at Mount Rugby
Back aboard Silver Fern, we motored back around the corner to Kings Cove. We were expecting a big wet storm and we already know that the holding was good and that Mount Beattie provided protection from the West. A hearty dinner, a few glasses of wine, and then we all drifted exhausted to bed.
We woke with the dawn at our anchorage in Deephole Bay, to confirm that the tiny predicted weather-window for our westerly run to Port Davey was holding steady. The three of us that enjoy a cold-water swim were treated to clear skies and a beautiful sunrise.
Sunrise over the d’Entrecasteaux Channel from Deephole Bay
We weighed anchor and ate breakfast as we motor-sailed out past Southport Bluff, site of yesterday’s hiking, and with views up to the King George monument that John and I bumped into yesterday. It was a lovely day for a sail.
Brendon avoiding the reefs and hidden rocks
Threading our way between some private fishing boats, Deepwater Bank, and the ominously named Black Reef, we turned inland around the bluff and anchored in Recherche Bay. We could see snow on top of Arthur’s Peak that hadn’t been there yesterday, but were now positioned in the most Southerly safe anchorage that we could find.
At anchor in Recherche Bay
Consulting the forecast, we were excited to see that the Westerlies out in the Southern Ocean were predicted to abate overnight, picking up again tomorrow at midday. We settled on a plan to start our westerly passage at dusk.
What to do in the meantime? How about a nice picnic on the beach?
Silver Fern crew, November 2024, at Recherche Bay
Recherche Bay
We had the rest of the day to kill. We found a path behind the beach, which led to a statue of a whale and a 1792 quotation from Admiral Bruni d’Entrecasteaux:
It would be vain of me to attempt to describe my feelings when I beheld this lonely harbour lying at the world’s end, separated as it were from the rest of the universe – ’twas nature and nature in her wildest mood…
We were enjoying a similar state of mind when we were surprised to encounter a gaggle of tourists, so there must be a road somewhere close by to “world’s end”. We also bumped into a pair of grey nomads who were attempting to walk the trail to Fisherman’s Point, which seemed as good a plan as any, so a few of us set off behind them along the marked path.
The track was only indifferently signposted, and much of it was below the tideline of the beach. After a number of false turnings, the people in front gave up, but we ploughed on, just enjoying the views and the sunshine.
Recherche Bay
At length we arrived at the point, marked by a light and some cairns. A few steps inland was a ruined building, apparently once part of a pair of infamous pubs, both called the Sawyers Arms. Today there were only some brick walls, some lilies, and a rather surprised black Tiger Snake which swiftly slipped away to shelter.
On to Port Davey!
As dusk fell, we secured Silver Fern for sea, hoisted the main, and poked our nose out of the heads. The persistent westerly gale had, as promised, died away. Perhaps ironically, this gave us no wind to sail with, but we had plenty of fuel and a big engine and a short window of safety to get around the South Capes. Motor-sailing, we took it.
Time to go!On whale watch
To lead us on our way, a pair of humpback whales, probably mother and calf, breached off the bow, played around for a while, then swam beneath us to pop up astern. A little later, a lone dolphin caught up to investigate. An albatross took station, swinging endless circles around us as we motored into the light swell.
Darkness slowly fell. It wasn’t my watch, but I stayed up anyway to see the sunset and enjoy the feel of the ocean. Venus rose, followed by the first stars. At 8pm I was joined by the rest of C Watch for our official two-hour stint, rounding South Cape and setting course for the Maatsuyker Islands.
Rounding South Cape
At the end of our watch, we grabbed some bunk time and were woken as planned by A Watch at 2am, to calm seas and a diamond-dusting of stars glittering over our phosphorescent wake. Every now and then, we caught a flash of white as our albatross crossed in front of our running lights.
I always revel in a night passage, but this was a first for my watch-mates Ange and Mish. We soon got them set up with blankets, cushions and (just in case) sick bags, and I think that in the end they enjoyed it.
Silver Fern, like most modern boats I suppose, is equipped with a touch-screen electronic chart at the helm. This gives the helmsman a clear moment-by-moment picture of the entire situation, with instant overlays of radar, AIS, and a whole host of systems information available to the fingertip (except, in our case, for wind instruments, which were all out of commission due to a wiring fault). In the past, I have been used to regular forays down to the chart table to check that we are where we are supposed to be, and to commit to memory any upcoming reefs or shallows before my next visit below, clinging to the chart table and trying not to vomit while attempting to focus on blurred marks on fiendishly furling paper… I found that I didn’t miss it.
Just as our watch finished at 4am, the barometer fell by 4hPa and the stars forward started to haze over. According to standing orders, any fall of more than 1hPa per hour triggers waking the skipper, so we got John out of bed and then, feeling slightly guilty, went down to our bunks.
I woke naturally at 6am and made my way onto deck, to find that we had passed through Port Davey and were cruising up Bathurst Channel.
Sunrise over Port DaveyEntering Bathurst Channel
The weather was still fine. The falling barometer had presumably just been heralding the forecast change later in the day, but it didn’t matter what happened now, there are endless safe anchorages within Bathurst Harbour. We had made it!
Lifting Silver Fern’s anchor and sailing out of Quarantine Bay, we emerged into 30+ knot winds gusting 40. With a reef in the main and flying the staysail we were still overpowered. Before long, the staysail developed a big hole and we quickly replaced it with a tough orange storm jib. Thankfully we’d replaced a broken reefing line yesterday, so we were able to put another two reefs in the main until she was able to balance on the autohelm, and then we had a fun and breezy sail down to Southport.
Slightly overpoweredShien’s expression…Our mate Liv
Deephole Bay, Southport
As we sailed round Pelican Island and dropped the anchor in Deephole Bay, Stuart noticed that Southport on the other side of the bay was home to the Southernmost Pub in Australia. There was nothing for it, then, but to winch the dinghy into the water and (after first remembering to replace the bung… whoops…) motor across.
Ange, Rob and Stuart at the Southernmost Pub in AustraliaRob and I share a dropJohn ferries us homeSilver Fern at Deephole Bay
On arrival aboard Silver Fern, we were delighted to find that B Watch had had a lamb roasting in the oven all afternoon.
“B” Watch in the galley
Southport Lagoon
The next day dawned, and we eagerly checked the weather in the Southern Ocean. It was not looking fun at all, we’d have been beating directly into 40+ knots for our Westerly passage. The weather was fine here in Deep Pool Bay, though, so we hopped into the dinghy and went ashore to explore the local lagoon.
There was a path of sorts behind Deephole Bay beach, which wound its slightly muddy way between stringy gums, she-oaks and melaleuca. Native flowers were out in force, and there was evidence that the track was maintained at least in part by Tasmanian Devils.
The crew had separated naturally into two groups, depending on whether they had arrived in the first or second dinghy shuttle. The path split at a marked sign, and the first group headed for the bluffs, whereas our group headed for the lagoon.
Pieter makes a decision
The lagoon was quiet and pretty, the water brackish and peaty and fenced around with a continuous beach of small shells. In the South, mountains loomed, with a hint of the bad weather behind them, but here at the lagoon it was warm and still.
Southport Lagoon
After returning to the boat for lunch, a few of us came back to the lagoon. Skipper John is always up for an expedition, and he and I mused that surely there must be a way to hike around the lagoon and over the dunes, meeting up with the path to the bluffs.
Without much preparation or forethought, off we went. The going was reasonable until we reached the dunes backing on to Southport Bluff Beach. There wasn’t any obvious way down through the tangle of densely packed trees, let alone up the other side, and we couldn’t even see the ground through the thick underbrush. Remembering the method that Tasmanian icons Tim Christie and Reg Williams used to forge the Three Capes Track, I hurled myself onto the top of the foliage, rolled down the hill and then crawled up through the tree tops until I reached the top of the dune. It wasn’t easy, but the view was worth it.
Southport Bluff from Southport Bluff Beach
Safely on the beach, we reflected that the one thing that we hadn’t seen was any sign of the path from the bluff to the boat. We looked back at the dune, and really didn’t feel like retracing our steps to try to find it. But we were on one side of a peninsula, and we knew that the boat was on the other side, perhaps we should try walking cross-country over the middle. What could possibly go wrong?
The first part was easy, along a pretty beach. A small cliff rose up, but we skirted the edge of it, and found ourselves at the monument to the George III, a convict ship that sank here in 1838 with heavy losses. From the monument we reckoned that we should be able to find a path, but there was none visible, and we later found that this was because the monument has been closed to the public for some years, something that wasn’t apparent when approaching from our unusual direction.
So… faced with miles of peat bogs and thorny underbrush, and armed only with confidence and a cheerful demeanour, we set off.
Visually, it looked like waist-high tussock grass. In detail, each tussock was defended by sharp woody brush, and separated by deep peaty puddles. We came to recognise the boggiest areas by the colour of the foliage, and yomped over ridge and gully, aiming for the treeline behind which we knew Silver Fern must lie at anchor.
Finally, weary and with aching thighs, we clambered up the final slope. John couldn’t wait, and forged ahead to enjoy the view from the top. I stumbled along in his wake and toiled my way up behind.
John was standing stock still, apparently admiring the view. “What do you see, young man?” I called out, as I topped the brow. Then we both broke down in helpless laughter; there was nothing ahead but yet another boggy expanse of tussock grass to yet another distant ridge.
We did eventually make it across to the beach, where the rest of the crew had set up a sundowner fire near an old railway platform, part of a disused rail network designed to move limestone from Ida Bay quarries to vessels berthed in Deephole Bay.
Terminus of the Ida Bay to Deephole Bay quarry lineSundowners on Deephole Beach
After a certain amount of beer and wine, we returned to the Silver Fern for dinner, and to check the wind forecast. We thought that we could see the hint of a tiny weather window opening up between two low-pressure systems spinning up from Antarctica. The picture wasn’t clear yet, but tomorrow we would move South again, edging closer to the Southern Ocean.
For my significant birthday this year, I have gifted myself a sailing trip into the Southern Ocean with Ocean Sailing Expeditions. Our aim was to sail from Sandy Bay near Hobart, Tasmania, down the d’Entrecasteaux Channel into the Southern Ocean, around the South and South-West Capes and then up to Bathurst Bay and hopefully on to Macquarie Harbour.
The rest of the crew were flying in from the mainland, but the expedition yacht Silver Fern was moored only a hundred metres away from my own Cheval de Mer, so on the appointed afternoon I strolled across and gave a hail.
Skipper John popped his head out, and almost immediately I found myself repairing a broken flag mount. Over the afternoon the other seven paying crew members arrived, along with the yacht’s mate Liv. Everybody seemed interesting and agreeable, and together we fitted the furling genoa which had just come back from being repaired. At some point in its life, it had been converted from a regular genoa, and thus had far more batten pockets than you might expect, aligned in different directions, but in the end we got it sorted. Unfortunately it was clear that there were still some areas that were worn out, so we’ll have to hope for the best in the Roaring Forties.
Getting the battens inShe’ll be right
The next task was to hank on the staysail, which was an easier job, but it soon became clear that the sail itself was full of holes so we took it off again and replaced it with an orange storm jib.
Having been assigned our bunks and our safety gear, we assembled a chicken risotto dinner, washed it down with beer and wine, and then popped out to the local pub for a pint.
The crew retired to quarters. My bunk is in the bow, upper starboard. Instead of a lee cloth, the upper bunks have pulleys that allow them to be folded up at an angle, trapping the occupant safely in a small space against the hull when at sea. I’d not seen that configuration before, and while it seemed practical, I wondered how much space would be left for me and how I would ever get out again.
Forepeak cabin. My bunk is top right.Mid cabin
The bedding consists of a sheet and a single thin blanket. We had previously been assured by the owner that the temperature below is maintained at a steady 21 degrees, but in fact the boat is unheated and next morning those of us who had not packed sleeping bags woke shivering. Presumably the owner is used to the South Pacific and has not encountered Tasmanian conditions.
Luckily, as the token Tasmanian aboard, I still had access to my car, so I drove a bunch of us in to the Hobart camping shops to purchase sleeping bags and fleeces.
The tasks for the morning began with a trip to the fuel dock to fill the tanks with fuel and water. She’s a big boat – seventy-two feet – and the wind was up and the crew untested, but with the help of the bow thruster and willing hands, we warped her in. I was given the task of checking the spare jerry-cans lashed to the deck, and found that they were nearly all empty, so we fixed that.
To Quarantine Bay
Out in the Derwent, we practiced our man-overboard procedure on a sacrificial fender. With a big boat like this, you can’t crash-gybe and stop dead in the water and haul the casualty back over the rail. The boom itself weighs several tonnes and you really don’t want it moving quickly, and the freeboard is far too high to reach somebody in the water. The plan was to drop the sails and motor back to the victim, winch Pieter in a waterproof survival suit into the water to grab them, and then winch them both out. It all worked rather well.
Approaching the “casualty”Bringing the “casualty” aboard
On the way down the Derwent to Bruny Island, we spent some time getting used to Silver Fern. The steering wheel is connected to the rudder by means of hydraulic rams, which give no feedback at all to the helm. The only way to understand the rudder angle is to keep an eye on the electronic display on the binnacle. Generally it seemed that the easiest way to steer was to use the controls on the auto helm.
While hoisting the main, it had quickly become clear that the first reefing line had lost its integrity, with the core separated from the sheath and about as much use as a wet noodle. On the way in to Quarantine Bay, with the main still up, we spent about an hour replacing it. We needed to attach a new line to the end of the old one and thread it through the system, but there wasn’t enough room to get a splice through the pulleys, so we needed to sew the two ropes together. This took a few attempts, but luckily Mish had been a trauma nurse and was a dab hand with the needle.
Mish sewing the lines togetherForedeckies sorting the lines
Finally we dropped the pick in Quarantine Bay in North Bruny Island, not so very far from our starting point but with a lot of essential tasks under our collective belt. The bay promised shelter from the current northerly and the forecast westerlies.
The anchorage was calm and comfortable, and in the morning Shien, Pieter and myself dropped into the water for a refreshing ocean swim.
Shien’s morning cold-water swim
Breakfast was a free-for-all from the available ingredients, but once we had cleared up, we all separated into our assigned watches. We have three watches, with a four-hour rota during the day, which is more about cleaning and food preparation than navigation, and two-hour cockpit watches if on passage overnight.
Ange on the daily vacuumPieter washing up
Then it was time for passage planning. Up until now, we only had a vague plan that we would head South, round the South Capes and then try to spend some time up the West coast in Bathurst Bay or Macquarie Harbour or both, but we knew that there were a bunch of fast-moving lows in the Southern Ocean.
Silver Fern has a Starlink internet connection, so we use Windy to forecast the pressure systems. Usually this displays average wind speeds, but for the Southern Ocean’s extreme conditions it is more helpful to use the gust overlay. On the Windy snapshot below, pinky purple is around 40 knots and blue is around 60 knots. It is clear that we won’t be going West into the teeth of the storm today, but there is potential for a gap opening up around Tuesday.
We settled on a plan. We would squeeze as far South as we could manage while remaining in the sheltered d’Entrecasteaux Channel, and wait for a weather window.
Our nominal driveway junction exits onto a nominal road. Both of these have been variously constructed and reconstructed over time, both by myself and by the farmer on the other side of the road.
I have never been entirely happy with the initial turn-off into my property, which is fine for my Land Cruiser but not traversable by lesser vehicles. I’d taken some advice from a proper landscape engineer, and the junction needed to be reshaped to be less of a curve and more of a ninety-degree turn-off. I had hired an excavator for the weekend to sort out the creek crossing, so I seized the opportunity to do something about the junction, too.
An early attempt to ease the camber of the driveway junction in 2021Driveway to the left, nominal road to the right
Part of the problem was the nominal road. Why do I call it ‘nominal’? Before I purchased the property, this end of the official road existed only on a map. On the ground, there were only a winter creek and lots of trees. I asked a friend with a bulldozer to push the road across the creek and about half way up the hill, giving access to a small track into my property. Much later, I had a new driveway cut on a better route, and at the same time my farming neighbour pushed the nominal road further, over the hill between our properties and down the other side. This gave him fire trail access to some of his farther fields; you can see the extended road to the right of the photo above. The road is fine in itself, but it is steeply sloping clay and it sheds water across my driveway junction, washing away and undercutting the exit.
The other part of the problem was that the gravelly surface of the turn was heavily cambered and just too darn steep for a two-wheel-drive car to navigate.
I decided on a two-pronged approach. Firstly, I would try to reshape the junction to make it easier to navigate, and secondly, I would put a French drain across my driveway exit and pipe it all the way down the hill to the creek.
I used the digger to remove the upper edge of the curve, to straighten it out so that the driveway met the road at right-angles instead of curving into it. Then I used a mixture of forest earth, spall, road base and blue metal – basically whatever came to hand – and raised the level of the driveway junction by about a third of a metre.
Road base mixed with ‘organic stuff’ Raising the surface of the driveway, to make the junction less steep
This photo gives quite a good perspective of how much I lifted my driveway junction above its original height.
Since the treads of the excavator have a tendency to rip up the surface, I tamped down the surface by repeatedly towing a trailer full of rocks over it.
Tamping down the surface
So far, so good!
Now that I was happy with the height of driveway junction, I dug it up again to put in a French drain.
Digging it back up again!
At around this point, my friend Pete arrived with a shovel, which made things go a lot faster because I could focus on driving the excavator, loading Pete’s trailer and barrow, and pointing at things.
We took advantage of the natural rain gully that had formed on the upper side of the driveway, and teed it into a trench that we dug coming down from the top road. This part is a proper deep French drain lined with 20mm aggregate and containing a sleeved and slotted ag-pipe. There’s a bit of excess sticking out in this photo which has since been cut off.
Two French drains come down from left and right and meet undergroundThis drain (pale rock) used to be the steep driveway, but now will be re-wilded
Pete and I were pretty tired now, so we set up camp for the night, ate steak and drank negronis by the fire, and then retreated to Pete’s van when the heavens opened.
Pete enjoying the wet and windy night
We wondered if all our hard work would be washed away by the torrent, but in the morning both the creek crossing and the half-finished French drain had coped admirably.
Back on the tools, we led the combined run-off from both French drains all the way down the road to the creek. I didn’t put quite so much effort into digging and lining this channel, as it’s nice and steep and exists only to move the water down the side of the road.
In fact, by the time we (well, Pete) had shovelled our way halfway down the hill, we were knackered and called it a day.
Rough channel at the bottomDropping in the ag-pipe
In the event, other projects intervened, and it wasn’t until some six months later that I was able to return to finish up. Even with just bare ag-pipe for the bottom stretch, it was clear that the French drains at the top were working as there was no erosion across the driveway junction and equally no erosion down at the creek.
Hand-selected blue spall from my 10 tonne pileNone of this has washed out……but I’ll protect it anyway
On this second visit, everything had to be done by hand, because the bottom stretch is so steep that it makes working with an excavator quite tricky. I had hoped to rent a skid-steer but the rental place told me that theirs wouldn’t be able to work across the slope, so it was out with the rake and shovel.
I had Duggans quarry deliver another 12 tonnes of 20mm drainage aggregate. I had kind of hoped that they would be able to pour it out of one side of the truck as they drove up the hill, so that I could simply rake it sideways into the trench. That wasn’t an option, but the driver did a great job of backing across the road and dropping the load in a series of piles to make my life easier.
Great piles of aggregateThe trench is finally filled
The raking and shovelling was still a lot of work and it took me all of the morning. Once I’d finished the bottom half, leaving some excess on top as I had nowhere to put it (I’ll put up road markers to stop people from driving on the crunchy bit), I still had quite a few tonnes of aggregate left over about half way up the slope. I tried to barrow it up the hill but it’s far too steep to push. I could have got the trailer and shovelled it in, but it had already been a long hard day and the gravel isn’t going anywhere, so I’ll save that task for another day.
I have finally come to that part of the rebuild process where I have dealt with all the big stuff – the engine and the windows and the larger leaks – and can focus on fixing the little things.
The Switch Panel
I had already spent some time already tracing mysterious electric lines around the interior, stripping out the unused ones and labelling the useful ones. One of the tasks that I kept putting off was to decipher the switch panel, because behind it was just a huge ball of loose wires. It was impossible to get my hand in to unthread them, because all the earth leads had been wired into a single brass block that lived in the middle of the snarl.
Snarl behind the switch panelEvery single earth went to this
One sunny day, I arrived with my soldering iron, some reels of wire, and a lot of patience, and began to unravel.
The reason for the snarl was that, although generally the wiring on the boat is sound, it had had decades of additions and changes, every one of which had all been led back to the same switch panel (and especially to the same earth block).
I slowly traced all the wires, and labelled each one, and excised excess cable and replaced it where it was a bit short. I made up a wooden board with more earth blocks than I will ever need, so that each earth wire is separate from the others and easy to distinguish.
No beauty prizes, but that’ll doJust need to secure the panel
Cheval’s Eyes
Cheval has these lovely old chromed navigation lights on either side of the bow. The lenses are faded, the starboard one is smashed, and neither of them are connected to the electrics, having been replaced by a modern unit on the pulpit.
Nevertheless, I rather like them, so one day I took them off and had a think about how I could make them look a bit better (and less leaky).
My first task was to fix the starboard lens, which was broken. I had some Pinkysil silicone left over from another project, so I made a mould of the inside of the port lens. Then I strapped the broken lens into the mould, and filled the whole thing up with F-190 polyurethane.
Of course, the starboard lens was now solid instead of being a transparent shell, but this was fine because I wasn’t going to use them as navigation lights. In any event, the lenses were so degraded from decades of sun that they had barely any colour.
I popped out the repaired shell, and – after quite a bit of experimentation to find something that would stick to both acrylic and polyurethane – discovered some spray paints that gave a bright finish, and gave them a few coats.
MendedPainted (nearly)Modelling the new eyesCheval de Mer’s eyes are back in place
Leaky Lazarette
The locker hatches in the cockpit will, naturally, allow rainwater to seep in along the hinge line and down the edges. There are supposed to be drainage channels to catch it and shed it into the cockpit sole, but some of them had rotted completely away, allowing rainwater to drain into the bilges underneath the engine. This would have been part of the problem that caused my oil leak.
Some new wood, a lot of elbow-grease, some industrial glue, and some left-over window sealant saved the day.
We went away for 7 weeks and came back, and the bilges were bone-dry.
Keeping it Tidy
I bought some No-Wear chafe guards to protect my new paintwork. They are flexible stainless steel with a strong adhesive backing, so you can mould them to the shape of your boat. Handy if you don’t have hard gunwales, and your boat is made from soft plastic.
I added some rope bags and a solar-powered extractor fan…
The final touches of deck paint
I’ve been slowly moving around the deck, checking fittings and filling holes, applying two-pack undercoat, and finally finishing off with either Kiwi-Grip textured non-slip deck paint, or Norglass Weatherfast gloss enamel. It looks OK, I think.
She just needs some soft furnishings, a bigger solar panel, and dinghy davits. She’s almost good to go!
Long-suffering readers of this blog will remember that I have spent a lot of time over the years working on the creek crossing at the bottom of my access road. Since the last road rebuild, a lot of wash has come down from the neighbouring farm, and has eroded both the road and the causeway. In addition, my neighbours have dammed the winter creek upstream for their sheep, which changed the character of the creek from slow seepage to a more continual flow. I needed to install some drainage pipes to protect the road surface.
One fine weekend, I arrived on site with a trailer-load of drainage pipes, and a digger from Mal’s Hire. In preparation for the delivery of several truck-loads of material from Duggan’s Quarry, my daughter had painted up a lot of helpful signs. I doubt that the quarry drivers were accustomed to such artistry, but they certainly obeyed the instructions.
The creek crossing was originally built about ten years ago using a base layer of tree trunks, then aggregate, then soil. It has worked well for most of this time, but a combination of clay filtering down into the wooden sublayer and increased water flow from the neighbouring farm’s new dams, has meant that some water runs over the top and has a tendency to wash away the surface of the road.
The winter creek fills and then seeps across the causeway
Digging away the substrate by hand would have been a thankless task, but the digger made it easy.
Starting on the drainage trench
Before long, I dropped in some drainage pipes, and got instant gratification in the form of the creek diverting through the pipe and out onto my property.
I finished off with 20mm drainage aggregate, and made good with excess mud and stone. It was still pretty boggy – after all, the mud was already saturated – but I left it alone to give it a chance to dry.
Loading the trailer with 20mm drainage aggregate
Hopefully all that mud will dry off…
That night, I put up my tent and cooked myself a nice supper by the fire.
All’s well that ends well
On the following day, I had other things to do with the digger, so it wasn’t til later that I got to have a look at the creek crossing.
It was still boggy.
This was when I discovered that there was a second flow of water coming down from another new dam in the farm next door. It was running invisibly under the ferns and then draining across the creek crossing, slightly higher up the slope. I couldn’t see it before, because the whole thing was wet, but now that the bottom half had drained, it was obvious.
It was far too wet to bring in the digger, which would have just churned everything up, so a couple of us dug out a rough new ditch by hand.
It originally looked like a seep, but once we’d dug a channel, there was a significant amount of water, which we lead down to the drainage pipe that I’d put in the day before.
Surprise seepage from the new damPipe entrance, creek flow lower, dam upper
The ditch is a bit impromptu and unlined, but I didn’t really want to start landscaping on my neighbour’s side of the road, and anyway we were tired.
Four months later, everything was looking just fine.
I spent an extra day shovelling in a layer of 20mm aggregate and topped it with blue spall to keep out falling debris.
Each cabin complex on the Three Capes Track has an identical dorm setup, so every night I was sharing with the same people in a carbon-copy of the same dorm cabin. As usual, I had claimed the bunk that nobody else wanted, in the darkest corner farthest from the door, which I crawled into like a yacht’s berth. This gave me my own corner of darkness while the rest of the guys were bumbling around with their bright head torches.
I am sure that head torches are wonderfully useful for those who choose not to let their eyes become accustomed to the dark, but I find them annoying in company because humans are always moving their heads, looking around, momentarily distracted by any noise or motion, and shining their lights into the eyes of anybody they want to talk to. At least with a small pencil torch, it remains focussed on the task in hand, and doesn’t bother anyone else.
I woke as usual six hours after going to sleep, in this case at one in the morning. Rather than get up, I just lay and listened to the wind hammering past outside. The forecast was for a blustery day with 50km/h gusts, and it certainly sounded like it as the occasional flurry of rain pattered on the tin roof.
By seven, I was up and about and making Aeropress coffee. What a fine device this is; lightweight, neat, unbreakable, and capable of quickly extracting every last millilitre of caffeine from a few spoonfuls of grounds. The second-most common comment on my travel kit this week has been, “Oh I wish I’d brought my Aeropress too” (the most common comment was, “Oh I wish I’d brought wine and rum too…”)
The fourth day of the Three Capes Track is acknowledged to be ‘the hard day’. Not only does it begin with the climb to the top of Mount Fortescue, a vertical rise of just under 250 metres, but it also has the psychological stressor of a scheduled bus waiting at the end of the walk to take us back to Port Arthur. We had booked on the later of the two buses, but nevertheless, the timetable was a niggle at the back of the mind.
There was rain in the cold and blustery air. We donned our waterproofs and set off. The showery weather matched well with the ecology of this side of the mountain, which tended to drippy rainforest and ferns and moss.
A nice pellet fire before we goReady for the mountainUp the steps to Mt FortescueStill climbing
The climb wasn’t as bad as advertised, although there were a lot of steps and it got a bit tiring. However, there were many mosses and ferns to look at, and when we finally got to the top, good although misty views back to yesterday’s Cape Pillar.
Mossy trees on Mount FortescueLooking back to Cape Pillar, from Mount Fortescue
The rain forest environment was quite different from the Banksia and She-Oak ecology that we had experienced on Cape Pillar. There were no Spring flowers here in the gloom, but instead an abundance of ferns and mosses.
Tasmanian Soft Tree FernTree fern overheadShiny Filmy-FernKangaroo Fern
We followed the path across the top of Mount Fortescue, and then steps leading down the other side. Abruptly, we emerged from the rain forest into young stands of Sassafras trees
Down the other sideInto the Sassafras
From here, we quickly dropped to a cliff-side path with the more familiar impenetrable jungle of bush plants, scattered with Spring flowers.
Looking back toward Mount FortescuePouched Coral-FernOyster Bay PineCaterpillar Acacia (I think)No idea what this is
The rain had died off, but now the wind picked up. It got pretty blustery out on the exposed rocky outcrops.
Windswept view back to yesterday’s Cape Pillar
Most of the Three Capes Track is private, in the sense that Parks & Wildlife only allow ticketed groups of 50 trekkers at a time, one group per cabin. The only faces that we have seen for the past three days have been familiar from our time on the trail and in the communal areas of the cabins.
The ranger at Retakunna had explicitly warned us that, near the end of Day Four, the Three Capes Track joins the public track to Cape Hauy. He mentioned that many people like to leave their packs at the junction and pick them up on their return, but pointed out that we should be mindful that – if left – they wouldn’t be as secure as we had gotten used to, because there would be other people about. In fact, when we reached the junction and encountered our first group of day-walkers, it was quite a shock to see the first face “not from our village”.
Most people left their packs anyway, wrapped in plastic to confound the currawongs, which apparently are prone to figure out zips and buckles in their quest for food. I carried mine anyway, for the same reasons as yesterday.
Bags in the bush
The wind was still gusting, but the weather was warm. The track to Cape Hauy is beautifully constructed of local stone, mainly in the form of steps. It was very pretty, but daunting to find that, whenever you turned a corner, there was more track stretching away to the horizon.
The endless steps to Cape Hauy
We followed the path until it wound its way to the summit of Cape Hauy. Buffeted by the wind, we stood and admired the dolerite stacks, the views, and some passing whales. Since Cape Hauy is a public area, there is a little guard rail around the top, something that has been deliberately omitted from the controlled parts of the Three Capes Track. Leaning on the rail, facing the mass known as the Candlestick, you can look down on the Totem Pole, popular with climbers.
The Candlestick on Cape HauyThe Totem PoleEnjoying the wind on top of Cape Hauy
The ascent of Cape Hauy really marks the end of the Three Capes Track experience. From here, it is but a gentle return to sea level at Fortescue Bay.
It had been a pleasant experience. Hardly a trek, more of a gently curated four-day amble through the bush. Parks & Wildlife have struck a careful line between tourist attraction and introductory hiking experience, with plenty of interesting tales without dumbing anything down. The paths and boardwalks are a necessary evil which insulate you and hold you aloof from the nature all around, but this is to some extent offset by the deliberate lack of signs, fences and guard rails away from the trail, which would otherwise detract from the wide sweeping vistas. The feeling of being part of a small nomadic village was a pleasant surprise, and enhanced the notion of being away from the stresses of civilisation.
Journey’s End, at Fortescue Bay
Even though we’d booked ourselves onto the late bus, we made it back to the Bay in time to catch the earlier one, but unfortunately that vehicle had been run off the road by a logging truck. Nobody was hurt, but the bus was now bogged in the roadside verge and couldn’t be moved. Pennicott Adventures did a great job of prioritising the walkers who needed to catch onward services, and used spare buses to ferry us all back to Port Arthur, tired but in good spirits.
I slept well on the second night of the Three Capes Track. I woke naturally at one in the morning, feeling refreshed, and went out for a little walk. Brush-tailed possums stared at me as I pottered about in their night-time territory. An incredibly bright star shone through the cloud layer. I wondered what it was, but it didn’t feel right to get out my phone and launch the star map, so I simply accepted its beauty and walked on.
Eventually I returned to bed, woke at dawn to light rain, and used the ingenious camp shower that I had noticed yesterday. I met Elizabeth in the kitchen and we brewed an Aeropress coffee, followed by fresh fried eggs over reconstituted Mexican beans.
One of the popular features of the third day of the Three Capes Track is that, because it is a there-and-back trip, you can store your pack in a dedicated hut and walk without it. I thought about it for a while, but in the end decided that I was perfectly happy with my pack, which was only a little over 20kg and had everything in it that I needed. I had carefully chosen its contents and I knew how to get to them instantly, so it seemed silly to try to strip it down any more. Just to show willing, I parked my sleeping bag and spare water bottle in the hut, and took everything else.
Day Three takes you out to on the narrow peninsular leading to Cape Pillar, tending to impenetrable Banksia bush on squishy mud. Reg and Tim, the locally famous bush-bashers who had spent several years breaking this trail, had found it very hard going. The ubiquitous boardwalk made it all rather easy for us.
Hurricane Heath, with views to Cape Pillar
The route is necessarily linear and windswept, and probably a bit miserable when the weather comes in, but today it was bright if overcast, and perfect for walking.
Once the path reached the Southern coastline of the Cape, it began to get rather spectacular, tending to dolomite columns and crumbling stacks.
Tasman Island hove into view, complete with lighthouse. There are harrowing stories about the difficulties of getting families and supplies up the sheer cliffs in the basket of a flying fox, before the light was automated.
Tasman Island
Almost at the end of the path, there is a short side-climb up onto The Blade, with marvellous views all around.
Steps up The BladeCape Pillar, from The BladeElizabeth on The Blade, with Tasman Island behindReinhard very pleased to have arrived at The BladeLooking back the way we have come
And now, the final short stretch to the end of the Cape Pillar Track and the Southernmost point of the Three Capes Track. But just because we were walking through dense Banksia on the thin end of a crumbling rocky peninsula, didn’t mean that there weren’t any more flowers.
Bushman’s Bootlace and Golden BushpeaGolden BushpeaMountain Pinkberry
But all good things come to an end, and our path ended here, on the cliffs above Cape Pillar.
Dolorite stacks at Cape PillarClaim Your Moment
We ate lunch on one of the stacks overlooking the sea (rice and fish again, it seems to work well), and headed back the way we had come, re-climbing The Blade on the way back (because why not?)
Day 3 was to give us one last surprise. The gentle boardwalk that we remembered lolloping effortlessly down this morning, turned out to be a long, long slope back up to Hurricane Heath, inflexibly hard stretches of boardwalk punctuated by little steps. My hip began to complain loudly for the first time today, and I sneaked some extra pain killers about half way up.
Passing Munro cabin, where we had awoken that morning, we picked up our stuff from the luggage hut, and continued on our way to Retakunna cabin, where the amenities were every bit as delightful as at Surveyors and Munro.
Relaxing at Retakunna Cabin
It got a bit cold later on, but we lit the pellet fire to warm the kitchen, then sat and drank coffee laced with rum as the rain came in over the scrubby mountain gums outside.
At the first hut of the Three Capes Track, I had a comfortable night’s rest and woke before dawn. I quietly left the cabin and limped out along the wooden boardwalk to the toilet block, which features beautifully clean dry toilets, the waste dropping into Apollo-shaped pods which are taken away by helicopter.
There was a warm desert wind blowing from the North. My hip was sore from an earlier injury but the painkillers were kicking in, so I did some gentle stretches in the pre-dawn light, and then made my way up to the helipad, which is a simple square of clean gravel at the edge of the compound, to watch the sunrise.
As the first rays of orange moved across the sky, a handful of other people slowly drifted out to stand quietly and widely separated on the pad. Each in our separate bubble of contemplation, we quietly watched the dawn of our first day on the trail. As the sun finally lifted clear of the horizon, the wind changed and brought with it a flurry of rain. Exchanging small private smiles, we sauntered slowly back to the cabins. Time for breakfast.
Elizabeth and I both like to enjoy our first meal of the day, so we had packed half a dozen fresh eggs each as a little luxury. Mine were in their cardboard carton, and one had broken, but it remained salvageable. We scrambled four eggs in ghee with cracked rice in one of the kitchen pans, served with fresh coffee from my Aeropress. Not bad at all.
We washed up, composted the shells, and packed everything else away. The weather outside had turned cool and blustery. We hoisted our packs, and set off.
The second day starts with the ascent of a double peak (Arthurs Peak / Crescent Mountain) connected by a low saddle. I was curious to see how my duff leg was going to cope. It’s only a 200m climb and the path is manicured into stone steps, but I was still a little puffed at the top of the first one. The painkillers and back brace were great, but presumably the tendon was still taking its toll inside.
To take my mind off that, Spring flowers were blooming everywhere, especially the Erect Guineaflower and the local subspecies of Hairy Boronia which is endemic to this peninsula.
Across the saddle to Crescent Mountain, the climb rewarded us with lovely views across the aptly named Crescent Bay, and beyond to Cape Raoul. It is a curiosity of the “Three Capes” Track that it actually follows the perimeter of just two capes, Pillar and Hauy. The third, Raoul, is only ever glimpsed in the distance.
Looking across Crescent Bay toward Cape Raoul
We stopped to admire the view, and then began the climb back down, following a beautifully constructed staircase of local stone.
The road ahead, along Cape PillarHiking down from Crescent Mountain
From the twin peaks, we descended into a flower-laden valley, where yellow-tailed cockatoos feasted on the ubiquitous banksias. The boardwalk made it easy for us, but the first walkers to break trail here spent several years forcing their way through impenetrable Banksia and She-Oak. Much of the work was done by a colourful couple called Reg and Tim, who named many of the features along the way, including ‘Where-the-freaking-hell-are-we Ridge’, which gave this basin its current name, Ellarwey Valley.
Much of the Three Capes Track is now protected by wooden walkways, and these do a great job of keeping everybody to the path and preventing erosion bogs, with the bonus of lifting you a little above the landscape so that you can see over the top of the scrub, but they are tediously hard and flat underfoot.
Boardwalk into Ellarwey Valley
Today, the valley was beautiful and the Spring flowers delightful, but it was very exposed, and easy to imagine that it would be a harsh trudge if the weather was coming from the Southern Ocean.
At the far end of the basin, we ascended Tornado Ridge where a short side-path led to a series of delightful benches overlooking Tornado Bay. Here we paused and put together a hearty lunch of pre-cooked rice and tinned fish.
Tornado Bay
Back on the main path, we followed the path alongside the plunging cliffs. A squall came in across Tornado Bay which had us scurrying for our waterproofs, but it swiftly passed by to one side.
The flora varied between wet and dry sclerophyll, but was still sprinkled with Spring blooms. The ground underfoot would have been boggy without the boardwalk. However, the wire-covered hard wooden surface had taken its toll on my boots, and I had to do a swift repair job. Thank goodness for cloth tape.
Arriving at the Munro cabin, we found that it was all pleasantly familiar. Several beautifully appointed fire-resistant buildings holding a variety of kitchens and dormitories. The marked difference was the availability of a hot shower located in the bush. Fill a bucket with hot water from a nearby gas boiler, pour the bucket into the shower bag, hoist it to the sky, and stand beneath! Lovely.
A nice hot shower in the bush
Where Surveyors has a deck for admiring sunsets over Cape Raoul, Munro has a viewing platform, complete with telescope, out over the whale migration route. Humpback whales hung out below for much of the afternoon and then, as dusk fell, a pod of dolphins came inshore to feed in the surf. Wedge-tailed eagles soared overhead.
Tonight’s dinner was reconstituted camp fare, but palatable enough: “Roast lamb and vegetables and mash” followed by rolls of sour cherry paste, with a glass of hot rum tea.
Dinner is served!
We should have carried more wine, really. The official recommendation was to carry three litres each of water per day, but I had barely touched mine, there would have been room for an extra litre of red instead. One of the other walkers had packed the silvered bag from the inside of a wine box, and had a little party sitting up on the helicopter pad with legs dangling toward the ocean, watching the whales.
I have always wanted to walk the Three Capes Track, a four-day hike around the Tasman Peninsula in Tasmania, but it is very popular and tickets are restricted and I never seemed to find the time to sort it out. I was delighted, then, to hear from my good friend Elizabeth that she was flying in the next month to do the trek, and that one of her party had cancelled. I instantly snaffled the spare ticket.
One week before the walk, I was cutting firewood up in my forest when I twisted awkwardly and hurt my leg. For a couple of days it was middling sore, and then it got so bad that I couldn’t sit or lie down, let alone walk. I went for remedial massage at my favourite Chinese doctor, and she did her best but shook her head and told me that I had torn one of the tendons in my hip. She gave me some lovely pain-relief patches which stopped the pain but didn’t help me to walk, and recommended that I buy a back-brace.
Our tickets were for Monday, and it was now Thursday. Off-the-shelf medication was having no effect, although the back-brace allowed me to stand unaided. I had ransacked my medicine cabinets for spare opiates, but none of them touched the incapacitating pain, so I begged my GP to give him something that would allow me to walk. He equipped me with Meloxicam for inflammation and Pregabalin for neuropathic pain. The published side effects were a motley selection, among them “unable to think”, “make bad decisions”, and – my favourite – “hold incorrect beliefs in the face of evidence”. Hiking in the wilderness for four days, what could possible go wrong?
Pregabalin needs a bit of tuning to each individual, so I upped the dose until I could make it through the day. My brain certainly felt a bit soupy, and I had trouble with simple arithmetic. My family told me that I was responding slowly but seemed happier than usual.
By Saturday, I could reliably walk a few tens of metres, so in the evening I strapped on an empty backpack over my back-brace and experimentally walked up and down the street. It was only moderately painful, so I jumped over a small creek. I didn’t fall or cry out. I had 48 kilometres to do next week. I recorded in my diary, “Only two more sleeps. I can do this!”
On Sunday, Elizabeth came to stay, and on Monday we drove over to the Port Arthur Heritage Centre to check in for the walk. Officially we had also purchased tickets for the Heritage Site itself, but there wasn’t really time to do anything about it, so we grabbed a bite to eat instead and joined the other twenty-odd hikers on the sea dock.
Tasmania Parks and Wildlife have joined forces with Pennicott Wilderness Journeys to provide a boat service across the bay to the Tasman Peninsula. I’ve taken Pennicott Wilderness boats several times, and they are always good. My favourite is the Bruny Island cruise, but even though the Three Capes boat is nominally a ferry service, this one didn’t disappoint either.
Looking back on Port Arthur Heritage Centre
The actual route across the bay is variable and weather-dependent (or, to be more accurate, swell-dependent, due to the big rollers that typically come in from the Southern Ocean). On our trip, the sea was uncharacteristically smooth, and so we enjoyed a jaunt to see colonies of cormorants and long-nosed fur seals, before arriving at the shelving beach of Denman’s Cove.
Long-nosed fur seals in Port Arthur Bay
The Three Capes Track begins with a sandy wade to shore from the landing-craft style ramp at the bow of the ferry.
The track began between two large rocks at the edge of the beach, with a wooden sculpture. Almost immediately, we found ourselves sharing the path with a small but determined echidna, which wobble alongside us completely unperturbed until distracted by a nice rotten log full of ants.
Sharing the path with an echidnaBlack Peppermint gum in flower
There were spring flowers everywhere, and we dawdled a bit to admire them, and a selection of views across the water to Port Arthur as the path slowly climbed up toward the cluster of cabins known as ‘Surveyors’.
Purple Love Creeper in flower
There were two tempting beaches along the way, not only Denman’s Cove but also Surveyor’s Cove. We knew that we would not be back down at sea level for several days, and it would have been fun to stay and frolic awhile. The water was warm, the sun was strong, and there was very little wind, but the idea of getting to our first stop, the Surveyors Cabin, was equally appealing.
We really hadn’t known what to expect, since the word ‘cabin’ can cover a multitude of sins, but these were spectacular. Spotlessly clean with well-organised bunks, well-equipped camp kitchens, and plenty of space outside to sprawl and admire the sun setting behind the spires of Cape Raoul.
The main social cabin at Surveyors
Each cabin is overseen by an on-site warden, who stays in a cabin of their own on the edge of the site. It sounds like an ideal job; they pack in all their supplies, stay for a few days greeting walking parties and cleaning up after them, hike out for a long weekend, then pack in to the next cabin in the cycle.
One of the dorm blocks at Surveyors
The ticketing system ensures that there are never more than 48 walkers in one place at one time, which sounds like a lot of people, but in fact it all felt spacious and uncrowded, and it was always possible to find space to put a kettle on or to find somewhere comfortable to sit.
One corner of one of the two kitchens
Since the first day was so short and we didn’t have to worry too much about spoilage, Elizabeth and I had elected to bring a one-off meal of steak and wine, and so dined that night in some style. Since we were packing all our food in and rubbish out, the rest of our inventory was freeze-dried to save weight. We ate and chatted, washed up, put the organics in a compost bin, and carefully rolled up the rest of the waste into freezer bags.
There was a well-stocked library and a supply of games, but as dusk fell, most of us drifted off to bed.
My bunk room was calm, dark, and comfortable. There were larger and smaller rooms, and the beds had been allocated according to the demographic of the group. I was sharing with a single man and a father and son; Elizabeth with the ladies and children in the group that she had booked with.
Each bunk was equipped with a foam sleeping pad, and we had all been advised to bring a sleeping bag and ear plugs (as defence against snorers), and to roll up some spare clothes as a pillow.
My dorm room at Surveyors
Tomorrow we would be heading into the thick bush of Cape Pillar. But for now, some rest.
While backing the yacht out of her berth the other weekend, the engine overheated. It had already done this once recently, and on that occasion had filled the bilge with oil. I had since carefully (and expensively) replaced all of the metal oil pipes in case of invisible pinholes, and since then the engine had been behaving itself, so it was disconcerting to hear the alarm shrieking again. This time, before we killed the motor, I peeked over the stern to check the exhaust, and sure enough it was running dry. There was something amiss with the raw water cooling pump.
With the engine cover removed, I could see that the cover to the pump’s impeller housing was now streaked with green, which it hadn’t been before. Clearly it was now leaking sea water, but it is well known on the Yanmar 1GM10 that a leaky pump cover can drip subtly and almost invisibly onto one of the oil lines, causing it to rust.
Salty corrosion on the pump coverSalty corrosion on the hose ends
Perhaps this was the ultimate cause of my assumed pinhole leak? Perhaps, but a slight water drip didn’t explain my current problem. I removed the cover, expecting to find the impeller broken up into chunks, but it was still in place and in reasonably good shape. Curious.
I unfastened the clamp holding the flexible sea water inlet pipe and pulled it off the pump, forgetting that I had not first closed the through-hull. There was a violent spray of sea water which only stopped after I reached behind the engine and smacked the stopcock lever with a rubber mallet. Shaking the water out of my hair and rolling my eyes at my carelessness, I returned to the task at hand.
With the hoses disconnected, it was time to remove the pump, but this was easier said than done. Perhaps due to long-term microscopic leakage, but certainly at least in part due to long-term neglect, all three of the pump’s mounting bolts were rusty and rounded. There was nothing for a spanner to grip.
I was contemplating the traditional solutions (welding a rod to the rusty bolt head, chiselling a groove to provide purchase for an impact driver), when on the internet I discovered “bolt extractor sockets”. What a marvellous invention. They’re like a regular socket, but instead of a hex shape inside, they contain angled blades. The idea is that you hammer them onto the rounded nut or bolt so that they cut their way on and hold tight, at which point you simply undo them with a regular socket handle.
“Bolt Extractor Sockets” with internal blades instead of hexagonals
I bought a set at Repco. The kit looked solid, but the concept sounded far too easy to be true. I was wrong; the first bolt came off like a dream. After a little fiddling, so did the second one.
There is an immutable rule of mechanics, that – regardless of where you choose to start or what you are working on – it is always the final fastener that causes the most trouble. The third pump bolt was no different. I hammered home the extractor socket just fine, but the third bolt sits partially obscured by the crankshaft pulley, and my socket wrench is just a little too fat to fit between the pulley and the bolt head.
I really really didn’t want to remove the crankshaft pulley. In that direction lies madness. Instead, I went to Nubco and purchased a beautiful little socket wrench with a low profile and short handle, built especially for those awkward tight corners. Back on the boat, it slipped perfectly under the pulley, and in a jiffy out came the water pump.
Mini socket wrenchThe pump removed
I could clearly see the moving parts inside, and frankly it didn’t look too bad. I needed to deal with the leak, but the rest looked OK. Still, there was a problem with the pump, so I went ahead and disassembled it. Most of the guts came out easily, but I had to pry and chisel the oil and water seals, and they would never work again. Nevertheless, they had looked fine before I mangled them.
Deconstructed Yanmar 1GM10 raw water pump
I asked the lovely people at Spectrum Engineering for Yanmar’s full rebuild kit. They didn’t have one, but they carefully examined my disassembled parts, gave me back the ones that they judged unharmed, and replaced the bearings and seals from their shelves. The lady asked if I wanted a gasket for the impeller cover. I said, “what gasket?” because my pump hadn’t had one. No wonder it was leaking.
After scrubbing the old parts clean with toilet gel, vinegar, and bicarb, the rebuild was pretty simple, apart from a rookie mistake when I was drifting in the new bearing seal with the back of a socket but unaccountably got it wedged at a slight angle. Back to Spectrum to get another replacement, and then the job was done.
Yanmar 1GM10 raw water pump, cleaned up and ready for reassembly
I’d decided to replace the seawater hoses that feed the pump, because they had seemed a bit crispy to the touch when I pulled them off. My local Repco supplied a Z-hose which I could cut into lengths including the tricky moulded curves.
Back at the boat, I laid down a puppy-training pad under the engine (marvellous for soaking up spillage, and much cheaper than posh chandlery pads) and pulled off the old seawater hoses. The stopcock was of course still closed, but residual water spilled out as I got to work replacing them, using new stainless hose clips.
Once both pump and pipes were installed, I folded up the saturated puppy-training pad, dropped it in the bin, started the bilge pump to clear the overspill, and watched the shells tumble along in the lowest bilge. Shells?
I stopped the bilge pump, and had a closer look. There was a handful of tiny mussel shells rattling around, which must have been ejected from the inlet hose when I accidentally flushed it over my head.
What the heck were shells doing in the intake hose? I remembered reaching behind the engine and whacking the stopcock lever with the mallet. There had been plenty of room to swing the hammer. I got out the Dolphin torch and peered over the engine block and into the gloom under the cockpit sole. I could clearly see the inlet hose, leading directly from the stopcock to the pump inlet; no filter, no basket, just raw seawater and whatever happened to be floating in it.
I can only imagine that the shells have been tumbling inside the hose, occasionally falling across the intake and blocking it, falling temporarily free when the engine and pump stops, ready to pop up and block the hose by random chance when the pump re-starts. I don’t want to imagine how many other shells have been crushed to fragments by the impeller and sent to circulate through the engine.
Tiny mussel shell in the palm of my handNice new raw-water strainer
I bought and fitted a strainer, fired up the engine, and sat happily on the dock watching the salt water being pumped back into the sea.
Before we bought her, our pocket cruiser Cheval de Mer had been in the same berth for some 20 years, through two previous live-aboard owners. For most of that time, she has sat with her bow facing into the dock on six permanently spliced mooring lines, which had been specifically created to hold her in position with easy access to a ladder up onto the dock along the starboard side.
We have no protective toe rails on Cheval de Mer, and the mooring lines had been rubbing in the same places for so long, that they had chafed right through the gel coat on the gunwale to the glass fibres beneath. I’ve sealed the worn holes with West System resin, and preventing further damage is on the to-do list.
Poly rope slowly sawing through the fibreglass
I had been checking the dockside fittings now and again, and had already doubled-up on two of the lines because they were looking a bit old. Then one winter’s night there was a wind event recorded as 120km/h, so I dropped by the marina next morning to check that all was well. There’s a short mooring line that is used to keep her close to the ladder, but the land-side connection isn’t really visible as it is hidden under the dock. That morning I found the mooring line floating free, with the rope eye and metal thimble worn completely through.
Mooring line thimble worn right through
Clearly, I was overdue to replace all the lines, but the reason that I hadn’t done it properly yet was that I didn’t want to just replace them ‘as is’. My preference is to be able to pop out for a single-handed sail now and again, and so far I haven’t done that on Cheval de Mer because of the difficulty of reversing out of the tight corner in which she is berthed, an action that really needs two people, one to steer and the other to fend-off. I wanted to make up new lines which would allow us to berth her stern-to, giving me the opportunity to simply motor out of the berth whenever I wanted to. In case you’re wondering, berthing in reverse will be much simpler than departing in reverse, due to the configuration of the pontoons and available hand-holds.
We waited for our chance when the wind was low and the tide was slack, so that we could turn her around in her berth while hastily fabricating temporary lines. I had an idea in my head that we would push her out and turn her around by hand, but Bronwyn pooh-poohed that plan and said that she’d simply motor out to sea, turn around, and come back in. Since somebody needed to be on the foredeck to fend off, and somebody else needed to be on shore to work the lines, we borrowed the services of our friend Peter, and thank goodness that we did.
We arrived as planned on a wind-free afternoon at the slack of high tide and started the motor, an old but serviceable Yanmar single-cylinder which thudded reassuringly as Bronwyn backed Cheval de Mer out of her berth. All went well until she was out in the channel and making that tricky first turn, and then the overheating alarm came on. Last time that happened, we ended up with a bilge full of oil, so Bronwyn hastily killed the engine and we completed the manoeuvre by hand, using lines, ironically as I’d originally planned. Luckily there were three adults and a child to help with the fending-off.
We got her around without too much fuss, and then pulled her gently into the berth. As the stern swim platform came gently level with the end of the berth, Bronwyn somehow fell off it and banged both thighs on the concrete dock. It hurt a lot, and resulted in significant and colourful bruising.
While Bronwyn sat quietly and thought nice thoughts, the rest of us juggled the available lines into suitable lengths, and it wasn’t long before we had her nicely positioned. In fact, with the stern swim platform facing the end dock, there’s little need to use the midships ladder at all, you can just step on and off the swim platform whatever the tide. It’s a bit of a mystery why the live-aboard owners chose to keep her bow-to in the first place.
Back at home, I got out a large roll of poly rope, and taught myself to splice an eye. It always seems so complicated when you read about it, but in practice it turned out to be pretty simple to make a slightly amateurish but strong eye in the end of the rope.
As always, practice makes perfect, and over a few weeks I made a full set, complete with new stainless-steel shackles and thimbles for the landward side.
Fancy new stainless fittingsFancy new splice
I tied the boat-end in a temporary bowline, so that I had some flexibility in choosing a good final length in all tides and weathers without committing yet to a splice at both ends. Meanwhile, I need to figure out what’s wrong with the raw water cooling pump…
Every time I drive over the bridge to approach our new house in Kingston, Tasmania, my eye is drawn to a wedge-shaped pillar of rock sticking up over the horizon. The map shows it as “Cathedral Rock”, part of Mount Wellington National Park, but to me it was a red flag crying “Climb me! Climb me!”
Cathedral Rock, in Mount Wellington National Park, Tasmania
This is the story of the day that I chose to climb up Cathedral Rock. To be clear, it’s not actually a vertical climb, as there is a track. The peak is 880 metres above sea level, and the track starts 600 metres lower than that.
My walk began at the North West Bay River, which is wide and shallow and mainly boulders. There are two starting points, and I tried both of them. There is access up the obvious private road from the car park, but it was more fun to climb down into the trickling river and jump from rock to rock up the river bed. After about half a kilometre, the sides of the ravine dropped to river level, allowing me to rejoin the official path, which was anyway always visible on the left bank.
North West Bay RiverHeading upstream
The Cathedral Rock track at this point is narrow, and easy to see in the sunshine. I thought that it might be a bit hard to follow in darkness or in rain, but wherever there was a change of direction, there was a metal pole with a small fluorescent orange triangle to mark the way.
Despite the fact that it was still following the river, the path very soon began to climb steeply upward between the tree ferns.
The start of the trailDicksonia antarctica tree fernsStarting to go upHelpful orange markers
I was already starting to feel a little out of breath when one of the orange triangles directed me to turn ninety degrees and walk directly away from the river. The path steepened noticeably, up what appeared to be a flash gully.
After only about half an hour on the trail, the path widened, but the slope was continuous and relentless and I was starting to pant heavily. As I trudged onward, sweat poured down my bowed head and dripped off the end of my nose.
I heard voices behind, and two merrily chatting young couples breezed past as if I was standing still. Cursing under my breath, I wondered if this was the first time in all my life of climbing tall things, that anybody has passed me on the trail. Am I getting old?
Youngsters!Still going up
I plodded on, through stands of razor-sharp cutting grass. Growing up overseas, I still find this plant fascinating, grass that can hurt you. We have five kinds in Tasmania, and I can never resist checking it with my finger. Blood welled instantly. Yup, still sharp.
Scattered on the ground were the shredded leaves of Silver Wattle which had fallen from overhead. It was late in the year, but when the wattle is in flower, it sends sap to the soft outer leaf shoots to attract Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos. As the birds tear into the stems to feast on the sweet sugary liquid, their wings get dusted with wattle pollen, which they then transfer to the flowers of other trees.
Ghania cutting grassSevered Silver Wattle leaves
The path kept on climbing. I remarked to myself that, of all the tall things that I have climbed all over the world in all kinds of weather conditions, this little track in the relative cool of the Tasmania Autumn, was up there with the hardest of them.
I really needed a break, but I have a rule about resting on hills. Never rest at the bottom or middle of a hill, only ever rest at the top or on a flat. The idea is to stop at an achievement, and to start on flat ground.
I was dying for a rest, but there was no let-up. The path just angled steeply up, zig-zagging as it went. I was at the point of cursing my own stupid rules, when I rounded a bend and the path became briefly level for about ten blessed metres. Well, almost level. Good enough. I slumped down against a comfortable tree, drank half a litre of water, and closed my eyes for a moment.
Heading up and on, the trail narrowed and, finally, became less steep. Now it was more like walking up a hill, rather than pumping every step with eyes fixed on the end of your boots.
Then, about an hour after starting out, I arrived at the base of the final scramble to the summit. The guides for this walk make no mention of the killer ascent thus far, but wax lyrical about the dangers of the final 400 metres, giving it black diamonds and even a warning sign. I was interested to see just how bad this next part could be! As far as I could see, the track just disappeared up a rocky watershed. What would I find next?
Despite the warnings, the final stretch was just a simple scramble, zig-zagging up a rocky incline with plenty of hand- and foot-holds, nothing at all compared to the hard slog of the endless track below.
The summit was a collection of rocky outcrops, firmly gripped by small stands of Black She-Oak and Needle Bush.
Black She-Oak Allocasuarina littoralisNeedle Bush Hakea lissosperma
The views were spectacular, all the way south down the Huon Valley, and East toward Bruny Island. I could also look back and see the road outside my house, where I first looked up at this rock and wondered if it was climbable.
I made it!Looking east across the d’Entrecasteaux. My house is about dead centre.Looking south to the Huon Valley. My forest is on the horizon.
It was nice to enjoy the open vistas to the South East, but it was the terrain to the North West that was interesting for future expeditions. Cathedral Rock sits on the cusp of a bowl that surrounds the upper reaches of the North West Bay River. From this altitude, I could see that the river bed up here is similar to the terrain at the bottom, mostly dry with flat rocks. I wondered if it would be possible to follow the river bed all the way up here into the bowl, and then climb out of the far end. The map showed that the river intersects with the Pipeline Track which would take me from Mt Wellington National Park and down into the city.
North West Bay River far belowFollow the ridge… must be a way throughLooking up to the ridge at the head of the river valley
I also looked around to see if there was a track along the ridge top, because in theory I should be able to follow the edge of the bowl around to Wellington Falls, and before long I stumbled on a thin trail that led over the blade of exposed rock and on to the next outcrop.
The path to Wellington Falls climbs to the right. Mt Montague to the left.
I chose not to follow any further on this day. I would need to start a lot earlier to get all the way round, and in any case my car was down at the bottom of the Cathedral Rock track and I had no way of retrieving it if I walked down to Hobart. There is, however, plenty of food for thought for my next trip.
I found a peaceful flat rock to sit on, contemplated the view, and ate some lunch. Then, having sated both mind and body, I began the scramble back down to the track.
As before, the rocky scramble was the easiest part. The long hike back down the steep trail looked simple, but again the relentless slope inflicted a slow muscle burn that didn’t let up until I reached the river.
It was a sunny Sunday morning with light brisk winds, a perfect day for a family sail after weeks of incessant rain. We climbed aboard, cast off, and motored out of our berth.
Immediately an alarm sounded from the panel in the cockpit. I heard it from the bow where I was keeping lookout, but I had only just replaced the depth sounder and had not calibrated it, so I assumed that it was responding to the shallow bottom under the keel. At any rate, squeezing out between rows of expensive boats on a blustery day is not the time to be focussing on electronic problems.
The alarm cut in and out as we navigated around the pontoons, and as we passed out into deep water through the arms of the breakwater I waited for the it to stop. It didn’t, and I saw Bronwyn duck forward from the helm to look more closely at the panel, and she shouted, “it says Low Press”.
Oh dear.
I stuck my head down the hatch and found that our nice clean white bilges were awash with engine oil.
Despite having lost all its oil, the one-cylinder donk was still plugging away, so we used it to get to a nearby mooring buoy. A gust caught us and we missed, and had to go round again, praying that the engine would keep on going. It did, we tied up, and killed the motor.
Now what?
We were stuck out in the Derwent River, on a mooring of unknown provenance. It looked big and well-kept, but we’d never seen anybody use it before.
We had the dinghy on board, although it temporarily lacked either a drainage bung or rowlocks. Still, it was easily enough to get the family back to the marina with diligent use of kayak paddles. We tied up the dinghy in our berth, and went home.
On Monday, we arranged for the yacht club to give us a tow to the yard, so that we could get her out of the water and have a look. It wasn’t really necessary to get her up on land, but she was overdue for an antifoul anyway, and because we bought her quickly for cash, we’d never seen her bottom, so it seemed like a reasonable opportunity to kill several birds with one stone.
That doesn’t look rightOn tow back to the marinaOut she comesNeeds a bit of work
As soon as we were up on the cradle, I pumped the oil out of the bilge and cleaned up the mess. The bilge pump – which had never worked very efficiently – was saturated in oil so I took it home for a clean. The unused piping for the water tanks (I’d removed three large tanks when we set her up for sailing rather than live-aboard) was similarly contaminated, so they went too.
The engine was pristine and clean. There was no sign of any leaks, no trails of oil, nothing. The engine sat on its blocks, and the oil sat beneath, with no indication of how it got out.
The oil filter felt rough to touch underneath, and I wondered if it had developed a pinhole. It was very, very tightly fitted, and there was evidence (in the form of crinkles on the underside) that somebody had cranked it on with a strap wrench. I had to puncture it to get it off, so destroyed any real evidence of pinhole leakage. There were also two metal oil pipes that dipped down into the bilges, where they had likely sat in rainwater for some time while the boat was unattended before we bought it, and these pipes showed a crusting of rust. I dismantled it all and ordered replacement parts.
In the meantime, I got busy with the hull. Once I’d power-washed and chipped off all the shellfish, the fibreglass was down to a previous layer of paint, and the steel keel was practically back to metal. There was a chunk missing from the rudder, where an exposed internal screw head was now visible. I applied two-pack resin where appropriate, and two-pack underwater undercoat wherever I thought I needed it.
There was a hole hereComplete undercoat for the keel
I would have preferred to rub the whole keel down and apply a smooth finish to the anti-foul, but time was short, the cradle was needed for racers rubbing down for the start of the season, and I did also have to work at my day job. A couple of top coats applied with a roller would have to suffice, on this occasion. She looked OK though.
While she was out of the water, I replaced the sacrificial anodes. The keel anodes were ready for replacement, but the one on the prop shaft was in relatively pristine condition, most likely because it hadn’t been fitted properly and only sat loosely on the shaft. To be fair, the previous owner had warned me that he had replaced it in the water and he wasn’t certain that he had tightened it enough, so I was glad to see any anode at all. I had a working theory that if the shaft anode wasn’t functioning fully, enough current might have leaked to burn a pinhole in the thinnest mild steel in the engine, which would be the oil filter.
These anodes have been working wellTightly fitted around the shaft, this time
The new set of (very expensive) oil pipes arrived from Yanmar. When the dealer got them out of the box, my first response was, “Gosh, they’re so shiny!”
He gave me a knowing look and said “Aaaah, you’ll have the old ones, then.” Some years back, Yanmar changed the design from steel to copper because of corrosion issues. Not quite a smoking gun, but a useful pointer that I might be on the right track.
Old and new pipes for a Yanmar 1GM10
I fitted the pipes, and then briefly fired up the engine. It started, didn’t knock, and the oil stayed in. I only let it run for about 15 seconds because there was no seawater coolant in the intakes. The proof would be when we put her back in the water and warmed the engine up, but at least there weren’t fountains of oil everywhere.
Pausing only to give the bilges a final clean, and then pessimistically lining them with puppy pads, we pushed her back into the sea.
Far cheaper than marine cleanersBack into the water she goes
We tied her up to the jetty, and fired up the engine. We stared fixedly at the bilges. Neither oil nor water appeared.
We waited, and listened to the rhythmic pop-pop-pop of the single cylinder. There was no oil in the bilges.
We put her into gear and strained the engine against the mooring ropes. There was no oil in the bilges.
We sat around until she was good and warm, and until the waiting rubberneckers had lost interest and got back to work, and then we quietly backed off the pontoon and opened her up. She had far more power than we were used to, and her bow pointed eagerly out into the river. She ran like silk.
Our new boat leaked when it rained. It wasn’t subtle; water poured in around the badly sealed acrylic windows, and through the screw holes, and through the wooden framing.
Not only is it raining inside, but you can see the mould along the wall beneath.
Given the sheer volume of rain water that we were pumping out of the bilges on every visit, it was clear that this was Item 1 on the agenda.
For the last decade, Cheval de Mer had been sitting in her berth, with the starboard side facing into the prevailing weather. The port side wasn’t too bad, but to starboard the paint had flaked off, and parts of the forty-year-old marine-ply superstructure had degraded to such an extent that they were water-permeable.
Rain damage on the starboard fore-quarterDefinitely in need of some love and attention
My first task was to undo the dozens and dozens of dome-nuts that held the windows on. This was tricky without an assistant, and I didn’t have a mole-grip to hand. I rigged up a spanner hanging from a line on the outside, which provided just enough resistance to undo the screw from the inside. Then return outside to reset the spanner, then back inside. Repeat… it took a while.
The old acrylic windows to starboard then popped out easily in a flurry of weathered wood-flakes.
The starboard window frame revealed
The port-side windows were fixed with sterner stuff. They had been glued in with a strong sealant, and the only way to get them out was to shatter them with a blunt implement. Eventually I extracted all the shards from the frame, only to find that the sealant itself was still firmly bonded to the paint all down the port side, completely immune to scraping. I got it off by applying a heat-gun, which didn’t affect the sealant but which bubbled up the paint underneath so that I could get the whole mess off with a scraper.
The port side is not so damaged, but has its own problems
Even though the wood was sodden in places, once covered in a tarpaulin it dried out without warping, although there were significant cracks and dints. Woodwork is not my favourite activity, so I cast around for an easier way to repair the damage. It was then that I discovered the delights of the amazing West System 105 epoxy resin.
This stuff is incredible. You mix it up and slather it onto wood (or fibreglass), and it soaks its way inside the layers, chasing away any water, and then sets to a hard but slightly flexible finish. I spent several days happily painting it onto the exposed wood, and watching it vanish completely inside, before finally it had seeped in everywhere it wanted to go and the final coat stayed on the surface, looking like a thick varnish.
Starboard: West System 105Port: Heat-gun and Knead-It
You know how this goes. Sand, fill, sand, fill, sand, fill…
Once I’d done the major work with West System 105, I filled small imperfections with Knead-It, a two-part filler that comes in a handy tube which means that you can just tear off exactly the amount that you need. Eventually there were so many different colours and textures that I couldn’t work out by eye what was flat and what wasn’t, so it was time to add some paint.
I used Norglass Shipshape two-pack primer, which sticks to pretty much everything that my boat is made of. On my first go, I made the mistake of brushing it straight after mixing, when it was still runny and very hard to work with, but I learned to patiently wait the crucial first ten minutes for it to go off. It went on pretty well after that.
Once it was all the same colour, my eye was no longer distracted by all the different textures, and I could properly see the lumps and bumps that needed sanding and filling.
That starboard fore-quarter again, looking very colourful, but nearly done
A second coat of primer, a final sand and minor filling, and then a top-coat of two-pack Norglass Norcote. For a short while, at least one part of the boat looked like a million dollars.
Shiny!
I waited a couple of hours for it to dry, but the weather was against me. The temperature was hovering around ten degrees, which is the minimum for curing, and the surface stayed resolutely tacky. Rain was forecast and I had to pick up my daughter from school, so I covered the boat in a tarp.
That night, the wind blew the tarp in so that it stuck to the paint, and I had to peel the whole thing off. Then I had to sand off most of my hard-won polished finish, and deal with some slumping that had occurred in the cold of the night. But at least the surface was now relatively flat and white, and I could move on to the next phase.
Using butcher paper taped to the dock, I made up templates of the new windows that I wanted to fit. They were significantly larger than the originals, because I wanted to completely cover the areas that had been weakened by screw-holes.
Templates for the new windowsCheval de Mer waits patiently
Following local advice, I took the templates to Eagle Plastics in Hobart, who gave me a warm welcome and made me some lovely new acrylic windows, 5mm thick with a bevelled edge and a smoky tint.
Scrolling through sailing forums, it soon became clear that the only choice for adhesive was 3M Very High Bond (VHB) tape, which was readily available on the internet from Embossing and Tape Supplies (ETS). This double-sided tape is incredibly easy to use and forms a powerful bond with both the acrylic window and the painted boat.
For the first window, I did make a mistake, in that I didn’t quite butt up the black tape to completely hide the underlying white paint. I had thought that the tint and the shadow would hide the joins, but I was wrong.
3M VHB tape applied (with visible joints, sorry)You can see the joints around the edges of the window
In retrospect, I should have used a little black paint either on the window frame or around the inside edges of the window, but such is the power of VHB that you only get the one chance: Once the window was in, I wasn’t going to get it out again without a large hammer.
I did better with the rest of the windows, though. You live and learn.
Port-side forward window, without visible joints
And finally, to make the whole thing waterproof, I needed to run beading around the outside edges.
Now, according to the forums, there is one and one only solution, and that is to use Cow Dorning’s CowSil 795. In my innocence I had assumed that I would just go and buy some when I needed it, but this American product is not widely available in Tasmania, and I wasn’t going to wait to have it shipped from the US.
I contacted the local Fibreglass Shop who advised that their marine customers have always had good results with an Australian product, FixTech FS200, and moreover they had it waiting for me in stock.
I got out the 3M Scotch blue (in my opinion the only worthwhile masking tape), and carefully taped both the acrylic window and the surrounding painted woodwork.
All masked up with Scotch Blue
Like any silicone product, it was quite messy and needed care, but I found that it went on easily enough as long as I didn’t apply it too thickly. The back of a bamboo teaspoon gave a nice finish.
I removed the tape straight away, which gave me the chance to fix up any over-thick portions with my trusty wooden spoon (wetted with soapy water) before it started to cure. No matter what you do, silicone gets everywhere, but I found that dropped spots were easily removed with Goof Off, which also served to clean my spoon and fingers between applications.
I used to play in the surf when I was younger, usually in a kayak, sometimes on wind-surfers and occasionally on long-boards, always in the freezing deep and stormy Atlantic off the coast of Wales. We never had any surf lessons but had a lot of fun.
More recently, in the warmer waters of Australia, and especially now that our daughter is older, we have spent some time on boogie-boards.
Berrima and Bronwyn enjoy a bit of a boogie at Lilli Pilli NSW
I have also started going out on my inflatable stand-up paddle-board, but while I am fine in lagoons and in flat waters, as soon as I hit any surf, I fall off.
Stand Up Paddle-board at North Durras NSW
Some time ago, we booked surf lessons with Broulee Surf School on the New South Wales coast, but what with COVID-19 and interrupted travel plans, we never got to take them. Roll on to this week, and we were staying at our favourite holiday house in Lilli Pilli, just up the road from Broulee, and so finally we were able to take them up.
We arrived in the morning to a good rolling swell of late-breaking waves. Recent storms had rearranged the bottom to provide an interesting selection of rips and hollows. Three of us met Robert, our instructor, for a couple of hours of personal lessons.
Ready to rock (hopefully), at Broulee Surf School
Robert was very relaxed and confident, but must have wondered what he’d let himself in for with three middle-aged suburbanite newbies. Our first exercise was to lie on our boards on the sand, and lift into a push-up and then downward dog… and repeat. In retrospect, I wonder how many people fail that first test?
Since I was in the water, and didn’t feel like breaking out the Go-Pro, I don’t have any photos of us, but I do have pictures of Berrima doing the same course on a different day.
Berrima demonstrates the technique
Once we’d mastered the art of correctly placing our feet, it was time to get into the water.
Once again, Robert instilled us with confidence, holding the board as we lay prone, and then gently pushing us onto smaller waves so that we could pop up and practice the standing manoeuvre.
As we got more confident, he pushed us onto bigger and bigger waves. Sometimes we wiped out, but the first time that I pumped the board from side to side to steer all the way to the beach, I was so stoked. A huge grin split my face. I was surfing!
Berrima demonstrates how it should be done
Of course, Robert was doing all the set-up and positioning me perfectly on each wave. When I tried catching my own, it didn’t go nearly so well! But the buzz was amazing. Even with the relatively small waves, it was very tiring to fight back out to where Robert bobbed beyond the break, but every time I struggled straight back out, knowing already that I wanted the next run to be better.
Each time he set me up for a wave, Robert just offered me one quiet piece of advice before letting me go. He didn’t need to do more than that, because it quickly became clear as soon as I was moving whether or not I’d made a mistake, even (as I quickly found out) a recoverable one. Whether it was a complete wipe-out or (whoop! whoop!) a great run all the way to shore, a minute later I was swimming back out shaking my head, determined to do better on the next run.
We were driving from Hobart in Tasmania to Lilli Pilli in New South Wales for a beach holiday, but rather than do the whole thing in one boring drive, we decided to pitch camp a couple of times, and visit the Colquhoun Mountain Bike Trail in Victoria along the way.
On our previous mountain bike adventure we had rented bikes on site, but this was supposed to be a budget trip, so we decided to bring our own bikes with us, particularly as Bronwyn had just bought a perilously expensive e-bike.
This entailed the purchase of a hitch-mounted bike rack that could take the weight of the e-bike. After some research we found that there was only really one make and model available to us in Hobart at short notice, the Yakima Hold-Up, so we went with that one.
Can we see the car? Sort of.
When folded, the rack occludes the car’s number plate, and when loaded with bikes, it partially occludes the number plate and also some of the lights. I was concerned about the legality of driving around like this, but after attempting to order a bike rack number-plate from Service Tasmania (sorry, not available for up to six weeks) and an accessory light-bar (sorry, not available at any cost), we took local advice (“just go, nobody cares”) and headed for the ferry terminal.
Since it was a public holiday weekend, we passed a number of police breathalyser and speed checks and so on and indeed discovered that nobody seemed to care.
The Spirit of Tasmania ferry arrived in Melbourne after a calm overnight crossing of the Bass Strait, and as soon as we disembarked, we breakfasted on the beach close by the terminal.
Breakfast done, we headed East through Gippsland, stopping on the way for a gentle cycle around a lake, then moving on to the Colquhoun Mountain Bike Park which really blew us away. It’s a free track inside the State Forest, consisting of a figure-of-eight black diamond track a little over 15km long, amusingly called the Scalectric Loop. Given our amateur status, we decided to tackle just the bottom ring of the 8 on this occasion, although we left open the idea of completing the top ring if we felt up to it.
The ride began on the Start Line Track, which was comprised of gentle rolling turns through beautiful forest before devolving into the Lollipop Track. This second part is hilarious. It follows the line of a muddy creek down hill, sweeping down to cross the creek before turning back to cross it again… and again… and again…
Each crossing had muddy water at the bottom, or a steep muddy descent, or a steep muddy climb out the other side, or some combination of all three. And it crossed, and crossed, and crossed back and forth. I have no idea how many times we splashed through the creek. Bronwyn was OK on her e-bike, and little Berrima was fine with her unlimited low-to-the-ground seven-year-old energy, but my 20-year old Giant hybrid bike with city tyres was in a permanent slide, and at one point I lost focus for a fraction of a second and crashed somewhat spectacularly, thankfully missing most of the trees alongside the muddy descent, but banging my knee pretty hard.
After many, many creek crossings and perhaps 6 kilometres we were starting to feel a bit tired, even though by now the Lollipop Track had turned into the less demanding Log Track. We were quite relieved to find a signposted ‘B-line’ which skipped the last few crossings and allowed us to quit the trail and ride back to the car park, covered in mud and very satisfied.
Muddy bottomsThat’s my knee
We’re certainly keen to see what lies beyond, in the top half of the figure-eight, but will need to return with adequate food and water and a whole day to do it.
For the moment, though: Back to the car, back to the tent, then next morning we were on the road again and heading toward our next camp site.
Our new house is within easy striking distance of a handful of “gravity” downhill mountain bike trails. Our daughter Berrima is nearly seven, and we reckoned that she was strong and confident enough on a bicycle for us to all try this new sport as a family.
Finding ourselves with a spare week due to a pandemic-cancelled holiday, we loaded the car with camping gear and set off for the two-hour trip from Hobart to Maydena, billed as “the largest gravity park in the Southern hemisphere”.
We stopped at the Mount Field campground which is convenient to Maydena, inexpensive and very pleasant. It is situated on the banks of the Tyenna River in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. After a comfortable night, we struck camp and headed for Maydena.
Maydena Mountain Bike Park
The town of Maydena, population 200, really only contains the Bike Park and a small cafe. We drove right into the park, rented some lightweight Trek bikes with fat tyres and front suspension, and rolled up to the trail head. This was really a dirt bus stop where you could choose either a minibus with a trailer which took serious riders 820m vertically to the top of the mountain, or a Canam quad with five tow-bar hangers which took beginner and intermediate riders up the steep trail to the top of the ‘green’ runs. We chose the quad. Berrima’s bike was too small for the hangers, but fitted neatly into the luggage tray on the back of the Canam.
As we bounced up the fire trail, the driver helpfully pointed out some landmarks, such as the point where the championship run jumps completely over the access trail. After only five or ten minutes, he left us standing in the middle of a shady rain-forest, pointing us in the direction of a thin track disappearing into the shadows.
The path sloped suspiciously upward, but our guide had warned us that it was only for the first dozen metres or so, and after that it was all gravity, so we shrugged and set off.
He was not wrong. The trail began to descend steeply, and before long we were flying round steeply sloping berms as we zig-zagged wildly down through the forest. The bikes were reliable, the surface smooth granite, the sun was shining, the forest was beautiful.
After some time we dropped out of the tree-line into an area of fox-gloves in full flower, butterflies flitting above as we rocketed down the side of mountain. It was exhilarating for all three of us, but especially Berrima who delighted in hitting the berms at full speed.
Once at the bottom, it was time to catch the Canam back to the top and do it all again.
When it was time for lunch, we briefly considered the onsite canteen – just crisps and sandwiches really – and then stepped outside of the gates to the only other business in Maydena, the Fika Time cafe / petrol station, which advertised great coffee and gluten-free food. Sadly, it was not to be. The ‘small black’ coffee when it came was enormous and bitter, and we waited and waited for our simple three serves of eggs. Eventually, two plates arrived, but one of them was wrong and had to be replaced. When the replacement arrived – but not the third lunch – we were starving, so we shared the two eggs between us. Eventually we asked about the third portion, which set off this whole diatribe about how they were very busy (they weren’t) and COVID and goodness knows what else. Then mysteriously they weren’t able to refund the third meal, so we took a cake in lieu, which wasn’t anywhere near the correct value, and went back to the bike-park cafe for some crisps before continuing our ride.
The Friendly Beaches and the Bay of Fires
From Maydena to the next nearest mountain bike park in St Helens is about a four-hour drive, so we broke the journey along the coastline, taking in some of the famous beaches and enjoying an impromptu steak by the side of the road.
We had booked a couple of nights at an unpowered site at the rather spectacular Tasman Holiday Park on the Bay of Fires in St Helens. It is spectacular not so much for the park itself (although it is a very well appointed caravan park), but for the tremendous Parkside Bar and Kitchen, where we enjoyed some wonderful meals, a great wine list, and impeccable service.
St Helens Mountain Bike Park
While it is theoretically possible to rent mountain bikes from Gravity Isle at the St Helens park itself, their website was being uncooperative, so we had arranged a day’s hire with Vertigo in town, who offered a shuttle up to the trail head as part of the package.
There is a further shuttle that takes you higher to the more advanced runs, but the way that the St Helens green runs are arranged is that they leave from and return to the same trail head. Because the green trails go up and down but start and finish at the same altitude, they involve a lot more pedalling than the downhill runs at Maydena. Thus although the runs are shorter, they are a lot more tiring.
As well as pedalling through pretty forests, the designers had also made the trails interesting, with rocks interspersed with mud, berms, tree-trunks, exposed roots, and the occasional little stump jump.
Half way through the day, we bought lunch at the converted shipping container that served as a cafe at the trailhead. Following our culinary experience at Maydena, we were a little hesitant, and indeed weren’t unduly shocked when we were presented with microwaved burgers and oven chips, with the meat still frozen in the middle.
Everything else about this new sport seems to be high-end; the land areas are huge, access is difficult, staffing levels are high, and the bikes and equipment are eye-wateringly expensive to buy. But in the realms of food preparation, at two out of three of the top gravity venues in Tasmania, we found ourselves underwhelmed by the food. Don’t mountain-bikers eat?
Luckily we had packed some chocolate bars, so we wolfed them down and drank some water and got back on the trails. By the time we’d tried all the green trails several times, we were tired and ready to stop. The exit run is called ‘Downtown’ and is a beautiful ride down the mountain, through the forests to sea level, with fast descents and switch-back berms. It was a lot of fun in itself, and finished with a gentle ride along the St Helens foreshore.
Back at the Parkside Bar in St Helens, over very welcome gourmet food and drinks, we mused that we could get used to this as a family adventure, and are looking forward to the next one.
We have just purchased a pocket cruiser, registered as a 1978 Snook 26. Since there is no record of Michael Snook ever designing a 26-foot version of his famous racing boat, we were curious about her history. Luckily for us, a previous owner had left on board a potted history of the yacht.
She was originally launched as a standard Snook 22 racing yacht, purchased by a Steve Lovell, whose nickname was ‘Shovel’. He raced her as ‘Shovel’ out of Bellerive in southern Tasmania.
A year later, he hauled her out and cut her in half with a chainsaw. Aided and abetted by Michael Snook himself, he spent three weeks inserting a four-foot pre-prepared centre section, increasing the total length to 26 feet (a change from 6.7 to 8 metres). To balance the boat, they moved the keel aft, and increased the draft from 1.3 to 1.7 metres. Arguably just for fun, they also increased the height of the mast to a 9 metre luff, and extended the boom out to 3 metres.
In this new format, Shovel raced very successfully, and – by virtue of the extended cockpit (which was known locally as ‘the beer garden’) – became a popular venue for post-race drinks and, by all accounts, some pretty disreputable parties.
At some point in the nineteen-eighties, Steve sold Shovel and moved to the mainland. The next known report is from a subsequent owner, Dennis, who found her in a dilapidated state in Devonport in Northern Tasmania. Dennis helped the then owners to rebalance the boat – now known as ‘Kermit’ – as a cruiser, and later bought her from them and sailed her back to Hobart. He reported that, even detuned, she was still very fast, with a propensity for surfing on the swell that had to be continually damped by means of trailing drogues.
Now berthed at the marina, Dennis and Fiona fitted her out as a live-aboard cruising boat. To increase the living space, they lifted the coach roof to give 6 feet of headroom while extending the cabin back into the ‘beer garden’ to return it to a more reasonably sized cockpit. They added a larger rudder, a pushpit, an inboard Yanmar engine, and had the interior fitted out with bunks, drawers, sinks, table, chairs and a head.
Looking aftLooking forward
They wanted to rename her, too, and were keen to retain some reference to the Snook’s long and interesting history. After some thought, ‘Shovel’ became ‘Cheval’, and then by obvious inference, ‘Cheval de Mer’.
Dennis and Fiona lived aboard for some 13 years, and I infer from the charts that I found in a stern locker, that they travelled to the mainland and then up the NSW coast at least as far as Port Stephens.
In around 2004 she was back in Hobart, and was acquired by Tom as a permanent live-aboard. He didn’t sail her much, but made some changes more in keeping with her new function as a stationary home. About five years later, Tom’s work took him to the US, where he remained for two years. Cheval de Mer slowly aged in the marina, starboard side facing into the weather, where the paint abraded away from the coach house and she began to leak.
Mould under the mattress in the fore-peakRain water in the fore-peak bilges
On his return, Tom found himself in changed circumstances and living on land, and he just wanted to pass the yacht on to somebody who would appreciate her. And that is where we came in.
Despite spending nearly a decade largely stationary, her hull seemed sound, the moving parts were all still moving, and the only issues seemed to be with the ply of the cabin top. In the middle of a pandemic and with the marina’s hard-standing already full of racing yachts getting tuned for the season, taking her out of the water for an inspection was a non-starter, so we took a deep breath and bought her warts and all without either a test sail or a professional survey.
As soon as we took possession, we emptied her out, and took her out on the water. She performed beautifully in the gusty light winds of the day, with a slight tendency to lee helm as she appeared to be massively over-powered. Considering her history, that’s not at all surprising, and we’re happy that we just need to settle in and get comfortable with her.
Some years ago, we sold our live-aboard cruising yacht Elizabeth when we decided that we weren’t brave enough to continue with our world cruising plans in the company of a small baby. In the intervening years, we have often looked in a dreamy way at the yacht listings, but it was never either practical or the right time. Finally, however, the stars aligned in our favour: We found ourselves living by the coast on the island of Tasmania, next to arguably the best cruising ground in Australia, and our daughter turned six and began to show an interest in the world of sailing.
We were monitoring the sales listings for live-aboard cruising yachts around the Southern hemisphere, and looking for something a lot cheaper and older than either of our previous standard production boats Pindimara or Elizabeth. We reckoned that we were now experienced enough to tackle something a little more bespoke and unusual, and there were plenty of interesting candidates out there, many of which had been circumnavigating with families aboard for years.
We had been talking to agents in the US and New Zealand, and although there were plenty of boats for sale, we were prevented from travelling to either destination by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Then a couple of interesting yachts popped up right in our own neighbourhood, and we went to have a look. On the walk back from the marina berth of a particularly interesting steel-hulled Adams 35, we passed a lovely little blue pocket cruiser with a hand-written ‘for sale’ sign tied to the shrouds.
The owner, Tom, was aboard, and showed us around. She was a sound 26-footer that had been used for several decades as a live-aboard at the marina, but all her rigging was in place and she had a newish engine and, we were told, a full sail inventory. Tom had been stuck in the US for the last two years due to work and the pandemic, and so the little boat had sat wallowing unattended for all that time and now sported flaking paint on the coach house and significant rain-water in the bilges. Nevertheless, she appeared to be fundamentally sound, had a recent insurance survey, and was very very cheap as the owner had moved ashore and didn’t need her as a home any more.
As a coastal pocket cruiser, she wasn’t at all the kind of boat that we’d been looking for, but she felt good aboard and the price was very appealing. We slept on the idea, and then realised that this might be exactly the kind of yacht that we needed. Because our 6-year old daughter had just started school, we were unlikely to need an ocean-capable cruising yacht in the near future, and knew from experience that such vessels can be horribly expensive to keep in trim if only sailed at the weekend rather than cruising aboard. We have regular jobs and a couple of building projects on the go, and wouldn’t be sailing on a daily basis. Furthermore, at only 26 feet and steered with a tiller, she might be just the boat to teach an enthusiastic little girl how to sail.
We had thought that whatever boat we finally purchased, we would keep her on our own mooring near to our bush property to the south of the island. However, Tom had already established that the marina would be happy for us to take over the lease on the existing berth, which was only minutes from our newly built house.
We handed over the cash, and are now proud owners of an elderly but cute Snook 26, named Cheval de Mer.
From our house in Kingston, Tasmania we could see snow up on Mt Wellington, so we thought we’d go up and have a closer look. There is a road that leads from Hobart city centre up to the Pinnacle, but it’s sometimes closed to traffic in inclement weather, so we booked a ticket on the Mt Wellington Explorer bus which always has access through the snow gates.
Snow on Mount Wellington, with wattle trees blooming below
The bus has the advantage of being a hop-on hop-off so you can take advantage of the many trails that lead up and down and around the mountain, and still always get home by flagging down the bus at one of the stops. We hadn’t realised that we would be getting an entertaining guide in the form of the driver, but we did, a wide-ranging history of settlements on and around the mountain.
Up at the top, at 1271 metres, we had snow to play in, and marvellous views of the surrounding islands and bays.
The last of the winter snowKingston, our house off to the rightHobart city, viewed from the Kunanyi Pinnacle
It was frankly freezing in the wintry wind. The temperature at the top of Mt Wellington is usually several degrees colder than Hobart at sea level, and the reason that Hobart is such a comfortable place to live, is that the mountain takes the brunt of all the Antarctic weather.
The bus waits at the top for about half an hour on each trip. We’d spoken to the driver about which walks might be good today, and it was his opinion that the tracks from the Pinnacle were all treacherously icy today, so he recommended dropping us at The Chalet so that we could do the 4km Organ Pipes Track down to The Springs. He also offered to radio the next bus so that they knew to expect us.
The Chalet was an interesting place, a stone hut clearly meant to provide shelter from inclement weather. It had a barbecue outside for sunny days, and a large fireplace and a stack of firewood for those who might be cold and wet.
Inside The Chalet on Mt Wellington
The Springs is downhill from The Chalet, but the path confusingly sets off upward and back towards The Pinnacle. However, it soon sorts itself out and gently follows the contours down towards the base of the Organ Pipes, the most obvious feature of the mountain when viewed from afar.
First, though, it crosses an enormous boulder field, remnants of the great “Glenorchy landslide” of 1872, Tasmania’s most devastating recorded landslip which destroyed a fair few properties on its way to the sea, thankfully with no loss of life. If the same thing happened today, the consequences on North Hobart would be disastrous.
These days, the boulder fields are well bedded in and are popular with climbers.
The boulder field looking down Glenorchy, North HobartCrossing the landslide on the Organ Pipes Track
The original Organ Pipes track was built, along with much of the mountain’s infrastructure, in the early 1930s as a way to provide work for the huge numbers of unemployed following the Great Depression (the unemployment rate in Tasmania was 27% in 1931). The work was back-breaking but stood the test of time, with the tracks only being reworked in 2017, itself a mammoth task taking two years.
The new path is constructed largely from painstakingly laid natural stones. and is in itself quite beautiful.
After a while, the Organ Pipes themselves came into view on the right hand side, a formation of massive dolerite pipes. Several marked trails led in that direction, bearing the warning, “suitable only for climbers”.
The Organ Pipes of kunanyi/Mt Wellington
The track then descends into mountain woodlands, with birds flitting about and, on our visit, flowers breaking out to herald the Spring. The purity of the air is demonstrated by the festoons of lichens hanging from the tree branches and clinging to the rocks.
Rhizocarpon geographicum Map lichenCladonia pleurota Red-fruited pixie cup
As we descended out of dry sclerophyll and into wet heath forest, we encountered some interesting shrubs endemic to Tasmania, including Richea dracophylla which was just starting to bud.
Shortly after this, the track was crossed by a noticeable scar caused by the passage of an enormous rock, 50 tonnes of dolerite that parted company with the Organ Pipes in 2014 and came to rest on the downhill side of the track. Looking uphill, the boulder’s path is still vivid, all the way to the top.
50 tonnes of doleriteLooking up the scar track
Down at The Springs, with its cafeteria and car park, we found the bus waiting for us at the bus stop, which took us down to the city for a spot of lunch.
Wellington Park, which at 30km across is one of the largest reserved areas in Tasmania (outside the incredible World Heritage Area), is criss-crossed with interesting trails like this one, and we will be back to do some more.
It all started out so simply. Since we had been forced to put our plans for an off-grid house in the forest on the back burner, and had quickly built a different house on an urban block nearby, we were left with 14 acres of woodland which would provide us with an endless supply of firewood and the odd camping weekend, and… what else?
I could grow vegetables. And perhaps honey. Maybe ducks.
But let’s start with vegetables.
I decided that my preference would be to work in 10m x 5m plots. I find that area easy to handle with manual tools and, let’s face it, the dimensions make the math easy. Having several identically-sized autonomous blocks, rather than a rambling smallholding, also means that if disaster (irrigation failure, possum attack) visits one block then I haven’t lost everything.
The land slopes at around 8-10 degrees, so I needed to choose my sites carefully if I was to avoid repeatedly staggering up and down from the tool shed. Given that our access road leads only to our putative building site, and that the site itself is still largely covered in freshly felled trees, my options were somewhat limited. In the end I chose a slightly undersized area close to the tool shed, near to a line of native cherry and sedge which appear to define an underground seep.
The soil
I unlimbered the trusty mattock, and set to work.
With the area cleared of Common Heath, ferns and debris, I set up a 1.8m fence to keep out the wallabies and possums, and dug over to about 10cm. The soil is sandy clay, and pretty easy to manage.
The soil may be easy to work, but it is very poor quality. After some manoeuvring, a helpful fork-lift driver at Horticultural and Landscape Supplies north of Hobart managed to drop a cube-and-a-half bale of SeaGreens kelp compost onto my trailer. I somewhat gingerly towed it to Lymington, and got it up the track.
It took a little while to shovel it out and dig it in, but the plot started to look pretty good.
It was the height of Summer, and the ground was bone-dry. No matter how good my compost, no seeds were going to sprout in these conditions. It was time to install some irrigation.
The irrigation tank
I reckoned that a 2000 litre rainwater tank was probably the biggest I could handle by myself, and should be equal to the needs of my vegetable patch (but read on!).
There are many suppliers of rainwater tanks in Australia, most of whom operate on a just-in-time build-and-deliver business model, which didn’t suit me because access to the property is still problematic, particularly for delivery trucks. However, I happened to be out at Global Poly investigating pumps and cartage when they mentioned that they almost always keep some spare 2000s on the forecourt. I put one on the trailer and took it home.
The builders at our new house in Kingston had finished work, and had left behind a pile of surplus blue-stone from their installation of our household rainwater tanks. Berrima and I shovelled about a tonne into a bulk bag on the trailer, towed it to the forest, and spent a happy afternoon crafting a tank stand.
Now I needed a way to fill up the tank. In the future, I have grand plans to fill all my irrigation tanks from the roof run-off of an oversized shed, but that project is still just a twinkle in my eye. In the meantime, I needed to sort out cartage. There are a number of local water cartage firms who will bring a tanker to your property, but again I was concerned about access for heavy commercial vehicles, so I decided to create my own cartage system.
Water cartage
Originally I looked around for a second-hand Intermediate Bulk Container (IBC). These metal-bound plastic tanks are designed to be handled by a fork-lift and are used all over the world to deliver all kinds of liquid products. They fit neatly onto a trailer or in the back of a ute. It’s usually possible to pick up a food-grade IBC at a reasonable cost, but with COVID playing havoc with the logistics, this was not a good time to try to find one in Tasmania.
Once again, Global Poly came to my rescue. They sell compact ‘Fire Cubes’, designed to be used in conjunction with a generator and a pump in fire-fighting from the back of a ute. At 900 litres, a full tank would exceed the carrying capacity of my trailer, so it would take three partial loads to completely fill up my irrigation tank, which seemed acceptable.
Have tank, will travel
I already had a spare generator that I’d bought for the convenience of the tradesmen working on our Kingston house, and a simple Chinese pump only set me back a hundred dollars or so from my friends at Global Poly, so I was good to go. I pumped water into the cube from my house rainwater tanks, drove to the property, and pumped it back out. And repeat.
Pumping rainwater from the trailer into the irrigation tank
Drip Irrigation
I had previously set up small household drip and spray systems running through timers under mains pressure, but I had no real idea how to set up a gravity-fed system on this scale. My gut feel was that, unless I wanted to mess around with tall tank stands, I would need an electric pump to run the system, but I was open to the suggestion of letting it flow out under gravity. There’s a great deal of conflicting and often quite complex advice on the internet, and I wasn’t able to make a firm decision. I did notice that Hobart company Hollander Imports received a lot of local praise. They don’t have a proper web presence, only a Facebook page, so I drove into Hobart and ambled into their office, hoping for some advice.
The gentleman behind the desk listened carefully as I described the size of the tank, the size of the plot, and the slope of the land, and then pronounced the site ideal for a gravity feed system. He loaded me up with coils of piping, constant-pressure drip line, and handfuls of taps, joins and clips. He reckoned that the constant-pressure line would compensate for the change in pressure as the tank emptied, and would provide an even supply of water. He also recommended that I didn’t bother with all the fancy delivery-and-collector patterns published on the internet, but just to run both my plants and my drip lines downhill from a horizontal feed pipe.
Constant feed drip line (brown), irrigation piping (black) and a bag full of parts
The plot is 40 minutes from my house, so I needed a way of automatically turning it on and off as I didn’t want it dripping 24 hours a day (I had nowhere enough water for that!). Hollander Imports sold me a battery-powered mechanical timer, which controlled a simple flow gate.
I took all of it up to the land and, leaving the timer aside for the moment, connected the plumbing components together in their approximate final configuration. I manually opened the tap on the irrigation tank, and it all worked perfectly.
Approximate set-up for testing
I unplugged the piping from the tank valve, and inserted the timer into the line. It toggled on and off correctly according to its program, but even when “on”, it drastically reduced the flow to a rather pathetic dribble. This needed some more investigation.
The secret is in the timing
There was clearly something not quite right with my choice of timer. Eventually, deep in some technical specifications that I found online, I discovered that the physical valve in the unit requires a minimum head pressure in order to fully open. I scribbled some numbers on the back of an envelope, and clearly the gravity system wasn’t ever going to deliver enough of a head; unless I wanted to raise my 2000 litre tank several metres above the plot, this particular unit required mains pressure to ensure that the valve opened fully.
I did some scouting around, and found a timer that – according not only to the wording on the box, but also to the detailed technical specifications – was designed specifically for gravity-feed drip-lines, which as a bonus allowed the electronic operation of up to four separate gates. I bought one, with a single gate, and set it up.
Timer with integrated valveTimer with separate gate valve
Unfortunately, this new valve didn’t perform much better than the first one. Despite its advertised capabilities, it too needed a minimum head pressure if the valve was to fully open.
I went back to my original gut feel; I would need a pumped system.
Oh boy, the internet is full of advice about irrigation pumps.
Eventually, though, I found some bloggers who had set up similar small systems, and the general consensus was that you could get good results by using an inexpensive pump from an ornamental garden fountain. These pumps have the double advantage that they operate on a pressure that is low enough not to overload the drip fittings, and they are cheap to replace if they go wrong.
Of course, these pumps need electricity. I got out a couple of solar panels and a battery box which I use to run my Engel fridge while four-wheel-driving and camping. I set this up in my shed, and bought a simple mechanical timer to control the pump.
I turned it on, and the water flowed gently out of the drip feeder. I set it up to run for half an hour, morning and night, calculating that this would use 1000 litres a week, or a fortnight for the full tank. Contented, I drove home.
Where has all my water gone?
A couple of days later, I returned. The soil had clearly been watered, but the tank was empty. That was nearly a thousand litres in two days. Puzzled, I refilled the tank, re-did the math (same answer), and turned down the flow on the pump.
Despite this glitch, the system appeared to be working in the sense that it was wetting the ground, and time was ticking on and I didn’t want to miss the Autumn planting season. It wasn’t perfect, but I needed to plant some seeds.
Tasmanian soil is fairly consistent across the State, and has a mineral profile that lacks certain essential ingredients for vegetable gardening. I had found an organic fertiliser recipe in the excellent book ‘Tasmanian Food Gardening’ by Steve Solomon, and had for some time been tracking down the ingredients from local suppliers.
I mixed up enough for ten square metres, sprinkled it around, and planted the seeds of some winter vegetables. Apart from the niggle of the water usage, everything seemed to be going smoothly.
A few days later I returned, and the tank was once again empty. I had other things to take care of, but the seeds were sprouting and we were in the middle of a drought, so for the next few weeks I was taking every spare moment to drive back and forth, towing thousands of litres of water and pumping them into the ravening maw of my irrigation system.
The seeds are sprouting, under the bird wire
At last, after several weeks of this craziness, I was able to put aside a whole day to sit quietly without the distractions of work, of house-building, of firewood, or of small children, and to turn the system on and off and to observe it carefully.
Firstly, the mechanical timer was not keeping time at all. During the past fortnight I had noticed that it would be running anything from one to twelve hours behind (or possibly ahead, who knew?). I had it set to switch the pump on for 30 minutes, twice a day, but if the timer wasn’t reliable, how long was it really pumping for?
I took the timer out of the system, and, sitting quietly in the sunshine, began switching the pump on and off manually. Because it’s a low-pressure drip system, it isn’t immediately obvious from the business end whether it’s on or off. Once the pump stops, the pipes spend an appreciable time slowly draining, and you have to watch the drip nodes very closely to see if any water is coming out, especially as – without pump pressure – only the nodes on the underside, hidden against the soil, are working.
Time and patience eventually won out, and I proved to my satisfaction that, once the pump switched off, the pipe continued to siphon slowly throughout the day, quietly draining the tank until it was empty. There was a satisfying magical moment when I turned the pump off and stabbed an air-hole at the highest point of the hose. The system aspirated loudly, and the flow stopped.
When the pump is on, it now spurts a little fountain out of the cut hose, but the water returns to the tank, the pump and drip line compensate for the pressure loss, and the fountain makes a pleasant tinkling sound that tells me when the irrigation is on.
Remember the problem with the mechanical timer? I replaced it with a digital timer, which keeps perfect time. Later, I tried the mechanical timer at home, on mains power, and it ran perfectly; there must be something about running it on the inverter of the battery box that confuses it.
Catching the rain for irrigation
One day, we’ll build a shed with a large roof which will capture tens of thousands of litres, which will solve all our water supply problems. Right now, though, we have other priorities, but I was not unaware of the craziness of towing thousands of litres across country with a big V8 several times a week.
Our builders in Kingston had ordered a batch of incorrectly coloured roofing panels, which were sitting in the garden of our house, awaiting disposal. I put them in the trailer, added a stack of cheap construction timber and some guttering, and built myself a rain-catcher. It won’t really collect a lot of rain in the dry season, but – bearing in mind that the irrigation system is agnostic to the weather, and pumps rain or shine – it keeps the tank topped up in the wet.
Yes, it would be possible to add a rain sensor. It’s on my ‘nice to have’ list.
From our temporary accommodation in Birchs Bay Tasmania, we look out every day across the D’Entrecasteaux Channel to the shores of neighbouring Bruny Island. The ferry operates from Kettering, a few minutes up the road, so it would have been rude not to go and explore.
The island is 50km long and made up of North and South Bruny Islands which are separated by a narrow isthmus, known as The Neck. The North is largely given over to sheep farming, while the South is mostly National Park that is inaccessible to traffic. The easiest way to explore is by boat, and the best way to do this is through Pennicott Wilderness Journeys.
We caught the Pennicott bus from Kettering, which took us across on the ferry and then through North Bruny Island, across The Neck (stopping to look at the views and penguin rookery), and then boarded one of their iconic yellow RIBs at their base (and seafood restaurant) in Adventure Bay.
Almost as soon as we had left the dock, we were surrounded by bottlenose dolphins.
A Pennicott Wilderness Journeys yellow RIB (and a dolphin)Hello, bottlenoseIt’s impossible not to smile at cavorting cetaceans
The dolphins loved the powerful wake of the triple 250hp outboards, and our skipper Mick ran doughnuts so that they could play in the waves. As with whales, dolphins have this remarkable ability to make humans laugh and smile when we see them exuberantly playing in the wild. It was a great start to what was going to be a wonderful cruise.
Leaving the dolphins behind, we began to explore the towering columns of Jurassic dolerite that form South Bruny Island’s Fluted Cape. The flat-bottomed boat could get up close and personal with the rock formations and caves, and had more than enough power to get in an out against the swell.
The Bruny StackExploring a caveLooking up at the towering dolerite cliffsA Tolkienesque skyline
The cliffs are stupendous, among the tallest dolerite columns in the world. They are perforated by numerous sea caves, one of which is largely underwater and forms a spectacular blow-hole as wet air is pumped out by the swell pushing in. The skipper amused the crowd by poking the boat’s bow into the top of the cave as it spat salty spray all over us.
Nearby was an island colony of black-faced shags, who seemed completely unperturbed by our presence. They’re fairly common on islets off Southern Australia, building their nests from seaweed and driftwood.
Rounding the Cape, we found ourselves out in the Southern Ocean. The skipper opened the throttle, the three 250 horsepower Yamahas on the stern kicked in, and we blew past the aptly named Bridge Island, heading south.
We were motoring toward a group of four dolerite islands known collectively as The Friars, home to a male colony of rare Australian Fur Seals. They live here in a somewhat cantankerous group, travelling to the Bass Strait to meet up with females in October, each one potentially servicing up to 50 females before returning home, presumably exhausted and ready to rest for another year.
A few of the thousands of male Australian Fur Seals in The FriarsThere’s a fair bit of testosterone aboutYoung males looking rather cute
Around the corner is a colony of animals formerly known as New Zealand Fur Seals, more recently termed Long Nosed Fur Seals. They are closely related to the Australian, but form separate colonies.
A great site for a colony of male Long Nosed Fur Seals (on the stack to the right)
On a beach all by itself, we were lucky to see an Elephant Seal. A few years ago, an 800kg female of this species rampaged through the camp site at Adventure Bay, damaging a caravan and demolishing fences and picnic tables. She was eventually lured away by a fish on a piece of string. The one that we saw was pretty placid, though.
Elephant Seal at the Friars
Turning back toward South Bruny Island, my breath was taken away by the beauty of the landscape. The sea and the sky matched in shades of vivid blue, and across the towering dolerite peaks of Fluted Cape, the highlands of mainland Tasmania loomed in the distance.
We’re living at the bottom of the world, and we love it!
If, Gentle Surfer, you have been following our blog from the beginning, then you will be wondering what happened to our off-grid house in the forest.
Once the COVID-19 pandemic shut down all the State borders, it played merry hell with our logistics and we had to temporarily abandon our plans. I had paid off the landscaping and road-building contractors without ever seeing how far they had got with their work. This was my first opportunity in almost a year to see what the site looks like today.
My first priority was the state of the new road into our property. I had arranged, over the phone, for dozens of tonnes of rock to be spread up the lower reaches of the road after it had been levelled, but had no real idea how far the contractors had got or what it was going to look like.
In the event, too much loose rock had been laid over the load that had previously been compacted, making it hard going even for our rented 4WD, and the top part of the road had no aggregate at all, and was starting to grow ferns.
Evidently I’ve got a bit of work to do on the road, over the Summer!
Lower slopes good……upper slopes bad
My second priority was to see just how much levelling had been achieved on the actual building site. The contractor had been working on a cut in which we were to build our 6×12 metre shed-cum-solar-farm, and all I knew was that he had made some progress and then had had to stop when the track motor burned out on his digger, for which he was unable to source spare parts due to lockdown in China.
Now that we’ve shifted our primary residence to our other project, we don’t need so many solar panels in the forest and thus such a big shed, but I wanted to know how much levelling had already been done and whether we could build a smaller structure there. At the very least, perhaps we’d have somewhere flat to camp when we visit…
In the event, Dan had done most of the digging-out and about a third of the levelling. It’s not ideal, but is a good start to work with once we finally get down there.
Probably big enough to put a tent on
As for the building site itself, well, it’s still liberally scattered with the timber that I felled on my last visit, now nicely overgrown with ferns. My immediate plan is to clear the timber, split it into firewood, build a solar irrigation system, and plant vegetables.
One day, we’ll still build a house here
Once the current house build project has finished and we’ve settled in to our new home, the forest will be waiting just down the road. We certainly haven’t given up on that project and have already started thinking ahead and making plans.
As they used to say in the newspaper trade, watch this space!
Our new house in Kingston is almost finished, but – because of pandemic restrictions to cross-border travel – we had still seen neither the house nor the land that it sits on. The whole project had thus far been conducted entirely over the internet.
The border between ACT and TAS opened in mid-November, and Link Airways laid on an unusual direct service from Canberra to Hobart, so we took the opportunity to fly down and – for the first time – see our project in the flesh.
There was a short delay at Canberra Airport when the ground crew realised that the HF aerial had snapped from the top of the fuselage and was wrapped around the tail fin (you can just about see it at the top of the photo below), but in the end we boarded anyway. I chatted briefly to the captain on the way up the stairs, and he quipped “We don’t use HF anyway”.
Spot the missing antennaMasks to be worn aboard
Although the builders had been good at posting progress photos on the internet, we’d never seen any of it for real, so it was with some trepidation that we approached the building site for the first time.
We were relieved to find that it all looked exactly as we expected.
The bathroom tiling is looking goodThe butler’s pantry is coming alongThe main living area, viewed from the kitchenThe kitchen cabinets almost installedInside the fireplaceBerrima in the master bedroom, watching the carpenters start work on the back deck
This visit also gave us a welcome opportunity to look at the surrounding area. The last time we’d seen pictures of the plot was from our bush-fire assessment, when there was nothing there but empty grass. Today, what a different picture!
The fledgling streets are crammed with tradesmen’s vehicles, skips, back-hoes, pile of earth, stacks of temporary fencing. The houses are springing up like mushrooms along the edge of the creek, which has been planted with native shrubs in plastic tubes.
Our house (unpainted, centre), nestled between our new next-door neighbours
The neighbouring buildings are quite close, so we are glad that we are in a quiet cul-de-sac to the front, with creek and shrubbery to the rear. It will be interesting to meet our new neighbours; from the state of their buildings, it looks like we’ll all be taking up residence together, early in the New Year.
With the foundation posts installed last week, the builders have been working swiftly at the factory to finish the interior of the house. They only had a week to finish up before moving the house 200 km overnight across Tasmania from Westbury, near Launceston, to its final resting place in Kingston, near Hobart.
Yesterday, the tilers finished up the bathrooms, installed the vanities and hooked up the plumbing.
The main bathroom is looking pretty good!
Meanwhile, the cabinet makers assembled the joinery and plumbing in the kitchen and pantry.
The green cabinets are in the pantry, you can see the blue kitchen cabinets around the corner.
The two wings of the house were then separated and lifted onto two low-loaders, which trundled through the night, through the centre of Hobart in the small wee hours, until they reached our plot in Kingston in the early morning.
The living wing arrives, protected from the elements by wooden blanksThe service wing arrives, not quite as wide but very long!
Now it was just a matter of lifting the two wings onto the pre-prepared pilings…
24 Rodway Court has landed!
You can see from the photo that the front of the house isn’t fully clad. This is because there will be a connecting garage in front, but since that will be on a slab, and needs a driveway and crosswalk, it couldn’t be manufactured off site. We believe that this will be built next.
The water and sewage are already in place, and today we spoke to the electrical company about our new account. After that we just need to install the solar heating, the wood stove, the wooden flooring, the raised decks and stairs…
In the Australian building industry, there is a key milestone where a project is deemed to be “Substantially Commenced”. This phrase occurs throughout the legal, contractual, and financial documentation, as well as in both Federal and local government policies. The term is, however, not explicitly defined, neither as a legal term nor in any building code.
In most jurisdictions, in the context of private housing, it is deemed to be the date at which the foundations have been laid. For most projects, which are built in situ from the ground up, it is the first time that the builder breaks ground and does something physical. In our case, because the house is being built off-site, the building was in fact almost complete before it had been “Substantially Commenced”.
The living wing, with all of the edges now square-set (Oct 24)
The under-floor heating is in, now for the tiles in the bathroom (Oct 28)
Our “Substantially Commenced” date was Wednesday 28th October. On that day, our concrete piers had to have been installed on the land, otherwise we’d miss a load of contractual and financial milestones and generate a whole heap of extra paperwork and expense.
By Wednesday of the week before, we still didn’t have our Permit to Build. On Thursday, the entire planning department took a day off. On Friday, the planning department were back at work, but the only person authorised to sign our Permit to Build, had gone on holiday. On Monday, despite continual prodding by our builders, we heard no more from the department. On Tuesday, our builders sent a work crew for a site check, and discovered that the builders of the properties on either side of us have been using our property as a work site and dumping ground.
Get off my land! This hard-core and mixer belong to other builders.
One of the clauses in our contract with the builder was that the site must be completely empty before they start work. We contacted the builders on either side, who both admitted liability, and promised to move their stuff immediately.
Late on Tuesday afternoon, only hours before the deadline, we received our Permit to Build.
On Wednesday, the work crew arrived on the property to put in the foundations, and found that (of course), neither of the neighbouring builders had done anything about their junk on our land. Thankfully, one of the crew took it upon themselves to push everything over the boundaries.
Because our project is a post-and-pier construction, which does not involve any excavation or poured concrete, the actual work of building the foundations went very quickly indeed.
A lot more than just the house is resting on these little posts!
Our foundations are now officially down, and we are Substantially Commenced!
It’s been a month since we received our Planning Permit from Kingborough Council, but sadly this didn’t give us the right to actually do anything. Possession of a Planning Permit merely confers upon us the right to apply for a Permit To Build. Until we receive that second document, we can’t even break ground on our land.
Time is ticking on, and Council is still sitting on our Permit to Build. Without that document, we not only can’t build, but we can’t get a loan. The bank are patiently sitting on our loan application, but we’ve already had to ‘refresh’ our loan paperwork once already, when the bank statements and so on that we’d provided went out of date. It is frustrating because we’re still making substantial payments to Get Things Done, and our cash reserves are dwindling. In addition, part of our contracted agreement is that the foundations must be “substantially completed” by early November, and it’s now late October and we can’t get them started.
If we’d been building in the traditional manner, on concrete foundations at our property, we’d now be up the proverbial creek, with no way of getting the build done in time. We are, after all, moving to Tasmania in December.
Luckily, the house is being built off-site as two separate wings in TasBuilt‘s factory, and we had enough cash to get them started with the framing and windows, so they forged right ahead and started building. The framing was done in a couple of days.
Framing for the front of the house, showing both wings (Sep 28)
Framing for the cathedral ceiling of the living wing (Sep 28)
A view through all the bedrooms and bathrooms of the service wing (Sep 28)
Despite the fact that we can’t pay the builders any more money until our loan goes through, their factory has its own timetable and they were keen to continue; a week later they’d installed the windows, electrics, and made a start on the insulation.
Electrics in the living wing (Oct 10)
External wall insulation to the front of the house (Oct 10)
Internal wall insulation in one of the bedrooms (Oct 10)
A week later, they’d made a start on the roof and cladding, and made good progress on the dry-walling.
Dry-walling in the living wing. It looks nice and bright! (Oct 17)
Cladding and roof detail on the back of the service wing (Oct 17)
Ensuite and walk-in wardrobe from the master bedroom
Now that the builders have started, it seems that nothing can stop them. The house is due to be completed and moved to our property (on two low-loaders in the middle of the night) in a fortnight’s time. Before it arrives, the foundation posts need to be in place. These are scheduled to go in next Wednesday… and we’re still waiting for the Permit to Build.
Now that our plans had been submitted to the council, all we needed to do was open some champagne, sit back and wait for the build to start, right? Mmmmm no. Not at all. The builder introduced us to the Decor Sheet, a couple of dozen pages in which we needed to itemise in excruciating detail every inch of the exterior and interior of the house.
This was mind-bending stuff. We’d never before realised just how complex a system a house is. Every design decision influences other aspects of the design in ways that are hard to predict until you have gone down the path, and then wound back to try another route. Almost every evening, for months, we fired up the laptop and launched the current version of the Decor Sheet and talked our way through it, again and again, Googling our way through the unfamiliar terms. Did we want square set apertures, droppers, finials? And if so, why?
The first part of the Decor Sheet deals with the outside of the house; building materials, colours and so on. As time went on and we made firm decisions, we signed off first new version A, then version B of the original plans. We then realised that some of the decisions that we’d made about the exterior affected the interior, leading to version C, which raised questions about the roof, which led to version D, and so on.
The “exterior” part of the Decor Sheet needed to be signed off far ahead of the “interior” part, and although it was a bit stressful, we did manage to get it done. The next step was to deal with the “interior” pages, and at about this time, the wheels seemed to come off the builder’s bus. They were supposed to be helping us through the design process, but suddenly they weren’t responding to emails or answering calls. The only response we could get was that they were “very busy”, but that we still needed to complete the Decor Sheet by a specific date, otherwise we would “lose our place in the queue”.
The Colourist
We have no idea how to choose a colour scheme for a house, or how to design a kitchen or bathroom. I mean, why should we? Like anybody else, we know what we like, but how on earth were we suddenly supposed to become interior (or indeed exterior) designers? The builder had originally promised expert guidance, but that guidance was clearly not forthcoming.
For around a hundred dollars, we engaged a “Colourist” through the local paint shop. She was amazing! We had originally intended to talk to her about interior walls, but she got the bit between her teeth and revamped the exterior as well, with full and frank advice about the whys and wherefores of her decisions. We left the shop with an armful of colour chips and, for the first time, a warm fuzzy feeling that we were getting on top of things.
The Kitchen Designer
That warm fuzzy feeling persisted until we started on the kitchen. We already had a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the builder’s joiner, whose response to any request for advice about cabinet making was “We can build anything!”, which was hardly helpful. She had a particular penchant for making drawers and cupboards in unusual widths “to make them fit”, without any thought of how we might use them in real life.
With no practical advise forthcoming from that direction, we downloaded the kitchen design tool from Ikea and messed around with it. It’s a great tool, but we still didn’t feel that we were qualified to make our own decisions, so we made an appointment with an Ikea consultant. He came round to the house and at first was unwilling to provide actual advice beyond recommending products that fitted our specifications, but Bronwyn convinced him to think a bit more laterally and a few hours later, the two of them had thrashed out a rather nice design for both the kitchen and the pantry.
All of the cupboards and drawers were carefully designed to match standard-sized Ikea kitchen products, so that we would have no trouble finding inserts and trays for them. We did want the kitchen to be installed by the builder in their factory, rather than after-market by Ikea or anybody else, so we sent the finished design to the builder, who gave it to the joiner, who copied the basic design into his plan, but stretched all the cupboards out “to make them fit”…
We soon sorted out the joiner’s little game, and got the kitchen cabinet plans changed back to the way we’d designed them. However, the whole experience got us thinking about the limitations of having built-in wardrobes and cabinets. After all, if we wanted a wardrobe, we could get a free-standing one, and if we wanted to change the function of the room in the future, we could just move that wardrobe somewhere else. If everything was built-in, which was the builder’s default option, then we would lose that future flexibility.
OK then, we removed all the built-in wardrobes from the Decor Sheet.
Bathroom Design
For similar reasons, we decided to “Ikea-ise” the bathroom. We’d already decided on the floor and wall tiles, so now this meant also choosing our own bath, vanity units, sinks, taps, and other paraphernalia for each of the two bathrooms.
Some of the items were available from the builder’s own suppliers, so we let them deal with that. Others, such as some fancy tap ware, we purchased ourselves, and will freight directly to the factory. When it came to the bathroom furniture, Ikea Melbourne will deliver to Tasmania via the ferry, but we didn’t want the goods to arrive either too early (and lie around in the factory, potentially getting wet or damaged) or too late (thus delaying the build), so we rented a storage facility close to the factory and had them delivered there.
When the builder is ready to receive them, we’ll hire a local driver to pick the boxes up from storage and take them to the factory.
The Electrical Plan
There’s a part of the Decor Sheet that says “create an electrical plan”. Eh what? So not only are we required to be colourists and furniture designers, now we need to be electricians, too? Apparently.
We knew this was coming, and for months I had been trying to get a template from the builder, so that we had at least a vague idea of what kind of documentation we were supposed to provide. Eventually, after even more bugging and prodding, we received a snippet of somebody else’s Electrical Plan, and found that it was simply a plan view of the house, with all the lights, sockets, switches, data, and specialist power supplies marked.
Sure, we can do that! The power and data plans were reasonably easy; maximum power and data everywhere, to cater for every possible change of use for a room. No worries.
But when we turned to the lighting plan, we ended up once more going down the Google rabbit hole. How many downlights should we have per square metre? What’s the best way to arrange lights in a bathroom? And then, once I’d started drawing in the switches, I realised that you could easily get into a situation where you couldn’t comfortably turn the lights out on your way to bed, or turn them on if you entered through the back door at night, or what if you came out of the office at night and wanted something from the kitchen…?
It was mind-boggling, but I believe that I thought of everything.
Variations
As each change is made to the Decor Sheet, it affects the original quoted build price, which was based around a set of standard inclusions. These changes are supposed to be recorded in a document called a Variation; when we remove items from the plan, the price goes down, and when we add new ones, it goes up. At least, that is the theory, but the builder had stopped talking to us and we had no firm idea of where we stood financially. We knew that some of the early changes that we’d made, such as the Velux skylights, and moving the driveway from one side of the plot to the other, were large-ticket items, but we had still received no quote for them. Without knowing how much the build was going to cost, we were running into problems with financial planning.
It wasn’t just the money; we were trying to make important decisions, many of which required interaction with the builder, and it was as if they had just written us off. One night, after poring over the plans and figures and Decor Sheet once again, I got fed up with the whole thing, and emailed the builder to inform them that we were not moving forward with the build or paying them any more money until all of our outstanding questions were answered.
Early the next morning, the somewhat nervous and apologetic builder arranged a Zoom meeting, and shortly after that all the remaining issues had been addressed, including a properly itemised Variation. We spent a couple more evenings going through the dreaded Decor Sheet, checking it line by line, and then we signed it.
We’ve been forced by the pandemic to put our plans for the forest on the back-burner, and instead to build a completely different house on a completely different plot. We now find ourselves under pressure to get the house finished so that we have somewhere to quarantine when/if we are allowed to relocate to Tasmania at the end of the year. At the time of writing, it isn’t clear how we’ll transit intervening Victoria, which is in a declared State of Disaster…
Putting those worries aside, we do need to crack on with our design. There is a tight deadline if we are to submit the plans in time for the builders to start ordering windows and other materiel, in time to get the prefabricated sections delivered to the site by the end of September. To this end, we have been having daily discussions with the builder and with various suppliers (fireplace, flooring, decking, solar heating) to try to get everybody on the same page before we submit the plans to Council.
Since everything is connected to everything else, we also needed to decide on the flooring and the tiles and various finishes up front, so that we have a good understanding of how they all work together; it would be disappointing, for instance, to find on the day that the top of the floor tiles (7mm thick) don’t line up with the top of the wooden flooring (14mm + underlay) and indeed the hearth of the fireplace. This entailed numerous trips to the tile shop, bathroom shop, kitchen shop…
Site Surveys
We had engaged a geotechnical engineer (Ian Newell at EAW Geo Services) to perform a soil survey even before our plot purchase was confirmed. We didn’t want any surprises about our foundation requirements, and thankfully we were graded H1 with stiff clay, which won’t give us any problems with a pier foundation.
Even though this is an urban block and not a bush block, we were also required by Tasmanian regulations to determine our Bush Fire Attack Level. We engaged another surveyor (Rebecca Green and Associates) who determined that we were “low risk”, something that we already knew but which needed to be backed up by a certificate as part of our planning application.
Bear in mind that, because of the current ban on interstate travel, we have never actually seen the block that we bought on the internet. One good thing about the Bush Fire Rating is that the surveyor must provide photographs of the surrounding vegetation in their report. Now we have access to current photographs! This gave us our first good view of the neighbouring blocks. We are a little surprised to find that nobody else had started building yet. Are we going to be the first?
The bottom view is our block.
Up on stilts
The plans were converging on a solution that fulfilled our requirements, but which didn’t blow our budget too badly. We were aware from Google Earth that there was a slight slope to the land, but since our house would be built on posts rather than on concrete foundations, we weren’t too bothered about it. Our previous plans for the property in Lymington had to deal with a much steeper slope, where we anticipated a deck standing over 3m above the terrain. For the Kingston house, we figured that there would be a drop of less than a metre from the lounge sliding doors to the garden, but we’d sort out some kind of step or low platform after the house was built. The engineers had made a similar assumption, roughing-in a few wooden steps on the design to make the doors accessible, but otherwise leaving them alone. When the rest of the design was largely complete, TasBuilt Homes sent a surveyor with a Dumpy to get accurate readings, and confirmed a fall of about a metre across the whole 30m length of the site.
At about the same time, we were having interesting discussions about the slope of the garage roof. There is a local ordinance that the house and garage have to be roofed with the same material, but the style of Colorbond that we preferred for the house roof requires at least a 5 degree slope for drainage. The garage had a 3 degree slope, and if we increased that to 5, and extended the roof over the front door as a porch as we intended, it would interfere with the opposite eave.
Our choices were either to cut the garage into the ground (which would result in a garage floor below ground level with all the associated drainage issues, and would necessitate a more in-depth geotechnical survey), or to lift the entire house by about 30cm. That was pretty much a no-brainer, but when the architect plugged the new figures into their drawings, they found that the rear of the building would be well over a metre off the ground, and – under current Tasmanian legislation – we would need some enormous balustraded stairways to conform to health and safety regulations. Our slim and minimalist design suddenly sprouted all kinds of ugly appurtenances which pretty much wiped out the entire garden.
Oh no! Where did all those stairs come from?
In order to get rid of the stairs on our planning application, we needed to bring in the deck design a bit earlier than we had anticipated. After all, it’s just a budget, hey?
Thankfully, Bronwyn had already been talking to a local deck builder, and he was able to quickly come through with some specifications for the planning application. Our main deck, which was originally going to be a low platform along the side of the house (so low that it didn’t need planning permission), was now up on significant stilts, which meant that we’d also need a privacy screen. We also created a small back deck for our bedroom, so that we’ll be able to drink tea as the sun comes up.
OK, this should work.
It was time to lay down our first serious payment, tens of thousands of dollars, to the builders. They are now submitting the plans to the Council.
Our off-grid house-build in Tasmania has come to a complete standstill, following the builder’s surprise cancellation of the project, and the closure of State borders during the covid-19 pandemic. Dan’s digger – which has been chugging away all this time, clearing and levelling the site – burnt out a track motor, and importing spare parts has become problematic. We can’t get to the site to complete the clearance ourselves or to oversee any decisions due to quarantine regulations, and anyway the importation of building materials for the house, not to mention electronics for the solar array, has become all but impossible.
Our daughter starts school in Tasmania in 2021, and the contract in our current AirBnB in Canberra expires before Christmas 2020. We really need to sort out a Plan B.
We did some Zoom tours of houses for sale down in Kingston, which is on the outskirts of Hobart and close to the school, but noticed when the property agent panned around the neighbourhood that there were still some empty plots available. That got us thinking.
We had already formed a good working relationship with TasBuilt Homes, who had designed us a nice house which they were going to build in their factory and then bring in pieces to assemble on the land. Unfortunately, their surveyor decided that the approach road was too steep for their low-loaders to negotiate, and we moved on to other plans.
What if we bought a simple urban plot with access to town electricity and gas, and got TasBuilt Homes to put their house there instead? That would tide us over for a few years and enable us to get settled in Tasmania before once more addressing the off-grid build.
And so it came to pass that, three days ago, we became the proud owners of Lot 319 on the Spring Farm Road project in Kingston, Tasmania.
Can you see what it is, yet?
While the conveyancing was going through, we spent several weeks drafting the design of the house that we’ll put on it. This weekend, we’re signing a contract with TasBuilt Homes to start working on the full design.
An artist’s impression. The colours are wrong, but the shape is right.
It probably won’t be finished in time for Christmas, but we do still own our wonderful forest, inside which is an area that has now been at least partially levelled. To that end, we have purchased a new tent in which we can live (and, if necessary, quarantine) until the Kingston build is complete.
Having exhausted the possibilities of round houses and prefabricated houses, it was back to the drawing board once again. We had been trying to make the project easier for ourselves by getting major parts prefabricated and delivered, because we were working interstate and would not have daily oversight of the construction. One obvious solution was to move to Tasmania and personally supervise the build, but we had temporarily lucrative work in faraway Canberra which we still needed if we were to complete the project. Perhaps it was time to stop trying to make things easy, and get somebody to build a bespoke house for us on site?
We initially approached Davies Construction, who were happy to build something that resembled our previous designs, and provided some reasonable-looking cost estimates. We were feeling quietly confident when they backed out at the last minute, saying that they had just completed a build across the river in Franklin, and found that the travel distance of their sub-contractors was too onerous. I suspect that in reality our project was too small to be of interest to them.
Then we started discussions with the amazing David Kapel, a build manager in Launceston. David was excited by our project from the beginning, and took all of my carefully assembled quotes and estimates and agreed that he could meet almost all of them himself. He would handle our entire build, including all sub-contractors, from breaking the ground to the final finish, including electrical and plumbing work, for a reasonable price.
The way that he was able to achieve this was because the main structure of the house would be made from baulks of cedar, imported already cut and shaped to the owner’s specification by the Scandinavian company YZY Kit Homes. YZY had an agent close to our house in Canberra, who was happy to show us around some demonstration houses.
YZY Kit Home “Madeira”.
Being made of thick timber, these houses are sturdy with excellent thermal insulation, and the parts are easily transported. We were shown a house like the one above, broken down into components and ready to be packed into a standard shipping container which would easily fit down our road.
YZY Kit Home structural members ready for transportation.
Nothing was too much trouble for David, and he even agreed to a fixed-price contract because he was interested in having a show home in the south of Tasmania. We met him on site and discussed access, and we discussed turning circles and trees that needed to be removed, and the levelling of a space on which a 40-foot shipping container could safely be offloaded using a side-crane.
Over the months, we worked out interior decoration, decking materials, and different methods of achieving (and in fact exceeding) our required Bush Fire Rating.
Based on the YZY Madeira, our final plan.
We moved forward with grading our access road, and I got busy with the chainsaw to clear the building site. We put our property in Montevideo up for sale to free up some cash, and got down to the final fiddling details of the placement of light switches and power sockets. We were onto a winner.
Then disaster struck. Due to a family emergency, David had to pull out of the project and shut down his construction company. We were devastated.
YZY were still happy to supply the kit, but did not have any other licensed builders in Tasmania. Still in shock, shattered and not a little depressed, we drew a line under the whole idea of house-building, and went to look at yachts instead.
It took a little while to work it out of our system, and we looked at a lot of yachts. In the end, though, we couldn’t really find what we wanted for the amount of spare cash in our pockets, so we returned home to sulk.
Then we heard once more from David; his son, whom we had already met, was interested in taking up the reins of the family business. We slowly restarted our negotiations, and were just in the process of pricing up a second design option, when COVID-19 became a worldwide pandemic. Transport prices from Scandinavia went through the roof, as all the world’s empty shipping containers ended up rusting in China awaiting cargoes that never arrived. The Australian dollar went into free fall, and the supply chains of imported building materials broke down. Tasmania closed its borders to non-essential visitors.
We hope and trust that we will all get through this, but until the crisis is over, that’s the end of our story.
Back in 2012, we asked Matthew, a friend and neighbour who had access to useful machinery, if he would help us with bulldozing a road into our property. We asked him to make it as subtle as possible, just a winding bush-track through the forest to give us initial access, without materially changing the look and feel of the site. Matthew made us just what we wanted, a dirt track just perfect for humping camping gear in and out of the forest.
The entrance to the track from Klynes Road into the property, freshly built in 2012.
I had an idea in the back of my mind that some day we’d need to widen it to give access to construction machinery and to serve as our official Rural Fire Service access road, but for now this would do us just fine.
Since the “official” council road, Klynes Road, was merely a dotted line on a map rather than an actual graded thoroughfare, we also got Matthew to clear a line along its path up as far as our track entrance, adding a turning circle for delivery trucks, for when the time finally came to build something. Nobody else uses that end of Klynes Road, as it doesn’t go anywhere, so we felt that nobody would mind.
Then we went travelling abroad for a number of years, and returned with a small child. This re-focussed our minds on the building project, which had heretofore been a nebulous plan that we would think about somewhere in the future.
The first step was to evaluate what had happened to our property in the intervening six years. Was the access track still open? Was the cleared building site still accessible? We hopped on a flight to Hobart and rented a small car with a child seat.
We had no idea what we might find, or even if we’d be able to find the track. Nature can reclaim a lot of land in six years! This video records our arrival.
Track entrance in 2018
Top of the track, near the cleared site, in 2018
The track was still there, overgrown with ferns in places, and obstructed by fallen branches and the occasional tree. We cleared it all away, but found that the compacted mud of the track bed had eroded in places to reveal a lumpy surface of loose sand, projecting tree roots and slippery stumps, and there was no chance of getting our two-wheel-drive rental vehicle up there. We did come across a flat hard-standing that had been built by a gate to our nearest neighbours’ property (the farm on the other side of Klynes Road), a gate which hadn’t even been there six years ago. Now that we’d extended Klynes Road as far as our boundary, there was no reason why our neighbours shouldn’t make use of it, and they clearly had. It made a useful place to park the car, while we unloaded.
This is as far as we can get in this vehicle! Looking down Klynes Road from the track entrance.
Our storage shed, now six years old, was still standing on firm foundations, with all of our camping gear refreshingly un-nibbled by the local wildlife. After moving out the bulkiest items, we used the shed as a rain shelter for cooking and eating. Berrima, age 3, instantly fell in love with the forest, and with the whole idea of bush camping.
I had been worried that we would need to have the building site itself cleared again, but in fact it looked much the same as we’d left it six years earlier. I had deliberately left the tall trees standing while clearing away the scrub and litter, and I guess that’s the advantage of dry sclerophyll forest; all of nature’s action is far up in the tree canopy, and nothing much happens on the ground. There was just some Common Heath, a pretty but slightly prickly flowering native, and some bracken under the sheltering native cherry trees.
The house site, looking North, 2018.
Having established that everything was fine with our forest, we went back to work. A year went by, while we worked on contracts far away in Queensland and in the Australian Capital Territory. In the evenings, though, we planned and plotted ways to fund and build our final home.
Doing our research and due diligence, I became aware that the Rural Fire Service regulations had changed. When we’d put in our original access track, the requirement had been a maximum slope of 1 in 4; now the legislation had been upgraded to no steeper than 1 in 5.5 and at least 4 metres wide. Before we would be permitted to live in any planned house, we needed to build a new road.
I commissioned a surveyor to provide us with a contour survey of the site and track. This confirmed that not only the track but also the final rise of Klynes Road was too steep, and the surveyor went back to research the slopes further downhill. Once this was done, I plugged his figures into a GIS program, and then spent several months trying to combine the often contradictory information from this and our previous surveys, mud-map sketches, and paper documentation, to form a coherent picture of our site.
2010 mud map
2019 site plan
Poring over the numbers, I mapped out a potential contour route for an access road that would meet fire regulations, would be strong and wide enough to take heavy construction vehicles, and yet wouldn’t spoil the feeling of arriving at a remote bush block. In the 2019 site plan to the right above, you can see the wide green road skirting the Easterly limit of the contour lines.
The map is, of course, not the territory. For all I knew, there might be stands of important trees that I would not want to see felled, or other surprises that could only be determined on the ground. Since I was still working far away in Canberra, I also needed to find somebody with the necessary equipment and experience to get the job done in my absence. I boarded a flight to Hobart.
As luck would have it, it was pouring with rain that weekend, although this had brought the Common Heath into bloom across the entire 14 acres, which was quite beautiful.
Flowers of the Common Heath, pretty much the only plant that has reclaimed the cleared land.
I had intended to camp on the land, but instead elected to stay in a local B&B that had the advantage of heating and the internet. My rental car, a tiny hatchback, was obviously never going to make it up our track, but I figured that I would load it up with surveying equipment, stop short on the final drop of Klynes Road down to our creek, and hump in my gear on foot. I was quite surprised to discover that our neighbours had, in the act of putting in a boundary fence, extended Klynes Road right past our property and up over the next hill.
Our Klynes road terminus, 2018
Klynes road goes ever on… 2019
I had a rare old time stomping around in the mud, translating my mapped intentions onto the ground, and finding that yes indeed there was a slightly better route through the timber, one which avoided felling some of the older trees. I spray-painted and marked the route, while wondering who I was going to find to do the actual work.
Let’s put a road through here…
Back-tracking to our border with Klynes Road to check my figures against my boundary markers, I came across a large yellow digger parked on the fence-line of the farm on the other side.
Aha! I thought, and rang the neighbour whose fence this was, and before very long was in contact with the Dan, the Cat’s owner, who agreed that it made perfect sense for him to work on my project once he’d finished the fence-line, since his machinery was already on site.
Soon enough, the road-building project was under way. Perhaps ironically, the very first thing that Dan did was to widen and re-open the old track, so that he could get his digger up to the site. Now we are the proud owners of not one, but two roads.
Initial clearance of the bottom of the new road
Clearing the way for the top of the new road
Things quietened down a bit until after Christmas, when Berrima and I arrived at the end of a road trip to escape the 2019 bush fires. We had a good laugh “going on an expedition” (looking for and re-marking our boundary markers), setting up a tyre swing, and doing some bush artwork.
An Expedition to the South West Pole.
I also took the opportunity to finally clear the trees from the building site.
The building site, looking North, early 2020.
With actual physical labour and a changing skyline, it finally felt that I was achieving something. The site became brighter and sunnier, and the final shape of the view over the d’Entrecasteaux became more obvious. As well as Dan the digger, David the builder and Rodney the quarryman also visited, and we were able to point at things and make real decisions; it felt like we were making actual progress.
There is a bend at the bottom of the new road that is slightly too steep to drive up if the mud is wet. Even the Land Cruiser couldn’t get up in the rain.
The Cruiser goes up.. and then slides back down.
…but our resident artist made us a house number
Between Dan and Rodney and I, we formulated a plan. Dan would do some more levelling to straighten out the bend as much as possible, and then Rodney would drop a 1.5 tonnes of 60-100mm aggregate next to the creek. Dan would level it, and then Rodney would drop a second load. Once this had been bedded in up to the top of the bend, Rodney reckoned that the gravel trucks could negotiate the bend by themselves, and lay the rest of the 13 tonne loads themselves using the tipper and dragged chains.
Today, the first load went down, and the creek crossing looks marvellous.
The first load of aggregate at the creek crossing, looking North down Klynes Road.
The smoke from this year’s early and severe bush fire season had been closing in on Canberra for the past month. Official figures showed that breathing the air was equivalent to smoking several packs of cigarettes every day, with the city regularly topping the index of “world’s most polluted cities”. The ongoing bush fires, which were showing no sides of abating, where being fanned by high winds and extreme temperatures.
A fine view of Lake Burley Griffin and the Brindabella Range though the Canberra smoke haze
Smoke masks were either unavailable or in limited supply, and in any case didn’t come in non-adult sizes, so it was definitely time to get the children out. Some families headed to the coast, others to Melbourne in the south. We’d already escaped to Vanuatu for a week, but were now back in town and conditions were getting worse. We decided to go and camp on our property in Southern Tasmania.
Bronwyn needed to stay in town to work, but Berrima and I were free to go. It would be an interesting experiment, because at four and a half years old, Berrima had finally given up a nightly slurp of mother’s milk, and we thought that she was ready for an extended trip with Papa alone. We loaded up the Land Cruiser with camping gear, and hit the road.
On previous family road trips, Berrima had needed constant attention and frequent breaks at roadside playgrounds. This time, she entertained herself by chatting about the scenery, embroidering, drawing, and using road signs to teach herself to read. It was all quite charming.
To make it more fun, we stopped every 1.5 hours or so, selecting highway exits at random and driving around to see if there was a playground or something else of interest. It turned every 3 hour segment into an enjoyable 5 hour exploration.
Stopping for hot chocolate and curry at the Dog and Tuckerbox in Gundagai, we stepped out into 40 degrees of heat, passing trucks trailing rooster-tails of choking dust. We’d taken as wide a circuit as we could around the Snowy Mountain fires, but there was still a heavy smoke haze, with temporary signs along the Hume Highway warned of impending closures, and local fire signs set to Extreme.
One of our rest stops was in the typical rural town of Juglong, which had the advantage of a playground, but with the temperature still up in the forties, even Berrima couldn’t face playing in it for long. There was however a cute memorial sculpture to a policeman who was shot by a bush ranger (ie highwayman) in the late 1800s.
The Seargeant Parry Memorial at Juglong NSW
We weren’t out of the smoke yet, though, by far. The plume from the bush fires burning all down the East coast and across Kosciuzco had reached South America and New Zealand, so our little detour inland to Yass and down the Hume Highway didn’t make a great deal of difference to the air quality. Passing Tarcutta, my eyes were streaming so badly that I could barely see to drive. Goodness only knows what it was like for the folks out defending their properties.
On our first night, we set up on the banks of Lake Hume. Usually we bush-camp, but most if not all of the national parks were closed because of the fire danger, so we ended up at the Great Aussie Holiday Park in Bowna. This did have the advantage of a children’s water park and a very welcome pool, but the disadvantage of being far from any grocery shops. It was late in the day, so we we braved the cafe.
It took the chef 40 minutes to cook a steak and nachos, during which time Berrima and I covered an increasingly eclectic range of conversational topics as we tried to ward off hungry crankiness, one of which was trying to guess why the table had so many cut marks in the surface. I could only hypothesise that somebody had cut pizza on it, which didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Then, when our food finally came, it arrived with metal cutlery but no crockery, just a soggy paper bag which decayed instantly, so that cutting into the steak swiftly revealed… the table surface. Hopefully it was fairly clean.
Not exactly gourmet cuisine
Back at the car, we’d set up the awning to provide maximum shielding from the dozens of overly bright lights that seem to be de rigueur at every Australian camp site, and to take advantage of the wind coming off the lake.
This latter seemed like a good idea at the time, but the wind soon built up into 40kph gusts bringing with them searing convection-oven heat from the Kosciusco bush fires.
As the night drew on, a Southerly change brought a welcome freezing gale, followed by a thunderstorm and rain. We were awoken by an ecstatic dawn chorus, and the sight of clear blue skies for the first time in weeks.
Shuddering at the thought of breakfast at the cafe, we hit the road and continued South until we found a decent coffee shop in a sleepy roadside town.
As we crossed the border from New South Wales into Victoria, we drove out of the smoke from the out-of-control bush fires in Kosciuzco, and into the smoke from the out-of-control bush fires in Gippsland. We weren’t that surprised, as we had been hearing from friends who had escaped with their children to Melbourne, that the smoke there was little better than in Canberra.
Because we had a ferry to catch, we could only fit in a couple of stops along the way, but they did include the site of Ned Kelly’s last stand in Glenrowan (but no playground), and shark and chips in Benalla (ditto).
Without too much more ado, we arrived in Melbourne (not too smoky, as it transpired) and were efficiently embarked upon the Spirit of Tasmania II. We were early enough to enjoy an uncrowded dinner in the excellent restaurant, which is set up to showcase the best of Tasmanian produce, and then stood on deck to wave goodbye to the mainland before retiring to our cabin for the night.
The Spirit of Tasmania II leaves Melbourne
The swell in the Bass Strait was a relatively reasonable 3-4 metres which rocked us gently to sleep.
Early in the morning, we were decanted into Devonport under clear smoke-free blue skies, and headed to Launceston for a well-deserved breakfast. The chair-lift at Cateract Gorge beckoned, followed by a dip in the pool, and then of course a straight five hours at the playground.
After considering some lovely (but ultimately impractical and over-expensive) round house options, we have realised that we need to pay less attention to the fluffy design tasks, and more attention to supply chain logistics and to the post-lock-up finishing and decorating. To this end, we decided to investigate a prefabricated house.
We started out looking at “tiny houses”, which are a bit of a fad at the moment. Technically a caravan in that they possess a wheeled chassis and are thus immune to building regulations, they are not meant to be towed around on a regular basis and are commonly installed as a granny flat in a suburban garden. A tiny house can be a marvel of interior design, and we found that we were familiar with many of the principles because it is similar to that found in yachts, where space is also at a premium.
A typical Tiny House, the Hauslein Sojourner
Although tiny houses are very interesting, and a good way to create some extra living space in a confined area, they are relatively expensive per square metre because of the necessity to cram everything into a small footprint, and anyway we have plenty of space to spread out and no need to unnecessarily limit ourselves.
There are other styles of prefabricated house, that can give you a larger footprint. Around Australia, there are a number of businesses which will build a house for you in their factory, all the way to completely decorated with all utilities and appliances installed. The house is then cut into pre-defined segments and delivered to the site on a low-loader for re-assembly. The advantage is that the builder has complete control over all aspects of the build using their own staff, and can thus deliver significant economies of scale as well as an agreed price and timeline.
We chose to move forward with TasBuilt Homes after visiting their rather amazing factory in Launceston.
Tasbuilt Homes factory, containing a house in progress.
The way it works is that you take one of their standard designs, and then move around the internal walls and fittings until you have the result that you want. The guys at TasBuilt were very friendly and obliging, and we had an excellent set of discussions with them, specifying all the finishes and adding a North-facing deck. Since the price was all-in, there were going to be no surprises, and we were pretty happy with the plan.
All was going swimmingly well, until TasBuilt sent their surveyor down to look at our access road, which was then under construction. They approved of the road that we were building across our property, but were less happy about access down Klynes Road itself. TasBuilt’s surveyor judged that it was too narrow and too steep to negotiate with a 6 metre wide trailer.
Klynes Road survey notes
Although this is officially a council road, we are not averse to running a bulldozer down it or cutting back some trees if we need to, because we are the last property on the road and it doesn’t go anywhere else. However, there were places where we would have had to double the width, which would entail substantial earthworks and the loss of some beautiful well-established trees, so we regretfully decided to return once again to the drawing board.
We had long been interested in the idea of building a yurt or round house in the woods, even travelling to Mongolia to stay in an original felt-walled ger.
Our ger on the Mongolian steppe.
These gers are designed to be stripped down, packed up and moved at regular intervals, stemming from the traditional nomadic lifestyle on the Steppes. With the breakdown of the USSR and their enforced “westernisation” of Mongolians, there is a resurgence in their use, particularly noticeable today in construction sites as the workers move from site to site.
Gers in use by construction workers in Ulaanbaatar.
There is quite a movement around the world to take the same easy-to-erect construction concept but with the view to building a more permanent structure. Some companies used modern fabrics, others made the walls from wood. In all cases, the result is a polygonal structure with a large open space inside.
Australian Roundhouses
We looked at a few different companies, several in the US where this sort of thing has been going on for some years, but eventually settled on Australian Roundhouses (formerly Goulburn Yurtworks) just outside of Canberra.
A design from Australian Roundhouses.
The team were enthusiastic about prefabricating the structural elements in New South Wales and driving them to Tasmania on a low-loader to erect them for us. We had an entertaining time discussing various options and layouts; the polygonal plan provides a fantastic airy openness inside, but does present problems when most of our modern furniture is designed to fit inside a square box. Still, everything seemed to be going pretty well with an 8-metre central round house surrounded by a ring of “annexes” to give extra space. The central roof cupola would provide natural light, and the full-height windows and raised exterior deck would give us unrivalled views across the d’Entrecasteaux Channel.
We edged ever closer to an agreement, and the builders got ever more excited about their upcoming Tasmanian “holiday”. Then we realised that we might have a problem with the 49 foundation posts on which the structure would stand. They would add appreciably to the weight of the trailer which needed to cross to Tasmania on the ferry, so I agreed to look into sourcing them locally. Since the site is sloping, with a drop of a few inches to the South and about 3 metres to the North, a half to a third of the posts would need to be longer than the standard length in which such poles usually come. The longer ones, up to perhaps 4 or 5 metres, would all be “special order” and priced accordingly…
And then we started factoring in all the extras that we would need once the main structure had been constructed. Dry-walling, plumbing, electrical, waste, all would have to be added after the builders had gone home. Even the rough estimates started to blow our budget. We needed to reconsider.
Neat House
Perhaps we could get away with a smaller round house for our living area, and combine it with a more traditional structure for the services? We looked into a company called Neat House who prefabricate buildings in Tasmania using local materials.
This would use fewer long foundation posts underneath the yurt, but now we would be dealing with house components from two separate suppliers, plus additional labour to glass-in the connecting corridor between them. It was all starting to get a bit complicated, so we went back to the drawing board.
We had chosen a build site in the middle of our forest, and had at least made a start on putting in an access road and clearing some space. But what next? What kind of house did we want to live in, and who could we get to build it? Would it make sense to do it myself as an Owner Builder?
We knew that whatever we built, it would be off the grid and self-sufficient. Even though such structures are increasingly common in Tasmania, it seemed to us that it would be sufficiently non-standard that we wouldn’t find something off the shelf, and perhaps we would be best off managing the project ourselves. To this end, I began investigating the requirements to attain my “Owner Builder” qualifications, which would give me the legal ability to build my own house in Tasmania.
It turned out that there were two components to this; the “White Card” which is an industry standard health-and-safety qualification that is essential for working on any building site in Australia, and the “Owner Builder Certificate”, which is a specific course to prepare you for the job in hand.
White Card
An Australian White Card is a pre-requisite for any construction activity, and the terms and conditions vary between Australian States. Whichever card you get, though, it is valid in all other Australian States… and some States don’t allow online training… and you don’t need to reside in a State to apply for their card… and the Western Australia card is available online and differs from some others in that it does not have an expiry date. I couldn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t get the open-ended WA card, so I registered with EOT online training and got one.
The course was inexpensive and interesting, with a face-to-face component which involved videoing yourself giving answers to some of the longer questions which are reviewed by the trainers. There was also a slightly bizarre requirement to film yourself correctly wearing your Personal Protection Equipment, so I took the opportunity to kit my daughter out as well.
Bunnings also sell PPE for small people.
Owner-Builder
The Owner-Builder qualification is a bit more involved, but is also available inexpensively online. I took my course with ABE, and began a fascinating journey into the intricacies of controlling a building project. One theme that continued throughout the various modules was to think carefully about whether you were up for it; are you capable of managing your time, managing people, managing a budget? Is your family prepared to support you throughout the inevitable stress? Are you really prepared to give up so much of your time?
It really is a very good course, and at the end I felt a little nervous but at least mentally prepared for the challenges to come.
Now that we had purchased our forest in Tasmania, we had a great camping destination (albeit one where all our gear needed to be packed in over the creek on foot), but where should we build our house?
Our steeply sloping 2008 camp site. Note the staked retaining wall/ foot rest to stop us from rolling down the hill.
With 14 acres of dry sclerophyll forest to choose from, we spent several visits stomping about, clambering over fallen trees and poking at the ground, we slowly formed a more detailed mental picture of the terrain. The high Southern slopes are steep and rocky, and the low Northern slopes are steep and boggy. To the East, the land falls away steeply to one side. To the West lies the official route of Klynes Road, although in reality there is little more than a rough logging track which terminates at the creek crossing on our border. Still, it is the closest thing that we have to a demarcated border with the farm on that side, so we didn’t want to build in sight of it in case something changes there in the future.
In the end, we decided to put the house on a shelf of less steeply sloping land, more or less in the middle of the forest. After a lot of scrambling around and climbing trees, we ascertained that a raised deck would give us fine views across the d’Entrecasteaux estuary, over the tops of our lower forest. The higher wooded slopes to the South would protect us from storms rolling in from the Southern Ocean. Bravely, we hammered some stakes into the ground.
How about right here? The site in 2008.
It was still only coloured sticks in a forest, with no access except on foot by crossing the creek at the bottom of the property. However, a neighbour who had built a house further down Klynes Road had access to a bulldozer, so we commissioned him to run a causeway over the creek, push through an access track, and clear the brush from the building site.
2007
2012
The house is gonna be here! The brush cleared in 2012.
We’d asked him to leave the larger trees for the moment, but to clear anything that had fallen down. This had the unexpected benefit of providing us with chest-high stacks of drying fire wood which will probably last us for years.
Perched atop just one of our little piles of firewood.
We have no immediate plans to start the house build; all that is far in the future. But now that we can get a four-wheel drive in to our cleared building site, we have a perfect camp retreat at the bottom of the world.
Home away from home. Our considerably more comfortable camp site in 2012.Making good use of the wood pile.
For several years, all of our camping gear had been stored under a bush, wrapped in a tarpaulin. On every visit, we found more holes in our tarp, and sometimes nibble-marks on the tools themselves. We decided to construct a more permanent shelter for our gear, and to this end bought a prefabricated garden shed and some railway sleepers.
Digging the foundations for the shed. It’s nice firm clay down there.A man and his shed.
On a random motorcycle camping perambulation around the Australian state of Victoria, we noticed the town of St Arnaud on the map. Years before, we used to drink a very nice wheat beer called St Cloud from the St Arnou Brewery, so on a whim and on the barest similarity of names we decided to make that our next stop.
A rest-stop in the Victorian Grampians
On arrival, the town showed great promise, with sturdy gold-rush era buildings lining a prosperous-looking high street, including three large hotels. Wonder of wonders, there was even a camp site in the centre of town nestled up against the race track.
The camp site managers didn’t know of any brewery, which didn’t greatly surprise us as there was no real reason to think that St Arnaud was any relation to St Arnou, but they vaguely suggested that we might try the sports club up the hill. Sports clubs are not renowned for their real ale, so after quickly pitching camp we ignored their advice and headed for the town centre.
The town was strangely quiet, in fact we seemed to be the only living things apart from the locusts. Maybe everybody was already at the pub? We headed for the nearest one, which proved to be not only closed, but apparently closed down. Still, with the impressive Commonwealth Hotel only a few metres away, competition was presumably fierce. Arriving at the door of the Commonwealth, we found a sign saying ‘premises for lease’. We back-tracked to the third pub, but this too was closed and boarded up from the inside. We looked up and down the empty street. Where was everybody?
St Arnaud
We ambled back to the camp site, and recalled the sports bar ‘up the hill’. The indicated trail took us to a harness-racing track, nicely maintained with a central cricket oval, but devoid of life apart from a couple of kids in the distance playing in the nets. On the other side of the track was a building that looked very much like a bar, but it was still as a grave. Nevertheless, we thought that we could see the edge of a parked car sticking out from behind it, so we began to make our way around the race course. The air was full of locusts, and snakes slithered into the undergrowth from the rotting advertising panels underfoot.
We made it round unscathed, and were heartened to find an open door with a registration book for out-of-state visitors, a sight familiar in any of the innumerable gambling-funded drinking clubs across the continent. Signing ourselves in, we made our way past the usual sad array of motionless relicts that are always to be found slumped in front of the slot machines, and found the bar. It was, predictably, empty, and did not serve any ale. There was however a barman and a wine list, so we ordered a bottle and sat by the window. We felt that the sun had already well and truly set on St Arnou, but we sat and watched it go down once again.
Since we were the only customers, we got a fair bit of attention from the barman. Can I get you some food? Some more wine? Some more water? A toasted sandwich? However, he didn’t know anything about a town brewery.
When, suitably sozzled, we finally left to stroll back to the camp site, the barman rather bizarrely warned us not to cross the oval or we’d get “attacked by kangaroos”, and could he call us a taxi? When we reminded him that we were naturalised Australians and that killer kangaroos were quite low on our worry list, he meekly led us to the steps down to the oval and bade us good night.
(For the record, the real St Arnou is 1000 km away in the Hunter Valley)
We had been warned about the dragonflies, and here they were, swarms of them coming out of the desert, big fat and very very hard. Every time we stopped, enormous black crows would descend and pluck the mangled and juicy bodies from the motorbike.
We were riding across the Nullarbor Plain, the world’s largest single piece of limestone, comprising about 200,000 square kilometres of desert separating Western Australia from Southern Australia. There is only one road across, and the thousand-kilometre Eyre Highway has become a long-distance traveller’s icon. The story goes that, far from being the aboriginal name that you might expect, the word Nullarbor was coined by early explorers from the schoolboy Latin for ‘no trees’. This is something of a misnomer, because in fact this area forms part of the largest temperate forest in the world. It is a land of stark contrasts; red earth, bright green low-lying shrubs, and impressive glossy red gum trees, all stretching out forever beneath a vivid blue sky.
Look, no trees!
The logistics of living in such an arid environment preclude any kind of town on the Plain itself. There are a few hardy cattle stations out there, but along the road civilisation is represented by roadhouses strung out at intervals of 200 kilometres. Largely owned and operated by the major oil companies, they provide fuel for traffic and road trains and offer varying degrees of accommodation, food and camping.
Some are prosperous and well-appointed, others run down and a little squalid, but since 200 kilometres represents the maximum distance that the XJR 1300 can go on a single tank of fuel, we were obliged to stop at each and every one.
No trees here, either
Although it was winter and there was a fresh wind blowing in from the Southern Ocean, there was still an appreciable heat haze on the road. Mirages and inversion layers were common, and it was often quite a few miles before you could figure out what it was that was coming towards you, or even if it was coming towards you at all. The prettiest mirage turned the whole of the road ahead into a perfect reflection of the blue sky overhead, so that it seemed that at any moment you might drop off the edge of the world.
All trailers are restricted by law to 100 km/h, and since just about everything from the road trains down to the smallest car and even some of the motorbikes are towing trailers, this means that the traffic, if you can call it that, moves at that same speed like discrete beads along a wire. Horizon to horizon, you might see one bead up ahead, and possibly one far behind, but that’s as congested as it gets. Going a little faster than this, we would slowly catch and pass each road train, but it was sometimes a long battle through the vortex of turbulence that could extend hundreds of metres behind each rig.
Road Train
It is a point of pride for every Australian town, municipality or region to claim to be home to the largest, longest or oldest feature of Australia or, preferably, the world. If a particular region lacks any suitable natural features, then the locals will build something. Typical examples are The Big Trout, The Big Merino and The Big Banana. We have personally drunk beers in at least half a dozen Oldest Continually Licensed Premises In Australia.
The Nullarbor boasts not only The Longest Stretch of Straight Road in Australia (146.6 km) but also The Longest Golf Course in the World, which puzzled us a bit at first. All became clear when we realised that there was a tee and a hole at every roadhouse. The whole thing could be said to stretch out over more than 1100 km, but you have to drive for several hours down the highway to get to each tee. Of course there isn’t much in the way of green; the terrain is described as ‘natural ground’.
The plain viewed from a high scarp
Along the road, the landscape remained largely flat but the flora changed regularly, presumably reflecting changes in the underlying hydrology. The underbrush remained hummocky and rarely exceeded a couple of feet in height, but the amount of bare earth between the bushes varied, and trees came and went above. In several places we passed entire forests of dead trees where presumably the water table had dropped temporarily out of reach. In most of these, new growth was now springing up from the bases of the trunks, so presumably the aquifer had since recovered.
The lack of water was a constant theme. With only a few inches of rainfall a year, most water is trucked in to the roadhouses at great expense. Showers are available at a price, but unless you rent a cabin you are expected to bring your own washing and drinking water with you.
Sign of the times
A couple of days into the Nullarbor, we came across a road train parked in the bush and a hired motor home lying on its side. We stopped to see if we could help, but the road train driver, who had seen the accident and was now watching over the wreck, said that the occupants were fine and had got a lift out to the next roadhouse. On our arrival we heard that they had encountered a road train coming in the opposite direction on the wrong side of the road, and had lost control in their panic. We still don’t know how the roadhouse manager got it back on its four wheels, but evidently he did because it later drove in to the roadhouse car park with surprisingly little damage beyond some chamfered bodywork and busted windows.
They were lucky. You definitely don’t want to run into a fifty-metre road train.
Toy motorcycle
There are warning signs along the road for all manner of creatures, from camels to cows and kangaroos to ostriches. I suspect that many of these signs are just there to please the tourists, because for the most part the wildlife sticks to the safety of the scrub, but we did encounter a pair of emus that had come up to scrape dew from the tarmac. Seeing them in their native habitat, we realised that their hummocky bodies blended perfectly with the scrub, and it was perfectly possible to miss seeing a couple of metre-high birds if they were standing still.
On another stretch of road, I noticed a fallen log and pulled out to avoid it, and then had to swerve again because it was in fact a very large snake crossing the road and spanning almost the entire lane. I managed to avoid it, and I hope it got across before the next road train came through.
Large black crows picked up bugs that had been squashed by passing traffic, or clustered around the occasional road kill. Where there was a fallen roo, the feasting birds would usually see us coming from miles away and would take to the air well in advance, but on one occasion the birds seemed reluctant to leave. As we got closer, we realised that this time they weren’t crows, but instead a whole family of wedge-tailed eagles. As they struggled to get airborne, one of them revealed a wingspan wider than the fully loaded bike. We later heard tell of a motorcyclist who was showing off a long scar in the top of his helmet from the claws of an eagle that hadn’t quite got enough altitude in time.
A dingo ate my sandwich
As we travelled further into the region, the cost of a room for the night rose dramatically. At Caiguna they wanted over $100 for a bed, but only $15 to use their camp ground (aka the open desert behind the rainwater tanks) so we set up the tent instead. We didn’t have sleeping bags, just a sheet and some felt blankets, and as luck would have it a cold front came through and the temperature dropped to three degrees, so it was bit chilly. Mind you, the stars were incredible.
The half-way point at Eucla
After a few days, the roadhouses tended to blend together in our minds. Each had a pretty decent menu made up of frozen ingredients, jokey signs about tourists’ stupid questions, an endless supply of ‘I crossed the Nullarbor’ mugs, stickers and tea-towels, and – importantly – a well-stocked bar.
The cabins and camp sites were popular but we never had problems finding space. Once we’d watched the sunset there wasn’t much to do in the evening apart from go to the bar, and although we attended religiously every evening we were often surprised to find ourselves the only patrons. Most of the other travellers (road train drivers, grey nomads, the occasional motorcyclist) preferred to keep themselves to themselves.
A typical Nullarbor roadhouse
We did get to talk to a few fellow-travellers. The road train drivers were working in shifts and trying to stay awake, moving goods and produce westwards and, usually, empty trailers eastwards. Sometimes they stacked the empty trailers up one on top of the other to save on tyre wear, and one driver explained how it was done. Apparently they back the first trailer up to a ramp, then reverse the second trailer up the ramp and on to first. Since they’re backing up a ramp, they can’t really see what they’re doing, and since all the trailers are the same size, there is zero tolerance for mistakes. Sometimes they miss and it falls off. We also heard about the fun they have moving mining machinery, because these stupendous machines are usually much wider than the low-loader trailer, with half of each tyre or track overhanging each side. Often the machine operator refuses to risk driving onto such a thin platform, and then it is up to the rig driver to fire up the unfamiliar million-dollar machine and ease it onto the trailer himself. Sometimes these fall off too.
The grey nomads were typically towing their caravans to warmer latitudes for the winter, and everybody else seemed to be driving Perth to Sydney as a sort of endurance feat; it is after all the complete width of the continent, passing through some of the most spectacular scenery in the country. We had passed a couple of lads on the road who were towing hand-carts on foot, but unfortunately there was no safe place to pull over for a chat. We did get to speak to a young student on a bicycle who said that he’d met them on the road and was a little jealous about how much food they were carrying, although apparently they were on a very tight budget and weren’t sure if they could afford to continue all the way to Sydney. The cyclist, a very pleasant chap, had decided to cycle across the continent on a whim.
Are we lost yet?
The eastern stretch of the Eyre Highway runs along the cliff tops overlooking the Great Australian Bight. It was dusk when we passed the famous Bunda Cliffs, and the caravans were starting to circle and to jostle for prime sea-views. They always do this, but we could never figure out why, because they then seem to spend the rest of the night watching satellite television. We have considered doing a Grey Nomad trip ourselves (sort of a Brunette Nomad), and have even gone so far as to go to van shows and talk to caravan dealers. It had seemed to us that a caravan was very much like a yacht, and since we’d had such a ball sailing and meeting travelling yachties, we were keen to try the same thing on land. One of the great things about sailing in remote parts is that no matter how eccentric your fellow traveller, and whatever their walk or stage of life, they are almost always intelligent and interesting and, even if only for one evening, good company. Having attempted to similarly engage the caravanners on our travels, we had to admit that, by and large and with occasional exceptions, they were largely… not.
Bunda Cliffs at dusk
For the last day of our trip across the desert, incredibly, it rained. The roadhouses were full of celebrating station hands,
“How much did you get up at Kickatinalong?”
“Almost an inch!”
“Ah, good on yer mate. We had nearly half an inch at Dustbowlcreek.”
The road trains kicked up a heck of a spray, which made it essential to get past them but impossible to see if anything was coming the other way. Luckily the road train drivers are very aware of bikes – many are bikers themselves – and were very good about signalling when the road ahead was clear. We just kept the throttle open until we arrived at the quarantine checkpoint at Ceduna, officially the end of the Nullarbor and the start of the Eyre Peninsula.
The quarantine officer eyed our luggage and bright waterproofs with a jaundiced eye.
“Got any fruit?” he asked.
“No,” I replied, “no food at all”.
He stared broodily at Bronwyn, as if he suspected her of smuggling grapefruit under her jacket, then grudgingly nodded.
“Right, move along.”
We had crossed the Nullarbor.
The bush toward Kambalda is starkly beautiful, with the bright red of the soil contrasting with the luxurious and brilliant greens of the gum trees, low-growing scrub, and ground-hugging succulents. Whatever its size, each plant is surrounded by a circle of bare earth representing the area from which it is sucking precious water. No competing plant can gain a foothold inside this zone.
Red earth, green plants
The land is largely flat and often salty, broken only by the small hummocks of laterite gossans, interesting geological features that form after iron is leached from the soil, forming a hard protective cap that prevents the underlying rock from being eroded away over the millennia.
Laterite cap near Kambada: Prosaically speaking, it’s a naturally occurring heap of rusty iron.
A little out of Kambalda there must have been a recent major change in the underlying hydrology, because for miles and miles all the trees had been reduced to bone-white sticks. I wondered if one of the many mines in this area had redirected some underground waterway into its workings, or if perhaps there had been a series of particularly dry seasons. Whatever the underlying cause, the water source seemed to have now returned, because a new layer of lush growth was springing from the base of each apparently dead tree trunk.
We will survive!
The road trains are longer out here; over fifty metres. If they’re coming toward you with a following wind, their bow wave can get quite uncomfortable.
Take care!
We saw our first bit of road kill, but it was thoroughly tenderised and it wasn’t obvious what it had been. Certainly not a marsupial; maybe some kind of deer? Then we realised that there were feral goats grazing In the bush, some with horns as long as my arm. We also startled an escaped sheep, definitely of domestic vintage, but unusual in that it had retained a full tail, a very impressive sweeping arm with a fluffy pom-pom on the end.
The road goes ever on…
The road went on, the earth became lighter in colour, but the signs to distant mines remained as prevalent as ever. We started to see what were apparently vast flats of soft mud, which ultimately joined together to form a feature called Cowan Lake which is mined for gypsum. I didn’t quite dare try to ride the motorcycle across the inviting flat surface, but clearly a number of cars had already been doing circle work and they hadn’t made much of a dent in the hard-baked clay pan.
Suddenly we were in Norseman, where a sign warned that it was 198 km to the next fuel stop (one full tank of fuel for us), and that water was scarce from now on so that we must be sure to fill up before continuing. I wanted to investigate an intermittent knocking from the bikes drive chain and there seemed to be plenty of motels to choose from, so we stopped for the night.
A motel in Norseman
I quickly traced the knocking sound to the chain adjusters which had come loose. Fixing the problem meant loosening the rear wheel nut, and unfortunately some lazy mechanic seemed to have thrashed it on with a windy-gun instead of tightening it by hand. I hate it when they do that, as it makes roadside adjustments really difficult. Still, there were plenty of heavy rocks lying around, and by hitting it repeatedly I finally got it undone. We had booked in to the motel restaurant for dinner, and it was made quite clear that if we booked for seven, then weren’t expected to show up until seven. With an hour to kill we took a stroll around the town, which consisted mainly of a scattering of hundreds of small houses in various states of disrepair, all apparently servicing the Norseman gold mine.
The mine – and the town – have an interesting history, in that they were named after, and discovered by, a horse. The story goes that a prospector tied the horse to a tree by his brother’s tent for the night, and when he woke up he found that the horse was lame. Investigation revealed a large chunk of gold-bearing quartz lodged in Norseman’s hoof. The prospector and some friends got together and purchased the claim, and the town came into being on the site.
We wandered deeper into town, admiring the famous collection of galvanised iron camels built on the roundabout in the centre.
Galvo camels
After a little more searching we finally located what seemed to be Norseman’s only pub, and met the locals. Both of them. One sat and drooled quietly onto the bar top, while another attempted repeatedly to engage us in conversation, which might have been interesting except that he had a habit of staring up into your eyes from close range, really foul breath, and a brain that seemed to be full of little more than whirring butterflies. Quickly finishing our beers, we scuttled back to the motel.
Since it was still too early for dinner, we decided to sit on the verandah of the restaurant and enjoy a pre-prandial bottle of wine. This suggestion caused great puzzlement to the waitress, who became fixated on the idea that we wanted to cancel our dinner reservation, but eventually we sorted it out and chose a bottle of elderly Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon that seemed oddly out of place in the otherwise standard selection of cheap table wines. The waitress struggled with the cork for a very long time, until I finally realised that she hadn’t even managed to get the point of the corkscrew into the wood, at which point I gently suggested that I give it a try. The bottle was thrust into my hands with alacrity, and I realised that all the others on the shelf were screw-caps. Possibly she had never before wielded a corkscrew in anger; I began to wonder just how long those bottles had been sitting there.
The wine turned out to be very good indeed, and we sat and chatted in the twilight until our food arrived. We hadn’t expected a great deal from the dinner, but even so we were still a bit surprised when my otherwise acceptable steak came with a big dollop of instant mash, and Bronwyn’s bruschetta came smothered in a slab of melted cheddar. Still, the wine was good and there was another bottle left, so I went and fetched it from behind the bar, snaffling the corkscrew on my way back to the table.
After dinner, we met Anne, our neighbour at the motel, who was travelling in the opposite direction to us. She had a bottle of white in her luggage, and we had a bottle of champagne in ours, so we got out some chairs and whiled away the rest of the evening on the verandah outside our cabins. We asked her what the road ahead of us held in store, and it turned out that her trip so far had been almost biblical, with plagues of mice, plagues of dragonflies, and a bushfire to contend with.
Out on the road next morning, we quickly found that Anne had been right about the dragonflies. Since they’re aquatic creatures, we weren’t entirely sure what they were doing out in the desert, but they slammed into the bike with dire regularity, to be picked off by cheeky crows whenever we stopped.
Have motorcycle, will travel
Norseman gold tailings
On the way out, we paused to gawk at the tailings heap from the still profitable gold mine, and then – watching out for flaming rodents – we rode on into the sunrise.
The Golden Pipeline
Living and working in Perth on the West coast of Australia, we had finally saved up enough money to get my motorbike shipped over from the East coast, where our good friend Elizabeth had been looking after it for over a year while we were off travelling. We were looking forward to using it to explore the remoter areas of our new home state.
The XJR’s arrival on the road train transporter exactly coincided with a lucrative job offer back on the East coast. We couldn’t bear the prospect of paying the road train to immediately take the bike back again, so we decided to ride East instead. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough time to get all the way to Brisbane before the start of our new contract, but we reckoned that in two weeks we could easily cross the famous Nullarbor Plain and get as far as Adelaide. We would then catch a plane for the short hop to Brisbane and ship the bike once again; prices from Adelaide to Brisbane are much lower than from Perth, because of the vast distances involved in crossing the Nullarbor.
We had intended to hit the road at lunchtime, but what with one thing and another (moving out of our Perth flat, cleaning it for the agent, shifting all our gear into storage, taking the removal van back to the hire shop) we didn’t get started until past three o’clock. Clearly it was going to be dark when we arrived at our first stop in the gold town of Kalgoorlie.
Loaded with camping gear and extra jerry cans of fuel and water, we began to make good time. Elizabeth had very kindly had the bike tuned before loading it onto the transporter in Sydney, and it was running very sweetly indeed. Although it had been years since our last motorcycle road trip, we quickly fell back into the old routine. With effectively only a single highway leading from Perth to Adelaide, we were in no danger of getting lost, but we did have to carefully plan our fuel stops. The big thirsty 1300cc engine sucked a lot of fuel, and so we could only go about 200 km on a tank, which broke the journey naturally into two-hour segments.
Ready to roll
The Great Eastern Highway clambers up out of Perth and over the Darling Ranges before heading straight as an arrow across the Eastern Gold Fields to Kalgoorlie. Fuel was not a great problem on this first leg, with regular stops servicing road trains and commuting mine staff. Each petrol station doubled as a diner with varying degrees of home-cooked food. One might be a fish and chip shop, the next a traditional truckers diner, but the food was always good and the stops busy.
Once out of the Ranges, the terrain was completely flat, light woods giving way to unrelieved acres of grassland. The road was accompanied by two other man-made structures, the railway and the water pipeline. The Goldfields Pipeline is one of the engineering wonders of WA, running above ground for 530 kilometres and supplying precious water to Kalgoorlie and Boulder in the dry red interior. In the 1890s people in the burgeoning gold towns were dying from lack of water, and engineer C.Y. O’Connor spearheaded a campaign to build a pipeline from the coast. It was the longest pipeline project in the world, and needed a system of steam-driven pumping stations to force the water up over the intervening Darling Ranges. Although supported by the WA government, there was fierce opposition to what was regarded as an unfeasible waste of money. There is a story that on the the first test of the newly completed system, the engineer opened the taps, and… nothing happened. Mr O’Connor, exhausted from the stress, put a gun to his head and killed himself. The following day, the water completed its long journey and emerged from the pipe, and has been flowing ever since.
Pipeline and road trains
Most of the traffic in these parts consists of road trains, limited in length to 35 metres and 100 km/h and so are relatively easy to pass on the straight road, unless they are wide loads carrying mining machinery, in which case they take up most of the available space in both directions. These extra-large transporters are accompanied by groups of pilot vehicles which go ahead to warn oncoming traffic, and run interference from behind to prevent you from overtaking until the whole flotilla is ready.
Wide Load
There was a popular belief in Perth when we left that kangaroos were a big problem on this road at dusk, but we didn’t see a single road-kill corpse, so we took that with a large pinch of salt. We have lived in the Australian Capital Territory where the roadside can be lined with dead roos and wombats, and the stench of rotting bodies on a hot day can make you gag. The only living creature on this segment of the Great Eastern Highway was the occasional crow picking squashed bugs off the road.
As darkness fell, we ran into a swarm of bogon moths, big fat migratory insects that are regarded as a delicacy by some aboriginals. Caught in the headlights at 140 km/h, it is like heading into a swarm of soft bullets, swiftly covering your helmet visor in an impenetrable layer of sticky bug juice.
Kalgoorlie
The day before we arrived, an earthquake hit the Kalgoorlie-Boulder metropolitan area, destroying much of Boulder’s historical centre, so we were a little unsure what we would find in its twin borough of Kalgoorlie. However the town seemed unscathed and business was continuing as usual and we checked into the Youth Hostel without any problems.
Most of the cheap accommodation is to be found opposite the town’s three brothels, some of which are museums by day while plying their more traditional trade after nightfall.
Questa Casa, oldest brothel in Australia
From there it was but a short step to the Exchange Hotel, where negligee-glad “skimpies” served us very welcome pints of frosty beverage. The skimpies are a bit of an institution in Kalgoorlie, pretty girls shipped in from outside to pull pints wearing nothing more than a continually changing set of underwear, to the appreciation of the almost exclusively male mining population. For a while there was a bit of an arms race between the pubs, until all the wait staff were going topless, but since then it has apparently settled down a bit. The girls themselves are happy and congenial, although often not enormously competent at bar work. If you want something other than a pint of cold, it is often best to approach one of the regular, more conventionally clad bar staff.
There is a lovely but little-known balcony upstairs at the Exchange, which looks out on the whole town of Kalgoorlie, and from which you can watch the parade of punters milling around the other pubs in the centre.
The Exchange Hotel
Everybody in Kalgoorlie is small-town friendly, and we soon ended up drinking with a mixed crowd of wiry mine engineers, Maori bouncers, and Aboriginal ne’er do wells. The night degraded appropriately into the usual debauchery; the Aboriginals started fighting each other and were ejected, and the skimpies knocked off work and joined us in the Palace Hotel across the road. Somewhere in the melee, Bronwyn’s handbag disappeared, but our kindly new friends made sure that we were alright for beers.
Back at the hostel we realised that the code for the combination lock at the entrance was stamped on the fob of our room key, which was in Bronwyn’s bag. I wandered around the outside of the building and eventually located a loose window which I managed to jemmy open so at least we were able to get inside, but no amount of fossicking with my library card was going to get us through the impressive lock into our room. Luckily there were some sofas scattered about in the corridor, so we passed out on those instead.
The morning brought a spare key and rain. We had breakfast at the excellent Kaoss Cafe in the central St Barbara Square, where the chef prepares all those out-of-style English dishes that you had forgotten about: bubble and squeak, liver and onions, mince on toast, and a host of others.
Breakfast in St Barbara Square
We strolled gently around town, interspersed with coffee and cake in an attempt to clear the mental fug. The rock museum at the Western Australian School of Mines is exactly what a museum should be. No shiny plastic and multimedia presentations here. The cabinets are scarred wood and glass and a little dusty, the exhibits labelled by hand on cardboard squares containing either a detailed technical explanation, a single terse word, or nothing at all, depending on the whim of the curator at the time.
The collection houses a representative sample of every rock, mineral and gemstone found in the Eastern Goldfields, with special prominence given to the different forms of ore that are so crucial to the wealth of Western Australia. This is not a museum for idle onlookers, this is a serious tool for the fledgling geologist. Pride of place, of course, goes to the models of the biggest gold nuggets found in the early days of the gold rush, some a foot or so across and containing a thousand or more ounces of gold and silver.
Tossing up whether to stay another night or ride off in the rain, we eventually paid a last visit to the Exchange Hotel to see whether they’d found Bronwyns hand bag (they hadn’t), mounted the bike and headed east.
Bright Postie gear didn’t stop the rain
Kalgoorlie Super-Pit
On the way out of town is the Kalgoorlie Superpit, another of those technological marvels that are scattered around a state used to doing things big. Historically, gold here was mined by individual lease-holders digging shafts with little more than dynamite and a shovel, and in the early twentieth century the landscape was littered with derricks and processing sheds. Eventually there came a point where it was uneconomic for a man and a spade to dig any deeper, and entrepreneur and con-man Alan Bond came up with a plan to buy up every single mining lease and then dig an enormous pit to extract every last ounce of gold.
Bond’s business failed, but the block of mining leases was taken up by another company, KCGM, who went ahead and dug the biggest gold mine in the world. The pit is truly enormous, and aircraft landing at Kalgoorlie-Boulder Airfield now have to detour around it because it creates a huge hole in the atmosphere above. We had originally bought tickets for a tour of the mine, but this had been cancelled because of the earthquake, and we had been told that even the public viewing gallery on the top of the spoil heaps had been closed for safety reasons.
Bronwyn finds a bigger shovel
As we rolled past in a light drizzle we noticed that the gate was now open, so we rode up the hill and took a look. The mine, usually buzzing with enormous machines crawling in the stupendous space like ants, was eerily quiet, so presumably they were still running tests; we’d heard that they were going to dynamite some possibly unsafe areas that afternoon, so maybe that’s why most of the machinery had been removed. Despite the quiet, it was still a really impressive hole in the ground. Here and there up the pit wall were tiny caverns, representing the tunnels dug by the original miners, now exposed as the superpit expands downwards and outwards.
KCGM Superpit, Kalgoorlie. Look out for the enormous mining machinery at the bottom.
Back on the Goldfields Highway, it was only 300 km to Norseman, gateway to the Nullarbor. We stopped about half way in the mining village of Kambalda, partially to refuel but mainly to get some sugar as I was still having some trouble concentrating through my hangover. Next to the petrol station was the mining village itself, a community of tiny cabanas for the use of shift workers at the mine. The cabanas themselves were extremely small, with probably only space to sleep and bathe, but the site was pin-neat and equipped with a pool and a bar.
Kambalda miner’s accommodation
At about this time, I discovered that there was a message on my telephone, from Bronwyn’s mobile. The staff at the Exchange had found her hand bag, complete with wallet, phone and money, and had rung the most recently used number in an attempt to get hold of her. In fact the bag had not been stolen at all, but had been picked up by an overzealous bouncer while we were looking the other way. We turned around and headed back, picked up the hand bag and, reasoning that it was (a) late, (b) still raining and (c) we already had a room key, returned to the Youth Hostel for another night. The Nullarbor could wait one more day.
Perth has been in a drought for the past five months, but the record was broken somewhat dramatically earlier this week, when we were hit by the worst storm in fifty years. The city centre was awash with rainwater and a hundred thousand businesses and homes lost power as winds of more than 120 km/h ravaged the city. Bronwyn was in the city when it hit, and watched as pieces of scaffolding were torn from a high-rise development. Judging that the train system would be inundated, she caught a bus, which turned out to be a lucky move. The emergency services had shut down most of the roads in the core because they were far too deeply flooded for normal traffic, but the rear-engined buses were big enough to get through, albeit by occasionally driving on the pavement. The police contacted the bus drivers by radio and told them not to let anybody off until they were well clear of the city. This was fine for Bronwyn but disturbing for some of the other passengers as they watched their flooded stops sail past in the wake.
In Australia it is fairly common that storms are accompanied by large hailstones. Down the eastern coast of the continent, hailstone damage to cars is so common that it is rarely remarked upon. Here on the west coast, though, its a bit of a rarity and this particular storm generated chunks of ice ranging in size from golf ball to cricket ball, smashing their way into houses through corrugated iron and tile, and destroying car windows and sun-roofs. The damaged houses, shops and cars then began to fill up with the torrential rain.
On the next morning I cycled to work before dawn as usual, and found the roads completely obscured by a blanket of branches, twigs and leaves ripped from the suburban trees.
Storm debris
Many of the trees, rooted in nothing but drought-dried sand, had given up the unequal battle completely and were lying embedded in the roofs of houses and across crushed cars.
There’s a car under here
Most of the lights and traffic signals were out, and abandoned cars were scattered at the bottom of the steeper hills.
Passing acres of car dealers in the business district, I was amazed by the extent of the damage. On some lots, almost every windscreen was cracked, and none of the body-work would ever be the same again.
Cheap motor, sir?
One car drove past looking as if somebody had attacked it with a ball hammer.
You dimple when you smile
Once at work, I marvelled at the roof of our chill-out area, which resembled nothing more than a colander.
Not much protection from the elements
Out on my postal round, I found gardens littered with shattered roof tiles and glass. The glaziers were having a field day, simply moving up each street from one client to the next. Meanwhile the park rangers had arrived, equipped with chainsaws and cranes and chippers as they began the long task of extricating all the fallen trees without causing even more damage to the surrounding property. All around, the elderly and retired were doing their share, brushing the streets clear with brooms and, in more than one case, on hands and knees with a dustpan and brush.
Even the ants had changed their habits. When the rain hit, they must have scurried around looking for somewhere safe to put their queens and eggs, and most of them settled on the same brilliant idea; they’d move into the post boxes. Almost every brick box was teeming with insect life, usually emerging from a hole that they’d cut around the soft mortar where the house number had been formerly screwed in.
Give me a ‘C’
As quickly as the rain came, it ran away, either pouring down the roads and paths and into the river, or sinking into the parched sand. Business quickly returned to usual, albeit amid scattered buckets and with the remaining unbroken windows and doors open to air the carpets. The cars, battered and missing windows and sun roofs, are driven stoically to work in the blazing sun. A fire-sale begins on the car lots. And in the heat of the new day, I fancy that I hear the sound of a million pens, writing to their insurance companies.
There is a saying in Australia that BOAT is an acronym for Bring Out Another Thousand, and it is spooky how often the answer to the question, “How much is that cool sailing gadget?” is “a thousand dollars”. It is also an oft-quoted statistic that the running costs of your pride and joy will be about 10% of the orginal purchase cost, per year, forever. In order to test this theory, we have kept detailed records of all our expenses, and found that, for the two of us living aboard Pindimara, it was closer to 15%.
For the benefit of others who are considering dipping a toe into the lifestyle, I have provided a breakdown of our expenses year by year. All prices are given in Australian Dollars. To convert to your own currency, you could use the Oanda converter.
Annual costs as a percentage of the original Purchase Price (172,900)
Total Expenditure 2005-2006 (Live aboard, not cruising)
14,206
08.2%
Total Expenditure 2006-2007 (Live aboard, not cruising)
27,402
15.8%
Total Expenditure 2007-2008 (Live aboard, not cruising)
17,021
10.0%
5 months Expenditure 2008-2009 (Live aboard, not cruising)
17,304
24.0%
6 months Expenditure 2008-2009 (Cruising)
13,186
15.3%
Average per year over four years
22,972
13.3%
Breakdown of costs
Preparations, not cruising 2005-2006
Fixtures and Fittings
Duvet, pillows, glasses
200
Bedding, pots, pans
250
Kitchen equipment
100
Tools, kitchen equipment
90
Water hose and connectors
25
Maintenance and Tools
Toilet maintenance kit
80
Lubricant, polish
20
Quick-cover tape x 2
20
Brushes, sanding, cleaning
45
Antifouling, thinners, tape, epoxy
920
Socket and wrench for propeller
60
Slip at RPAYC
535
Slip and replace prop
550
Solar powered vent
310
Silicone sealant, brush
10
Headsail sheets
169
Silicone lubricant x 2
19
Hacksaw, bastard, molegrips
75
Hire upholstery steam cleaner
32
Fluids for steam cleaner
16
Sump pump
88
Strap wrench
8
Caulking gun, superglue
24
Filters, impeller, oil, coolant
154
Safety Equipment
PFDs, flares, grease
450
Tender
Zodiac tender, used
750
Zodiac seat
140
Tender tow rope and fittings
30
Tuff Cote paint for Zodiac
120
Zodiac glue
10
Zodiac repair kit x 2
100
Zodiac rowlock adapters
40
Running Costs
Diesel Fuel
200
Cooking Gas
20
Fees
Registration to 17/11/06
160
Registration to 17/11/05
20
Mooring fees (Gibson)
3000
Visitors berth (RPAYC)
70
Insurance
1630
Loan interest to 10/06 (on 75k)
3666
Preparations, not cruising 2006-2007
Fixtures and Fittings
Cutlery, towels, hangers
72
Maintenance and Tools
12 vac, furler sheet
90
Antifouling brushes, tape etc
72
Mainsail and foresail service
1077
New foresail and trysail
3236
Buff and polish (Reflections)
650
Tarp., pole, tubing
20
Rubber for snubber
5
Foresail sheets
83
10m anchor chain
90
50m anchor warp
60
Spare plough anchor
79
Shackles, hoses, screws
33
Stainless work (Bluewater)
7335
Haul out, gelcoat repairs
1909
Safety Equipment
PFDs, boat hook, chart
280
Bearing compass
180
Sailing gloves
38
Manual bilge pump
29
PFD yokes, harnesses
1000
Yoke recharge kits
70
EPIRB
400
Jackstays (Riggtech)
281
Tender
Walker Bay
2000
Running Costs
Diesel Fuel
258
Cooking Gas
15
Fees
Mooring (Gibson)
1750
Visitors berth (RPAYC)
30
Visitors berth (LMYC)
25
Mooring (LMYC)
75
Visitors berth (Anchorage)
290
Mooring (Anchorage)
650
Visitors berth (Nelson Bay)
500
Mooring (Soldiers Point)
997
Insurance
1549
Registration (NSW)
163
Loan interest (on 40k)
2011
2007-2008 (includes 4 months liveaboard, not cruising)
Fixures and Fittings
Engel fridge
1300
3 new batteries and regulator
1406
Canvas and panel mounts
990
Labels and lettering
68
Lights and small parts
210
Solar panels
920
Electrical wiring and parts
768
Electrical wiring and parts
112
Cigar lighter Y adaptor
10
Water tank sensors and gauge
366
Electrical and plumbing parts
89
Cool boxes
170
Lamps and small parts
162
Mounting brackets
35
Maintenance and Tools
Oil filter wrench
10
Hammer, screwdriver
37
Plumbing
16
Plumbing
16
Solder sucker
15
Solder, wire, torch
31
Rigging check and halyards
3258
Plumbing and electrics
120
Waste tank
??
Plumbing for waste tank
80
Safety Equipment
Musto Trousers
259
Sailing jacket and trousers
275
Running Costs
Cooking gas
55
Fees
Mooring (Gibson)
3380
Insurance (Club Marine)
1630
Registration (NSW)
168
Loan interest to 10/08 (approx)
1000
Tender
Rowlocks
65
2008-2009 (first 5 months only, liveaboard but not cruising
Our yacht, Pindimara, had been on sale for a few weeks in Darwin, and had in fact already attracted the interest of a couple looking for a production cruising yacht. We were, however, painfully aware that she was stuffed full of our junk, and that we had left all the sails and cushions and cupboards open in an attempt to keep her aired during the hot Darwin summer, so that she looked more like a Chinese laundry than somebody;s pride and joy.
Chinese Laundry
We took a few days off work and flew up to Darwin to move all our gear into storage and give the boat a bit of a scrub; after all, she’d by now been sitting in the marina for almost five months and we thought that she would probably need it. In actual fact she was in fine fettle, just a little damp from several months of tropical humidity which had settled in the bilges. Her decks were tolerably clean and we had suffered no cyclone damage.
Then the monsoon arrived, a monster that settled in across the entire northern half of the continent. Being tolerably well travelled, I thought that I’d seen a bit of rain in my time. This was fundamentally different. Firstly, the air temperature in Darwin’s summer months is up close to forty degrees, and humidity is hovering in the nineties. When the rain comes, it’s warm. And in a monsoon, it’s moving sideways. Reports started to come in of minor tornadoes, and photographic evidence of fish raining out of the sky. There was so much rain that the marina started to fill up and overflow from the run-off, and the boats were bucking at their berths as the water poured in through the storm drains and out through the sluice gates to the sea.
The lock master, Keith, was kept very busy monitoring the levels and adjusting and readjusting the sluices, as well as pumping out sinking boats and rescuing overwhelmed pontoons. Despite all this, he very kindly allowed us to use his office as a sort of half-way-house for our gear, because we had to get it off the boat before we could do anything, and although we had brought many cardboard boxes we only had a limited number of plastic containers that could withstand the torrential rain.
We worked out a system where Bronwyn sweated below as she uncovered ever more boxes of supplies and packed them into plastic containers, while I ran with them back and forth up and down the slippery marina to the office. Whenever the rain paused for a moment, we piled all the boxes we could into Keith’s ute and took them to a storage locker, where I unpacked again and then repacked into cardboard boxes before returning to the marina with the empty plastic ones for another load.
However fast we worked, there were always more lockers to open and more gear to check and to move. It took two days to shift a five-year accumulation of gear and stores. The food was particularly exciting; we had a rough idea that we had a few months worth of stores left aboard, but we could have eaten well for almost six months with the stuff that we found. Some of it was pretty exotic, but its hard to move food across state quarantine lines in Australia, so rather than try to ship it back to Perth, we gave most of it to a delighted Keith.
A lot of the gear that we removed consisted of useful bits and pieces that we had kept in the lazarette in case we needed to repair something; spare sets of oars, bits of marine ply, old rope, propeller parts, broom handles and so on. Rather than dump this gear in the skip, I placed it neatly nearby, thinking that perhaps somebody else might like to keep it. To my amusement, the length of time that each part sat by the skip became shorter and shorter as other yachties began to regularly check what was there. After a few hours, I couldn’t even walk the length of the pontoon without somebody calling out “Are you throwing away that old rope?” and taking it off me.
We became especially popular when we started giving away fuel, because our tanks were full and we wanted to ship the empty deck jerry cans down to Perth. Bronwyn had a similar experience when she started putting dried food, books, and boxes of cleaning products in the marina’s launderette. This was all perfectly familiar, of course. Some of the gear was stuff that I had myself picked up from skips along the way.
Finally the boat was empty, and we began the long process of scrubbing, cleaning and polishing from the bilges to the mast. Still dodging monsoon squalls, we were forever opening the hatches to let in some air, and closing them again to guard against horizontal rain. I was so thoroughly wet that I didn’t dare enter the cabin for fear of dripping water into the bilges, so I crouched under the dodger as each squall rolled over.
Finally, only twenty minutes before we had to leave to catch our flight, we were done. Pindimara looked like a million dollars, and pretty similar to the way that we’d first seen her, all those years ago.
Saloon
Galley
Forepeak
We had thought that we would be shedding some tears, but in the event we never had the time. To a large extent we had got over the grief of parting over the previous months, while we were negotiating with the dealer and putting together a suitable collection of photographs. It’s still hard to look back at those pictures without our eyes misting over, but if there’s one thing that we have learned, it is that the sea is now in our blood, and we will be back.
I came across a wonderful opportunity to train as a postman, which is a job that I have always thought that I would enjoy. For non-Australians, you need to know that postmen here do their rounds entirely by motorcycle, riding directly to each houses letterbox across lawns and kerbs and pavements. Its a subsistence-level position, but all you need to qualify is a clean motorcycle license and no criminal record, and you get to spend a lot of time outside making people happy.
I duly started the training course, which included two interesting days being introduced to the “postie bike”, which is made specially by Honda for Australia Post. At heart it is a CT130 step-through, but it has some interesting refinements, including side-stands on both sides, a hand brake, and a clutchless gear box that will idle in any gear. We had to pass a number of tests, including U-turns in deep sand and negotiating driveways, kerbs and foliage in order to access letterboxes in high and low positions.
There were ten of us in all, from a variety of backgrounds, but about half of us were grizzled veterans of some other business who were looking for a job that was more fun and involved less idiots. Following extensive weaving-in-and-out-of-the-cones, and after some slight problems mastering emergency stops using 1970s-style cable-and-drum brakes, we all passed the test.
Postie Unleashed!
The job itself is simple but fun. I arrive each day at 6 am and start to sort my letters into the 1200 or so addresses on my route. This can take anything from three to six hours, depending largely on whether it is a bill or magazine day for one or more companies. There are dozens off us packed into a large warehouse, all doing the same thing, and the jokes and ribaldry fly thick and fast.
Sorting Frame
Then I load my motorcycle with as many letters as it can carry, and put the rest of them in a van which will leave them at a drop somewhere on my route. Off I potter to my first drop, and then I follow the same route every day, getting slightly faster with every daily iteration.
Australian letter boxes are not typically attached to houses, they are mostly some kind of box or structure at the end of the garden, at least theoretically accessible by motorcycle. We are permitted to ride on the pavements and verges and, depending on where the builders (in their infinite wisdom) decided to put the darn thing, often find ourselves riding in deep sand, gravel, bark chippings, flower beds, freshly rolled lawns, and so forth. The idea is to not actually ride on peoples’ lawns if we can help it, but as often as not I find myself approaching a pristine turf of bowling-green calibre, in the very centre of which has been built a letter box. It’s summertime at the moment, and my bike treads lightly; it will be interesting to see what happens in the rain.
You’d think that there would be some regulation size or position for a letter box, but there is not. Unfortunately this means that a great many of them are completely unsuitable for the delivery of mail, whether by motorcycle or otherwise. Its not just the physical location, although some of them are built at ankle-height which makes for some interesting gymnastics. No, the real problem is that for some reason that is buried in history, the default slot size chosen by almost all builders is about one brick wide and a couple of millimetres shorter than the width of a standard business-letter envelope. By far the greater number of these small boxes are built into a wall, so there is little chance of ever fixing the problem.
Typical Perth letter boxes
The structure pictured here is typical of the breed (note also the excitingly random distribution of house numbers on this example).
It is actually impossible to post a standard letter through such a slot, without first folding it in half or screwing it up into a sort of tube. The slot is typically made of rough-cast brick or cement, and tears the edges off both the letter and your fingers as you push it through.
Imagine the fun that I have with A4 envelopes and glossy magazines! Especially when, as is usually the case, some bozo has come along the night before and has stuffed the whole thing full of advertising leaflets for cheap barbecue utensils.
Adjusting to life on land is weird. Our apartment backs on to the Swan River, and on the first day we ambled down to have a look at it. Standing on the shore, I had a strange feeling of disconnection. It took me a little while to understand that where I had previously regarded water as a highway and the land as a barrier, now the roles were reversed. I can’t just hop into our dinghy and cross to the other side; I have to find a bridge or a ferry. The water is no longer my home.
LASERS ON THE SWAN RIVER
It was not all negative. It was nice to have electricity on demand, without continually having to consider the state of the batteries and generators. It was very nice to have unlimited fresh water, although neither of us could bring ourselves to ever waste any of it.
Australians have a strange relationship with fresh water. Whereas Bronwyn and I both come from countries where water is plentiful and yet we were brought up to respect it as a scarce resource, Australia is largely desert and yet the locals are so profligate that the water tables are irreparably sinking and the few major rivers are in the process of drying up. There is no concept of recycling; all used water goes straight into the sea. We had already had an argument with our tenants in Sydney, when we found that their water usage in the little one-bedroom flat was 12,000 litres a month, compared to our 6,500 a month when we had lived there, and of course our 600 litres a month on the boat. They did have the grace to offer to pay the bill.
It was also nice to be able to sleep the whole night through without springing out of my bunk to check the set of the anchor, investigate an unusual noise, or take over a night watch. We had particularly suffered on long passages when our watches spiralled into ever-shorter increments because it wasn’t really possible to get a proper rest while the boat was under way.
Even though we are now on land and none of these problems apply, we have once again found that cruising has changed us. We remain attuned to the cycles of the sun, springing fresh-eyed from bed every morning at dawn (even Bronwyn, who before we went sailing would cheerfully sleep until lunchtime). At the other end of the day, only a few hours after dusk will find us yawning and making our way to bed.
What we miss
We know that we miss the cruising lifestyle, but it is hard to put our finger on exactly why. Some of my happiest moments have been dozing on deck under an infinity of stars, as Pindimara blazes a phosphorescent wake across a boundless sea. Some of my angriest and most frustrated moments have been while dog tired and fighting gusty squalls as angry swells tower above the cockpit. Some of Bronwyn’s worst times were the long uncomfortable passages that seemed to extend forever as the wind and current conspired against us, and some of her best were the explosion of taste in a perfect salad lunch eaten on a sparkling blue sea under a tropical sky.
In short, much of the actual mechanics of sailing wasn’t a great deal of fun, but the opportunity to go where the wind blows and to visit faraway islands, to swim ashore and explore or just to sit on a flawless beach, to snorkel amongst the fearless fish of the reef, to stay as long as you want with nobody to tell you otherwise, all these things made it a way of life worth pursuing.
And when the passage is over and the anchor is safely down, then there are the fascinating people. Old and young, waiters and doctors, paupers and millionaires, all have chosen to live out on the edge, at the interface between the land and the sea. None of them are interested in picking a fight, stealing your wallet, or spray-painting graffiti on your home. All are content to accept you as you are without prejudice or judgement, to be entertained by your story and to swap it for another tall tale in return.
We’ll be back
We will go cruising again. Obviously we need to replenish the coffers, and we are already quite deep into discussions about what “the next boat” will look like. In the meantime we have a few other projects on the go, some of which will take several years to complete, and which require some of the capital that is currently tied up in our yacht. Regretfully, then, we have decided to sell Pindimara where she is, at the marina in Darwin.
That brings this little portion of the blog to a close. Thankyou, gentle readers, for following us this far. For those of you who want to follow the next stage of our plans, keep an eye on The Virtual Reinhard.
The onset of Darwin’s cyclone season coincided with the extinction of our cruising budget. That we were broke was no surprise, as we’d always known that our little pot of money was going to run out in November 2009. We had originally hoped to have got past Darwin by then, cruising the Kimberleys and then finishing up by selling Pindimara in Perth, but that wasn’t the way that it worked out.
Cruising is like that. You stop where it looks interesting and stay as the weather and your whims dictate; timetables are vague and often thrown out of the window. We had had a spectacular year and were more than satisfied with everything that we had achieved.
Having secured a (hopefully) cyclone-proof marina berth, we now had to decide between returning the following Easter to complete the voyage, and selling her right there in Darwin. In either case, we were committed to paying monthly marina fees at least until the end of the cyclone season, so we had to first find gainful employment.
We could, I suppose, have picked up lucrative contracts in our old discipline of computer programming, but despite the obvious financial incentives, that would have felt like a step backwards from our new lives. Over the year we had gently pursued other opportunities, and both had at least tentative offers of employment in Perth, about 1500 miles away down the west coast, and so after a quick jaunt to Europe to visit friends and relatives we relocated to Western Australia.
DOWNTOWN PERTH
From research on the internet we’d already decided which suburb we wanted to live in, so we checked into a cheap hostel nearby and went out on foot to find an apartment. It didn’t take too long to visit every realtor in the area and to determine the minimum rent that we should pay for a unit in reasonable condition. We saw some lemons, of course, but gradually increased our range in increments of $50 rent per week until we found one that wasn’t actively falling down, at which point we rented it.
Cruising had fundamentally changed the way that we looked at houses. Even the smallest was far larger than Pindimara, so we weren’t especially interested in the size of the lounge or the number of bedrooms. We were only anchoring for a while, not making a purchase, so we didn’t pay much attention to decor. We just looked for a few simple criteria: gas cooking, good natural lighting, and a sensible use of the cooling Fremantle Doctor wind that blows every afternoon. The first flat that we found that fulfilled all of these simple criteria, we took.
Furniture was easy, with simple functionality being the order of the day: cheap table, chairs, desk, sofa, and an expensive mattress. Having spent the previous year storing all our fresh food in a 42 litre Engel outback fridge, we ignored the monstrous walk-in fridge-freezers on display and purchased a small bar fridge instead. Our only real concession to land-bound life was to buy a simple washing machine.
Within a week of arrival, we had somewhere to live, a bicycle for transport, and the promise of jobs.
It was quite incredibly hot. Darwin was going through ‘the build-up’, which is the crossover period between its two seasons. The humidity starts ramping up from the dry season (hot, dry) to the wet season (hot, wet), making the weather more and more muggy but without providing the release of actual rainfall. For the greater part of the day it was literally too hot to move, and we found ourselves sitting in a stupour beneath our electric fan. The boat needed to be cleaned and prepared, but even the smallest task brought rivers of sweat pouring down our backs and legs. Occasionally we made a foray to the cafe so that we could sit under the air conditioner. In the city around us, Darwin’s residents began their annual peak of suicides and murders.
This was crazy. It was time to move on. We made use of the cooler periods of the morning and evening to hose months of accumulated salt from the fibreglass. In preparation for the cyclones we removed everything from the deck, stowed the foresail, lashed the mainsail to the boom, and doubled up all the mooring lines.
AN OVERHEATED BRONWYN HOSES THE DECK
In preparation for the humidity of the wet season, we ate or discarded our remaining fresh goods, filled the fuel and water tanks, sprayed the bilges with mildew preventer, laid cockroach traps, lifted all the seat cushions and topped up the batteries. The marina laundry took a beating as we washed every piece of fabric and packed it all away into vacuum bags.
VACUUM BAGS! WHAT A WONDERFUL INVENTION
In the hot periods of physical lassitude we spent hours on the internet looking at flight schedules and job opportunities, and then spent a few minutes packing for a round the world trip. That’s one of the great things about living on a boat; if you have to catch a plane, you don’t need to spend a lot of time deciding what to bring. Everything that you own goes into a small bag, and off you go.
We arranged for Keith the wonderful and obliging lockmaster to occasionally check and ventilate the boat over the next six months, got in a taxi, and headed for Singapore.
There isn’t too much to do around Tipperary Waters marina, although the two cafes on the shore are very good and we understand that a bar will be opening soon. The Dinah Sailing club down the road is the only place to get a drink, and although friendly enough it isn’t exactly spectacular. However, public transport is cheap, and it only costs two dollars to get the bus into town and about ten to take the taxi back again.
After so long in the back of beyond, it was surprisingly great to get a good dose of civilisation. We had some excellent tapas at the Moorish Cafe in town, and together with Rob from Ku Ching we tackled the enormous seafood platter at Crustaceans On The Wharf.
We also had a good party session up and down Mitchell Street, which is the restaurant and bar district, and met some fun and interesting people (that’s you, Carlee).
It’s funny that we’re seeing a completely different Darwin to our last visit. That time it was christmas and there was nobody here and nothing was open. Right now in September, the place is hopping. Last night we went to the famous market at Mindle Beach. As well as the crowds milling around in the market itself, there must have been ten thousand people sitting quietly on the beach watching the sunset.
MINDLE BEACH SUNSET
We’re very aware that the wet season seems to be coming early this year. It is very hot and very sticky, and although it isn’t actually raining, the sky is continually threatening.
Two yachts that were heading for Perth recently gave up and turned around and came back, saying that conditions are impossible. Since that’s the direction that we’re heading, we’ve spent a lot of time canvassing the local cruisers, and even though we’re aware that one man’s “impossible” is another woman’s “fun sail”, there is a solid consensus is that we’re looking at a very hard trip down the coast.
Faced with a rough ride, and aware that since we’ve started rushing along the coastline we haven’t been enjoying ourselves half as much as we ought to, we’ve decided to leave Pindimara in Darwin for the wet and cyclone seasons, and to come back and finish the trip in the middle of next year. Not only does it give us a chance to do some work and replenish the coffers, but it also means that we’ll be able to take our time cruising the Kimberleys rather than continually rushing along and checking over our shoulders for a cyclone.
Carefully timing the tides, we went to bed for some rest before getting up and leaving at midnight. It was a starry but moon-less night, there were almost no lights on the shore of Bathurst Island, and there was no wind at all. The backwash from the steaming light off the back of the furled foresail gave a strange, misty air to the world, so that we seemed to be coccooned in an ethereal blanket. We may have left a little late, as I forgot that it would take nearly 2 hours to get out of Gordon Bay, but the tide sucked us out and then gave us a 3.5 knot boost toward Darwin.
Despite the complete absence of any wind, the water got quite exciting, a roller coaster ride. At one point we were smashing through standing waves and I was wondering how Bronwyn, even though she is a champion sleeper, could possibly be snoozing in the fore-peak. As far as I could imagine, she must have been in the air half the time. Then the whole yacht went airborne off one wave and ploughed into the next, washing the decks of the accumulated mud and ash, and replacing them with sand and shells. A tousled head appeared in the companionway. “How fast are we going?” she asked, before heading sleepily back to bed.
A little later the propeller didn’t seem to be able to get any traction. Bear in mind that it was completely black. I peered into the small pool of light cast by the stern light, and could just make out that the water was bubbling and boiling beneath us. Presumably there was so much air in the thrashing water that the prop was cavitating.
Sliding sideways into the Beagle Gulf, I suddenly had an inspiration and realised that I might be able reprogram part of the autopilot to display the GPS ‘course over ground’. Then I could judge the tidal set without continually going below to check our position on the chart. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It worked a treat, and while I was at it I added a display for the water temperature. For the record, in the middle of the night in September, it was 27 centigrade. No wonder it is popular with crocodiles.
The sun came up, and the sea became flat an placid in all directions. We couldn’t see the shore and were completely alone.
NOBODY HERE BUT US CHICKENS
Suddenly an enormous cargo ship appeared, in a great hurry to get somewhere. It passed us by and disappeared again.
WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?
Time passed. There was not a breath of wind. We motored.
The tide started to pick us up as planned for the final approach into Darwin, slowly increasing the boost until we were doing over 10 knots.
LEFT – LOG SPEED. RIGHT – SPEED OVER GROUND
We could see the Darwin skyline, but we couldn’t get a mobile phone connection. Broadband internet was working, though, so we used Skype to call the closest marina, Cullem. They explained that although they did have a free berth, we would be charged $240 for the privilege of opening the lock gate. I think not. We called Tipperary Marina, who were able to fit us in at a more reasonable price. Although they were another four miles upriver, the continuing tide made mincemeat of the distance.
The approach to Tipperary was interesting, up a river which dries out at low tide. We maintained radio contact with Keith the lockmaster, and as we were passing a seemingly unbroken rock wall, he asked us if we could see him waving. Eventually we spotted him in the dusk, and realised that there was an all-but-invisible break in the wall. It was like the Gulgari Rip all over again, but this gap was only seven metres wide.
We negotiated the lock without any problems, and found ourselves in a trim and tidy little marina full of smart long-term liveaboards. Keith was wonderfully helpful and did a great job of making us feel welcome.
We had an exciting ride out of Snake Bay in a strong nor’easter which took us at 7 knots to Cape Van Diemen, the northern tip of Melville Island. For the rest of the night we followed the coastline southward, riding the winds until they faltered in mid morning. We were starting to notice an opposing tide, so rather than waste fuel we anchored off Bathurst Island in about 70 square miles of sheltered and shallow water. Only the southern part, Gordon Bay, has been named or charted, so we dropped anchor there in about 10 metres and spent the rest of the day pottering around. I really should have been doing my schoolwork, but after many night watches with my iPod I had finally almost finished organising our music collection, so I finished off that job instead.
Although we still carried a couple of month’s worth of dried and tinned ingredients, we were desperately short of fresh food. We ate our last orange, leaving us with one sweet potato and two onions. It was decision time. Wyndham or Darwin? We had to provision at one or the other before tackling the Kimberleys. Each town had its advantages and disadvantages.
Darwin has evil spring tides, an approach route that leads into the teeth of the trade winds, and nowhere simple to stay. The choice there is between anchoring in Fannie Bay and dragging the dinghy through half a mile of mud, or booking through the lock gates into one of the marinas. Because of the drying tides, all of Darwin’s marinas have lock gates that only let you in and out at certain times, considerably restricting your freedom. On the other hand, if we could get into a marina then shopping would be easy.
Wyndham lies at the bottom of the Bonaparte Gulf and was still several days away. The winds in the Gulf are notoriously inconsistent, and the GRIB showed that we would encounter confused light winds coming from every direction. The only place to anchor is in the strongly tidal river, the jetty is apparently only useable for a few hours each day, and the actual town is a taxi ride from the river. After provisioning, it’s a long hard slog back out of the Gulf. On the other hand, we’d never been there before and it has the dubious pleasure of having Australia’s hottest average temperature (32C).
THE JOSEPH BONAPARTE GULF
The trade winds were set to slacken. We also fancied a meal in a restaurant. We chose Darwin.
When we awoke in our little mud pond in the Snake River, I sat on deck and looked across the water at the settlement of Milikapiti. It seemed strange to be anchored so close to a shoreline aboriginal community, to be connected to their broadband mast and choked by their bush fires and yet not have any social interaction.
Firstly, we are not allowed on to aboriginal land without a pre-arranged permit. Secondly, the residents of the Arnhem Land coastline, even here on the island, do not seem to make any use of boats. Although their houses and cars line the beaches, they never seem to have any jetties, tinnies or even canoes. We have passed woven branch fishing traps within wading distance of the shore, but we’ve never once seen an aboriginal person out on the water.
The upshot of this is that we can’t visit them, and they can’t visit us. It does feel a bit strange.
And then, just as we were leaving, three enormous aluminium powerboats came flying down the river and were whisked up a ramp and out of sight. I thought that I would have to revise (or even delete) this blog entry as it looked like I was wrong.
I couldn’t really see who was in the boats, so I fired off a couple of dozen shots with the telephoto lens. Later that day I blew up the images and realised that the people in the boats were all white, possibly pearl fishermen. So my comments still stand.
Ahead of us were the infamous tidal flows of Darwin and its guardian Dundas and Clarence Straits, two or more days of irresistable rips and crucial tide timetables. For a clean run, one writer claimed that we needed to maintain an average speed of eight knots, which even allowing for a following current is a bit of an ask. Lugubrious cruising guides spoke of yachts that had mistimed it and anchored up, only to be sucked out of their safe bays by the marauding rip. On top of this, it’s the end of winter and we’re heading into the spring tides when the tides exceed nine metres and everything is just that little bit worse.
DUNDAS AND CLARENCE STRAITS (SCALE: 90 MILES)
Jimmy Cornell in his influential book ‘World Cruising Routes’ states quite bluntly that it should not be attempted, and recommends taking the longer route around Melville Island, even though this adds a hundred miles to the journey and ends with seventy miles of beating into wind to get to Darwin.
Even taking the northern route, cautious tidal planning is still necessary. We left Port Essington on a falling tide, hoping to get sucked out of the bay and at least half way across the entrance to the Dundas Strait before having to fight the easterly set. The plan began well, but inevitably we ended up in a hard slog against up to five knots of current. Luckily the trade winds were behind us and we could make a few knots of headway.
Evening fell as we fought free of the influence of the Strait, and then we had a hard nights sail across the top of Melville Island. The currents were increasingly difficult to predict and we zigzagged wildly. Even at the large scale of the chart above, you can see that our route was not exactly straight.
We sailed all night and most of the next day. We didn’t seen any other boats, but we did spot a bird floating along on the sea. You might not think that this was so strange, but the bird, apparently a black and white booby, was nonchalantly standing upright on the surface. As we got closer, we realised that it was standing on the back of a turtle that was nonchalantly swimming along. The pair were still together when they passed over the horizon.
By mid afternoon we were entering Snake Bay. We knew nothing at all about this area apart from the fact that it was a north-facing river entrance that should give us protection from the south-easterly trades, and that the aboriginal community there had a broadband mast. We’d been out of touch for well over a week, and quite apart from updating this blog, we needed to check on our university work and deal with some business.
Snake Bay is divided into easterly and a westerly channels, and judging by the patterns of the sand banks on the chart it looked as if the eastern side would have less current. By the time we got there, though, the wind had shifted to the NE and was blowing straight at us, building up an uncomfortable chop. Aware that the charts only had a zone of confidence of C (“depth anomalies may be expected”), we crept further upstream looking for shelter, but found none.
It was time for Plan B. I had previously noted that it seemed to be just possible to squeeze through a 30 metre gap in the shoals and access the main western channel, before tackling a 30 metre wide bar between two drying banks which would drop us into a 5 metre deep pool inside a large drying mud lake.
In a nifty and stylish piece of navigation (I can safely say this in retrospect, since we didn’t hit anything) we arrived at the centre of the 100 metre square pool and dropped anchor in millpond smooth waters.
APPLAUSE!
After catching up with the outside world and sipping a G&T or two, we collapsed into bed for our first sleep in 48 hours. The wind shifted in the night, and blew ash and smoke from the aboriginal fires through the cabin. I imagine that it kept the mosquitoes away.
We anchored off Adams Head, deep in Port Essington, and set off in the relative cool of the morning to explore the abandoned settlement of Victoria. The temperature was still in the thirties.
In the early 1800s, England had settled parts of the eastern coast of Australia but was concerned that the northern reaches of this vast continent might be vulnerable to Dutch and French expansion from their colonies in the East Indies.
Two military bases were set up, Fort Dundas on Melville Island and Port Wellington on the Cobourg Peninsula, but both settlements failed due to the harsh conditions. The English government persisted, and in 1838 set up the civilian settlement of Victoria at a site much farther inland, at Adam Head on the shores of the large Port Essington bay.
ADAM HEAD (WITH LATERITIC PROFILE)
Surveys had shown that there was a plentiful supply of fresh water, and also that the area might support a successful trepang trade. We’ve seen traces of similar activity (trepang are also known as beche-de-mer, or sea cucumbers or sea slugs) all over the northern islands and coasts. Mrs Watson of Lizard Island was there because her husband was a beche-de-mer fisherman. The sea slugs themselves were traded at great profit to the Chinese who regard them as a delicacy. I tried one once in Shanghai, and it was indeed very expensive but also tasted pretty much the way that you would expect.
The settlement began bravely, with a prefabricated Governor’s House, a church, a hospital, thatched and shingled cottages, and a military barracks.
CORNISH CHIMNEYS OF THE MARRIED QUARTERS
For food they had vegetable gardens, imported water buffalo, and a peaceable trading relationship with the local aboriginals and with visiting Macassan (Indonesian) trepang fishermen.
Unfortunately the original survey had been conducted in the wet season, and for the other six months of the year the colony had to rely on ever deeper wells.
THIS WOULD BE A LAKE IN THE WET
A cyclone hit in the second year, and destroyed much of what had been built. The supply ships came only intermittently, and the soil turned out to be so poor that their gardens were barely better than subsistance. Malaria became a way of life, eventually killing almost a quarter of the residents.
ONE OF THE FEW SURVIVING GRAVESTONES
At times fully half of the population were in hospital, not only from malaria but also from dysentery, influenza and scurvy.
After eleven hard years, the political situation had changed and foreign incursion was no longer regarded as a threat. The survivors were shipped out and the settlement was abandoned.
Some of the buildings were subsequently and intermittently used by freelance trepang fishermen and hunters tracking the now wild water buffalo, but the bush soon moved back in. It didn’t take long for most of the signs of civilisation to be erased.
SOME INTERESTING TREES
We were becoming a little jaded with the sail across the top of the Northern Territory. Access to the entire shoreline is essentially forbidden to non-Aboriginals without a permit, and permits are not easy to get. The rest of our world consists of featureless waters and small islands that we’re not allowed to visit either.
This morning we found ourselves at anchor off Black Point, Port Essington. The bay has a pronounced roll and we awoke irritable and grumpy, and not looking forward to more mindless mileage. We feel that we’ve seen little in the last thousand miles apart from sea water and the inside of a few pubs. Without our university work to keep us occupied and to fuel our discussions, we probably would have cracked long before this. Were we going too far, too fast?
Port Essington is part of a national park, and there is a ranger station at Black Point. I called up the ranger on the radio to see if it was possible to get a permit to go ashore at the nearby historical settlement of Victoria, and received the welcome news that no permit was required for day visits. Eager to see a new face after a week at sea, I tossed the dinghy over the side and rowed to shore to get more details. Just as I was setting the anchor on the beach, the ranger’s helicopter lifted off from behind the treeline and headed off seaward. Darn!
I went up to his house anyway and found the visitor centre, which was closed. Persistence paid off as I found an unlocked rear entrance and spent a happy hour or so wandering around the nice little museum there.
On the way back to the dinghy, I stopped on the beach and dug my feet into the baking hot sand. Scattered around me were hundreds of shell and coral fragments. I picked up a handful and realised that I was looking at more individual new things than I had seen in the entire past week.
The realisation hit that, although sailing is fun, I am first and foremost a land mammal. There just isn’t enough variety on the water to keep me that interested. Rowing back to Pindimara, I imparted this new-found wisdom to Bronwyn, who of course had worked it out for herself weeks ago and was waiting for me to catch up.
We decided to take a little holiday from our holiday, and instead of continuing westward turned inland, deeper into the bay in the direction of the ruined town of Victoria some three hours away.
It felt good to be heading for a real destination that we could walk around on, rather than just another palm-fringed inaccessible beach on the way to the next one. In addition, Port Essington is sheltered from the swell but not from the trade winds, so we were soon creaming along at a steady seven knots. Flying fish sparkled across the water before us, dolphins cruised serenely alongside. Even heeled over, the boat hung reasonably steady in the flat azure sea, and Bronwyn popped below for long enough to bake a batch of scones.
We didn’t have permits to go onto aboriginal land anywhere across the Northern Territories, so we did not get off on Raragala Island and did not plan to set foot on land again until we got to Darwin. Cruisers who were doing the distance more slowly had applied for permits with variable results. One boat’s applications got repeatedly ‘lost’. Another boat got every permit that they asked for, but dated in such a way that there was no way that they could possibly use them.
Not only did we want to become embroiled in aboriginal bureaucracy, but we were also aware of the impending cyclone season, so we decided to skip Arnhem Land completely. We drew a straight line on the chart across the Arafura Sea to the Cobourg Peninsula near to Darwin.
ACROSS THE ARAFURA SEA
SAILING INTO THE SUNSET (A FIRST!)
We were at sea for two days and two nights, during which time we sighted no land, no ships, no planes, and only three items of interest. The first was a banded coral snake. The second was a very lost ten-inch crab, swimming at the surface miles from shore. The third was a juvenile petrel who roosted on our dodger for most of the second night, completely unconcerned with the comings and goings of crew with bright lights and cameras.
PIDGE
On the morning of the third day we sighted land and dropped anchor on the south-western side of Grant Island for a rest. We couldn’t go ashore, because even this was aboriginal land, but we couldn’t face any more sailing and needed to get some decent sleep. After a few hours the swell turned around and began to hit us on the beam, which is never comfortable and a sure fire trigger for lost sleep and tinkling crockery. The good news was that the sea conditions were right and there was room to swing about; I could finally try a trick that Virginia had mentioned to us months ago.
Picture this: We’re at anchor. Boats at anchor are designed to point into wind, so the wind is coming from dead ahead. The swell is slapping into us from starboard (right hand side). I got a long rope and tied one end to the anchor chain where it dropped over the bow roller, and the other end to the port stern quarter (left back) of the boat. Returning to the front of the boat, I let out ten extra metres of anchor chain, dragging that end of the rope far below the surface of the water. Strolling back to the stern end of the rope, I attached it to a winch and wound it in, dragging the stern around to port, and pointing the bow into the swell. Rather than streaming off the anchor in a straight fore-and-aft line, the boat was now hanging sideways on a Y-shaped harness. The rocking stopped. Brilliant. Thankyou, Virginia.
In the morning we got up and looked at the perfect and inviting beach. Ah well. We had no permit, and anyway it was time to move on. We hoisted sail and headed out of the bay.
Just for a change we had a perfect combination of strong following winds and a swell that was directly astern. We could move around the yacht freely, read books and concentrate on small tasks without feeling seasick. It seemed as good a time as any to learn how to make an eye splice.
SEAMANSHIP
We’d planned to reach Black Point in the large bay of Port Essington by midnight, but we were making cracking progress and turned into the entrance shortly after nightfall. It was a pitch black moonless night, and much of the territory up here is not well charted. There are some spot heights and guesstimated contours, but even these are only 95% certain to be within 2 metres vertically and 500 metres horizontally, which is quite a lot of uncertainty. Nevertheless there wasn’t much that we could do about it, so we charged through in pitch darkness at something over six knots and, navigating by GPS, dropped anchor in 5 metres of water a respectable distance on the chart from the invisible reef and the invisible shore.
Once everything was ship-shape, I got out the big spotlight to have a last check for any hazards, and illuminated Black Point Beach only a few metres away in front of the bow. We hastily weighed anchor and backed off a few hundred yards before putting it back down again.
The first barrier to our westward route was a group of three long island chains, all running parallel to each other SW to NE. The first set were the Bromby Islets sticking up ten miles from the top of mainland Arnhem Land. Then we had to cross a channel called the Malay Road and squeeze between a couple of the English Companys Islands, before finally crossing Donnington Sound and finding a route through the Wessel Islands.
The most obvious route (apart from the long way around over the top of the Wessels) was to sneak between the Brombys and Cape Wilberforce at the top of Arnhem Land, run the gap between Cotton and Wigram Islands, and then take the Gulgari Rip between Raragala and Guluwuru Islands.
WESTWARD
The only problem with this plan was that each crossing demanded a particular time of the tide. Get it wrong and we could, for instance, face a 12 knot opposing current through the Gulgari Rip.
After a little thought and some work with the guides and tide tables we realised that if we left Gove shortly after midnight, we could use the moonlight to get out of the harbour and be crossing the Brombys at slack tide just after dawn. Then we had just enough time to get across the Malay Road and through the English Companys before the tide started flooding, after which the sail across Donnington Sound would bring us to the Gulgari Rip at the top of the following tide.
One disadvantage of the plan was that the literature was quite vague about the exact time that the tide turns in each of the passes, but we thought that we had probably figured it close enough.
We arrived at the Brombys in the pre-dawn light. The channel was half a mile across and we crossed it without any problems.
THROUGH THE FIRST GAP
The gap between Cotton and Wigram was more of a dogleg and reputed to have a four-knot rip. Even though we must have been close to slack tide we still got sucked through, and had to do some fancy footwork to avoid an area of boiling rip at the western end, where the seabirds were having a breakfast feeding frenzy.
CLIFFS OF COTTON ISLAND
BREAKFAST AT THE RIP
It’s about fifteen miles across Donnington Sound to the Wessel Islands, so we took it in turns to sleep.
The Gulgari Rip between Raragala and Guluwuru Islands is also known as ‘The Hole in the Wall’ because it is so narrow and difficult to see. Decent winds saw us arriving half an hour early, and we were a little disappointed at first to see that from the our direction the gap was really obvious. We didn’t want to get too close without committing, but through the binoculars I could make out whitecaps which suggested that the eastward rip was still running towards us. We hove to and drifted in the sunshine for an hour while we ate lunch and waited for the time that we believed that the tide would turn.
At the appointed hour, which was slightly after high tide at faraway Gove, we reset the sails and discovered that the hole had disappeared. Even though I had memorised the surrounding cliff structure when we arrived, the gap was still completely invisible until we found precisely the right approach angle. Our first sight of it must have just been very lucky.
Hoping that we were now at the top of the tide, we sailed into the bay that funnelled us in to the gap, arriving at about half past Gove high tide. We knew that the gap was about 70 metres wide with 30 metres of that navigable, but that’s still only 3 boat lengths across and as we approached it at 5 knots it looked terrifyingly narrow.
APPROACHING THE GULGARI RIP
Once through the jaws, the surrounding cliffs shielded us from the winds and the sails went slack. We’d expected this and had the engine idling in preparation, but we didn’t need it because the boat started to accelerate as the Rip sucked us in.
After that, the ride got surreal. We glided with slack sails between picturesque stacks of rock on either side, with nothing to do beyond keeping the bow pointed at the far end. Here and there, people have smeared graffiti on the rocks to show that they have been through; the crew of HMAS Wollongong were particularly obvious. Tiny bays open out on either side, and it is rumoured that some of them are deep enough to shelter in if you find yourself halfway through and fighting too strong a rip. I can’t imagine trying to get into one of them with your boat already out of control.
JUST PASSING THROUGH
I shot some very bad video that shows some of these bays.
The Rip spat us out into the Arafura Sea, and we popped around the corner to a safe anchorage in Guruliya Bay to get some sleep. In the morning we had a long passage ahead of us.
Gove is another Rio Tinto bauxite mining site, but quite different from the operation on the other side of the Gulf. Whereas the town of Weipa was purpose-built in the wilderness to service the mine, there were already existing settlements on the Gove peninsula when the miners came so they had to fit in around what was already there.
REFINED
Around the harbour itself are situated the Rio Tinto Alcan bauxite refinery and alumina loader, the Perkins delivery barge terminal, fields of sodium hydroxide tailings, and the Gove Yacht Club. Everything else is in Nhulunbuy Township a dozen kilometres down the road.
YACHTS AND TAILINGS
The yacht club gave us a warm welcome, and for a few dollars we purchased temporary membership which gave us access to a shower block and laundry, as well as a key to get in the back door of the pub which was handy when the front door was locked against drunken and screaming aboriginals, an all too frequent occurrence.
GOVE YACHT CLUB
The clientele of the club was a mix of aboriginal drinkers from the dry townships down the road, visting yachties like ourselves, and workers at for Rio Tinto who chose to live aboard rather than in town. The harbour contained quite a few wrecks of old liveaboard boats that had sunk when their tenant moved on to another mining contract.
GOVE HARBOUR FROM THE YACHT CLUB
The taxi service from the yacht club into Nhulunbuy was enormously expensive, so by far the best way to get there was to hire a car for the day. The cheapest service was run by local resident Manny (08 8987 2300) who charged us fifty dollars for the day’s use of a decent Hilux Twin-Cab, immediately saving us money over the cost of a taxi each way.
The ute enabled us to provision, although not to buy alcohol because the township is dry and you need a special license just to buy it from the supermarket.
FORBIDDEN FRUIT
One of the recurrent conversational themes at the club was how difficult it was to get fuel from the Perkins barge dock. Not only was it tricky to manoeuver in and out, but there were quite a few tales about how reluctant they were to service yachts at all. We threw some fuel cans into the back of the ute and filled up at the service station in town.
Nhulunbuy had little character and could be described as a number of houses of various sizes scattered around some small apartment blocks. There were a couple of small and run-down malls offering a supermarket and take-away food, a bank, a few clothing stores and a post office. The civic pride that was so obvious in Weipa was missing here, and the streets were lined with discarded junk.
DOWNTOWN NHULUNBUY
Since we had a car, we braved the “no entry without a permit” signs to visit the art gallery in neighbouring Yrrkala. The gallery was interesting, and so was the museum of artifacts and the photographic record of the conscripted aboriginal forces in WW2, but the gallery prices seemed to us to be rather high. It didn’t seem to hurt their business, though, because the building was scattered with brand new computer equipment and bark and wood paintings that had been packaged up for delivery to satisfied customers.
We spent several evenings at the yacht club and met a lot of interesting people. A bunch of backpackers had recently been abandoned there after crewing for a yacht whos skipper had promised them flights back to Perth from Gove. The yacht had sailed off into the sunset leaving them stranded on the beach, and they’d made the best of it by working at the club. Some kind soul had put them up on one of the boats in the harbour.
We also met Jan and Neville on Panache and Selina and Stephen on Westward II, as well of course Paul on the ‘big grey cat’ who entertained us with tales of his extraordinary life sailing from place to place. Gerry and Alan gave us a tour of Black Gold, probably the highest-tech power boat in Australia, which can run on practically anything – old sump oil, chip fat, coconut oil – because it has been built around a miniature hydrocarbon cracking refinery and computer controlled blending station. On the outside it looks like a rich man’s plaything. Very impressive indeed.
Time passed, and it became clear that Gove is one of those pleasant black holes where your life can slip away in a blur of alcohol and gossip. Some yachts had been there for years. Even the GPS didn’t know what time it was, never really deciding whether we were in Northern Territory or Queensland.
The only real irritant were the sandflies. Almost completely invisible, they were always attacking our lower limbs. We tried nets and mosquito coils and sprays and even set off an insect bomb on the boat, but they were completely unstoppable. According to the chemist in Nhulunbuy, they weren’t actually biting us, but were peeing on us and their pee is really toxic. Bronwyn was particularly susceptible, and all her sandfly sores turned into violently itchy welts.
ATTRACTIVE TO FLIES
It’s a feature of aboriginal life that they love to set fire to things. You can always tell if an island on aboriginal land is inhabited because of the enormous pall of greasy smoke that hangs over it, and here on the mainland it was no different. Every piece of bush was continually burning. Even when a roadside verge had already been reduced to stark black sticks, somebody on the way back from the pub would still try to light it. Long term yacht residents talked of weekly deck washes to remove the stray ash, and indeed Pindimara wasn’t looking too clean herself.
FOOTPRINTS IN THE ASHES
We woke one morning to find the whole peninsula in flames and the anchorage disappearing into the smoke. We took one last trip to shore to load up with water, hand in our key and say goodbye, then set our sights on destinations westward.
It was time to embark on our first proper ocean passage. Although we have done many multi-day non-stop passages, we’ve never really been more than 20 miles from land and there’s almost always been some island or cape within a few hours sailing that we could hide behind if the weather turned nasty.
The trip from Weipa to Gove is a 300-mile straight line across the Gulf of Carpentaria, with no islands or shelter of any kind. We already knew from our voyage to Weipa that the weather in the Gulf was very changeable, but although our GRIB files reflected this, there was nothing really nasty in the forecast for the next few days.
We set off up the channel out of Weipa harbour, carefully giving the working dredgers a wide berth, and crossed into the open sea with a good following wind. The water was so clear, and the seabed sand so yellow, that the terns wheeling about our mast became magically green in the reflected light.
RARE AUSTRALIAN GREEN TERN
Dolphins came to see us off, jostling each other to get the prime position just under the bow. For some reason, a dolphin’s idea of a good time is to have five tonnes of yacht crashing repeatedly down on his head. Each to their own, I guess.
ME NEXT! ME! ME!
The flat landscape of Cape York soon dropped over the horizon, and we were alone in the blazing heat. The instruments told us that the boat was moving, but there were no points of reference and we might as well have been standing motionless in an eternity of blue.
NOBODY HERE BUT US CHICKENS
Later that afternoon, the wind died and left us becalmed. We began to take the sails down in preparation for starting the motor, and then noticed a curious rippling in the surface of the mirror-smooth sea. We looked around a little nervously at the clear blue sky. Nothing was visible, but we were very aware of a breathless pause. Something was about to happen.
Suddenly the cockpit was full of insects. Hundreds of them swarmed all over the boom and the Hydrovane sail, and spun in a motley cloud above the targa. I examined the nearest handful and saw that they were small brown beetles. I assumed that we had encountered a migratory swarm, but then Bronwyn shouted “Ow!” as something bit her, and we realised that there were dozens of different species of all shapes and sizes. In addition to the beetles, which seemed to be a kind of grain thrip, there were enormous black and white horseflies, dung flies in yellow and green, a variety of moths, and some big and evil-looking red-headed wasps. There were even some flightless creatures, scuttling ants and spiders.
In short, it looked as if something had sucked up all the insects from a crop field, carried them twenty miles out to sea, and then dumped them on our boat.
Some years ago, I watched small dust-devils sucking up hay and making crop circles in a field in Belgium, and only a few months ago we saw a waterspout that dropped its load of sea water onto Capricorn which was passing by, so I can only imagine that something similar happened here. The sea is surely a very strange place.
No sooner had we swept the nastiest of the insects overboard, then the wind shifted 180 degrees and we were hurriedly re-hoisting the sails to go close-hauled. It was time to go sailing.
For several days and nights we continued, with fair winds and with none at all, with large swell and small, alternately running, reaching and motoring as conditions dictated. We didn’t see a single other vessel.
KEEPING A VIGILANT LOOKOUT
When the wind was blowing, we let Harriet the hydrovane do the steering, except when the wind dropped too much and the size of the swell exceeded the force of the breeze and made the boom slap at the bottom of every trough. Eventually I worked out a way of tying the boom down, which solved that little problem.
The wind tended to die off completely at night. We came to hate the periods of extended motoring, for the following swell demanded full concentration to stay on course, hour after hour after hour. I cursed the Raytheon dealer in Sydney who was supposed to have repaired our autopilot, but who just wasted our time instead. Our problem was exacerbated by the lack of landmarks, so that instead of simply aiming for a cape or a lighthouse we had to stare continuously at the compass, which is a very tiring way of motoring. At night we had a full moon, which was good for visibility but bad for steering because it washed the stars out and gave us nothing to steer by.
When the sails were up, even without the hydrovane the yacht was balanced and we were free to get up and walk around. Under motor, we were glued to the helmsman’s position. Our backsides became raw from sitting on the hard cockpit seats in the rolling sea, forcing us to adopt ever stranger seating positions in an attempt to bring some new part of our anatomy to bear that wasn’t already red and raw. I cut up some foam and made deck cushions, which made a tremendous psychological difference but which in reality only took the edge off the pain.
The third night was the worst. Turn and turn about, our spells at the wheel became shorter and shorter before we had to call down for a change of watch. Repeatedly rousted from less than two hours of sleep, we rested our chins on the wheel and stared at the compass through scratchy, red raw eyes. We were so tired that the boat was veering as much as sixty degrees to either side. Shortly after dawn we gave up, killed the engine and just let her drift unmanned while we both collapsed gratefully into blissful oblivion.
When we awoke, the sun was high in the sky and the sea was a still as a mill pond. We made breakfast and then fired up the motor again.
The day passed slowly, with no signs of life either human or animal. And then – Land Ho! A distant beach shimmered on the horizon.
We now have some inkling of how those early sailors must have felt when their destination hove into view after months at sea. Our hearts swelled, and we began to grin maniacally. Land! Land! Finally we had something to steer for, and we began to talk about what we would do when we reached land. Would there be showers? Would there be cold beer, would there be steak? Which would we have first?
The shoreline crept closer, until we could distinguish the passage between the mainland and Bremer Island, where aboriginal fires were burning. We’d heard that this was the traditional place for teenage delinquents, who were taken there to re-learn cultural values if they had transgressed against society. If this was still the case, then they certainly seemed to be busy at the moment.
A small yacht sailed out from behind the headland, crew waving cheerily as they passed. Sweaty, smelly, salt-encrusted and weary, we waved back. We had arrived.
We are the proud owners of four thousand dollar’s worth of Katadyn Powersurvivor 40E desalinator, but so far we had never managed to get it running properly. With the coast-hopping segment of our voyage behind us and some long non-stop passage-making ahead of us, I really wanted to get it going. The opportunities for filling up with clean fresh water over the top end and down the west coast will be few and far between.
KATADYN POWERSURVIVOR 40E
The problem with water-makers is that you can only test them when you are out in deep clean ocean, because any trace of organics (as found inshore) or chlorine (as found in tap water) can permanently and expensively kill the osmotic membrane. Since arriving in northern Queensland, we had been pretty permanently sailing through orange algal bloom, which is no good at all.
The story so far was that sometimes it made water, and sometimes it just blew bubbles, and there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. I variously re-plumbed, bypassed and short-circuited different parts of the machine in accordance with the instructions in the Katadyn manual, and after carefully following the troubleshooting flow diagrams, sent it back to the dealer for testing.
The dealer fired it up, said that there was nothing wrong with it, and sent it back (a process that spanned several weeks and as many marina office drop boxes). I plumbed it back in, and hey presto it worked first time. We waited a couple of days and then tried again, and sure enough it refused to make any fresh water at all. It seemed to only work when I was testing it, not when I actually wanted some water. The dealer didn’t have any opinion apart from “there’s something wrong with your installation, maybe an air bubble somewhere”. Thanks a bunch.
Far too late in the day, I thought of consulting Nigel Calder’s excellent “Boat Owner’s Mechanical and Electrical Manual”, and found that the limiting factor was whether or not the unit could build up enough water pressure on the osmotic membrane. Since the unit doesn’t have a pressure gauge, there’s no way to tell whether it has or not. Mr Calder opined that there is a direct correlation between the amp-hours in the house batteries and the pressure in the unit, but unfortunately the distinction between ‘the batteries are charged enough’ and ‘the batteries are not charged enough’ is too subtle to be picked up by our boat’s instrumentation.
Before installing the unit I had done the math and knew that I would need to run the tow generator at the same time as the water-maker in order to get enough power, which is what I had been doing. On paper it looked fine, but perhaps the reality was different.
I experimented some more, and after considerable frustration and more than one occasion when I announced that I was chucking the whole thing over the side, I settled on first running the tow generator alone for an hour or two to make sure that there was enough reserve in our (apparently already fully charged) batteries, and only then firing up the water-maker.
IT’S WORKING!
Finally, the Katadyn makes water. We can now reliably make five litres an hour. If the sun is high over the solar panels and we’re pulling the tow generator at over five knots, then we can run the unit for three or four hours without unduly stressing the system. Since we can get by on about 15 litres of water a day, we are now borderline self-sufficient in fresh water. Hurrah!
Weipa is a Rio Tinto company town of 3500 souls (a third of them children!) that exists to service the largest bauxite mine in the world. Many of those bulk carriers that we encountered in our journey up the reef were carrying bauxite ore to the smelters that we visited in Gladstone, so we were interested to see this end of the process as well.
From the chart we could see that there are two rivers that flow past Weipa, Mission to the north and Embley to the south. The Embley River is the shipping channel and well provided with navigation markers. The Mission River is much, much closer to town but has no markers and nobody in the literature seems to mention it as a potential anchorage. We went with the herd and put our anchor down in Embley across from the ore loader, in a large natural harbour ringed with beaches and mangroves.
We could see some houseboat moorings against the north shore, and there seemed to be a couple of other yachts anchored over there, but they were close to the ore loaders and we decided instead to shelter under the lee of the southern shore. The anchorage was calm, comfortable and quiet, except at the bottom of the tide when there was a 4.5 knot rip but it only rocked the boat for an hour or so in the morning. Occasionally a Panamax-class bulk carrier came by, but the harbour is big enough that we didn’t really notice, except when they eclipsed the sun.
The only way to shore is by Evans Landing, a public jetty that gives access to Steve the houseboat guy’s premises and little else apart from a telephone box, which you will need because the only realistic way into town from there is to call a taxi. Evans Landing was a mile away across the bay from our anchorage, but not a problem for our little 3 horsepower dinghy as long as we avoided low tide.
AN ANCHORAGE FAR, FAR AWAY. CAN YOU SEE OUR MAST?
Naturally the first thing that we did when we got to shore was to hunt down the pub, in which we were stymied because there is no pub, or indeed any real town centre. Since Weipa was originally just housing for the mine, it hasn’t grown up around a traditional centre, and has more the feel of a bunch of haphazard suburbs.
SPQ (SINGLE PERSONS’ QUARTERS)
CHURCH, ALSO USED AS CYCLONE SHELTER
There are, however, two clubs. Several people told us that the reason that Weipa has a Golf Club and a Lawn Bowls Club is because these are the two sports that you can perform while drinking.
We randomly chose the Bowls Club, and had a great time and met (and drank with) a large number of interesting and colourful characters.
CRAZY WEIPA LASS
BRONWYN AND MOIRA
We also managed to eat some local prawns. This may not sound much of a feat, but all the way up the Queensland coast we have been trying to eat local seafood, only to find that all their catch is frozen and sent to the city. When the local restaurants need fish, they have to import it frozen from the usual sources.
The Weipa Bowls Club had Banana Prawns straight from the Gulf of Carpentaria. They were excellent.
A couple of days later, we got on a tour bus and went to the mine. It was another fascinating trip, not least because it is a far cry from your traditional open-cast mine. Bauxite is near as dammit just lying around on the surface, so all the miners really have to do is come along with a scoop and pick it up. Of course, it is slightly more complicated than that, and they get to use some very big scoops…
TOO SMALL FOR BAUXITE. THIS LITTLE CHAP IS FOR MOVING TOPSOIL
BELLY LOADER PASSING BY WITH 170 TONNES OF ORE
BRONWYN BEFRIENDS THE TRAIN DRIVER
Tomorrow we’re heading out on an extended passage across the sea to Gove. Since the Bureau of Meteorology clearly has no idea about the weather in the Gulf, we haven’t read the weather but we have downloaded some GRIB files which tell us that we will have decent winds during the day but nothing but motoring at night.
There are a number of channels out from the Horn Island anchorage, each leading in a different direction between different islands. There are two that are potentially useful for a south-westerly exit toward the Gulf of Carpentaria, and each has its own collection of interesting tides and currents. There was quite a bit of detailed discussion about them amongst the yachties anchored behind Horn, including a fair bit of third hand local knowledge.
To us it seemed fairly simple. Option One was to fight the notorious Boat Channel with its 6 knot currents and shoals, then to double back through Endeavour Strait with its rocks and shifting sandbanks. Option Two was to slip out of Normanby Passage on a rising tide and to cross into the Gulf using the shipping lane at Booby Island. It didn’t seem like much of a contest.
Low tide was at dawn, but by the time we’d had breakfast and cleared the boat for sea it was closer to eight o’clock and already approaching the top of the tide (the tides are pretty strange around Thursday Island). This suited our planned relaxed start and we accepted the 3.5 knot boost down Normanby and ran gently over to Booby Island, from whence it is a hundred mile straight run down the Gulf to the company mining town of Weipa.
For a while we marvelled at the feeling of travelling southward, a first for this trip. Then we sat back with Harriet at the helm and admired the pale blue skies and azure seas sparkling in the sunshine.
The marine weather forecast had been unusually precise, with 15-20 knots from the southeast and no change expected for the next three days. As we came abeam of the exit to the Endeavour Strait, I noticed a few wispy mare’s tails high in the sky. These are rarely a good sign and, thinking about the very shallow waters in the strait to the east of us, I commented that this would be pretty nasty place to get caught in a storm. Bronwyn replied with something like, “When was the last time that we saw any rain? I can’t remember.”
It was Bronwyn’s watch so I went below to get some rest. After a while I became aware that the bunk was shuddering as if we were travelling at high speed, so I looked out of the saloon window and noticed that we were heeled over so far that the deck rail was in the water.
Up on deck, I found Harriet steering perfectly and Bronwyn looking in some bemusement at the huge squall that was spewing out of the Endeavour Strait and rolling towards us. Hurriedly we shortened sail and Bronwyn got into her life vest and harness while I hid in the companionway under the shelter of the dodger.
THANKYOU, ENDEAVOUR STRAIT
It was quite the squall, with driving rain and 35 knot winds. Bronwyn grinned at me through the water pouring down her face as we hit 8 knots. “At last,” she said, “I’m finally washing off all that sea salt.”
Then a big wave reared up and landed on her head.
EIGHT-KNOT BRONWYN
When we emerged from the other side of the squall, we found that while we we’d been in it, the outside world had gone grey and there were more squalls and storms on every quarter.
I quickly went below to check that everything was battened down and then lay down on the bunk. Bronwyn had waterproofs, safety gear and the helm and by far the safest place for me to be if the boat was going to get a thrashing, was in bed.
Night fell, and the worst of it was over. Bronwyn came below to scrape off the salt, and I went on deck for my watch. The storm had left a legacy of 25 knot winds and lumpy beam seas which made everything a bit uncomfortable. The rain had stopped, but I spent most of my watch under the dodger watching the helmsman’s position disappearing under spray as confused waves slammed into the boat. I was very glad that the wind vane was doing all the hard work.
The sun came up, and we were out of sight of land and becalmed under a motionless blue sky. Flying fish scattered across the surface like little jewelled helicopters, frightened by an enormous swordfish that swiped at them with its bill. A hammerhead shark cruised by, cocking its curious head sideways to see if we were worth eating. Up above, petrels and terns wheeled and dived, taking inordinate interest in the rigging.
WISH I HAD A BIRD BOOK WITH ME
It was all very beautiful, but it wasn’t getting us any closer to Weipa. We fired up the engine and motor-sailed.
Rather than take our little 3 horsepower tender across the rather unpredictable channel between Horn Island and Thursday Island, we caught the ferry.
TI (as it is known locally) is less than a square mile of tropical island, and very pleasant. The people that we met could be divided into the ones that were working in the shops, who were either grumpy or apparently bemused that we wanted to buy anything, and the people who were not working in shops, who were universally happy and smiling and having a good time. Certainly the pubs were doing a roaring trade. I was particularly taken by the sign outside the Royal Hotel, which as well as offering “the loudest music in town”, issued the stern declaration that it would refuse to serve anybody “with visual armpit hair”.
We visited the very pretty catholic church, and also the island’s graveyard which contains a great many memorials to islanders who died far too young while diving for pearl and trochus shells. There was also a section for Japanese fisherman who had died chasing the same dream.
One other curious feature of the graveyard was the popularity of the grave markers as scaffolding for termite nests.
Australian Customs regards TI very much as their front line against not only immigrants but also pests and diseases. Their big launch was continually running up and down the channel, checking out the boats and boarding incoming yachts and confiscating their fresh food supplies.
We had heard that, even though we were not arriving from abroad, we would still need to get a certificate of authenticity from the supermarkets which would allow us to keep our fresh food if we were stopped on the way back to the mainland. There was a colourful but uninformative sign on the ferry dock which seemed to back this up, but when we asked at the supermarket they said that all we needed to do was to keep the receipt. We kept our purchases to an absolute minimum just in case, and then ran into a uniformed AQIS (quarantine) guy at the dock. He told us that we didn’t even need the receipt, but then admitted that he’d only been on the job for a week and really had no idea…
There is a cluster of islands a few hours north of Cape York, out in the Torres Strait and on the way to Papua New Guinea. Although they are part of Australia, most of them have been placed off limits to visitors by the Torres Strait Islanders who live there. In the middle of the group, though, are two islands that we can get to.
Thursday Island is well known in the yachting community because it is a convenient place to stop and rest if you are following the trades from the Pacific to destinations westward. In some ways this is a bit odd, because TI (as it is known) offers few facilities to yachts, and the anchorage is poor holding in a vicious current.
We chose to anchor a mile away across the channel by Horn Island, which boasts a calm and comfortable anchorage and a regular ferry to TI.
After sleeping for most of the day, we ventured out onto Horn Island to look around. It comprises only a couple of streets and seems to exist mainly to service the local airstrip (TI itself is far too small to land planes on).
HORN ISLAND FERRY TERMINAL
We naturally gravitated to the only pub, the Wongai Hotel, for a cold beer. Before long we were chatting to Charlotte the barmaid, and then to Matt the off duty duty manager, and then before not too many more beers we seemed to know everybody in the pub.
As the night wore on we switched from beer to wine, then from wine to spirits. The pub closed, Bob the landlord invited us all back to his pool for skinny-dipping and more beers, and then there was an increasingly blurred round of house visits until finally we found ourselves back on Pindimara mixing cocktails as the party continued.
A great pub, a great night, and I really don’t know how I managed to wake up and ferry Matt and Lucy back to the dock in the tender in the morning. Certainly the crew of the ferry said later that it had been very funny to watch. I didn’t even see any darn ferry.
We had embarked on a four-day passage up through the Great Barrier Reef and out into the Torres Strait. The trade winds were blowing fairly consistently and the weather forecast was good. It was also stinking hot, and we discovered that some of our eggs had cooked themselves inside their shells.
The Great Barrier Reef is much more than the outer ribbon reef that protects the eastern coastline from the open ocean. Inside the enclosed lagoon are tens of thousands of square miles of shallow water dotted by uncountable reefs and islands, many of them still uncharted. The reefs are mostly invisible and lurk just below the surface, so the only way that you can know where they are is to pay diligent attention to the charts.
LIZARD ISLAND TO CAPE YORK
I really have to take my hat off to Captain Cook who sailed these waters with no idea what lay beneath. It is a wonder that the Endeavour only suffered one serious accident here. Bligh also passed through in his open boat after having been set adrift by the mutineers on the Bounty. We passed a few of the islands that he stopped at on his epic journey from Tahiti to Indonesia, a feat that he achieved by navigating entirely from memory.
Those men were giants.
One thing that Bligh and Cook didn’t have to contend with were the ore freighters which continually forge their way up and down the coast. With a good chart, it is possible to thread a large vessel through the reefs in any number of ways, but the maritime authorities have now designated a few specific routes and have made it illegal for commercial vessels to stray from them. On the one hand, this guarantees safe passage for the ships without fear of encountering an unmarked reef, and it means that we always know where they are likely to be, and where they will be heading. On the other hand, the designated channel is often the only reasonable route through, creating pinch points where all vessels, commercial and private, must come together. This is especially exciting at night when you are tired and alone on deck and find that your fragile cockleshell is suddenly the focal point of three enormous cargo ships.
SHIPS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT
We planned a route that largely avoided the shipping channels in the daytime, but which used them at night when we could take advantage of their navigation beacons.
The days passed and we settled into shipboard routine. The sailing was generally easy, although the trades tended to blow harder at night. In the day, they sometimes died right off, or we’d be hit by a squall, but we made good time and rounded Cape York at around three in the morning of the fourth day.
ROUNDING THE CAPE
Cape York is the northenmost tip of mainland Australia, and a milestone on our trip. It gave us an immense sense of achievement to have made it all the way up the east coast. We had now turned the corner, and from now on would be sailing into the sunset.
Coming abeam of Watson Island (where Mrs Watson’s body was found, see our previous blog), Bronwyn tossed out the trolling line to see if she could catch us a fish supper. Within half an hour or so, something struck hard. It fought mightily in the distance, but eventually Bronwyn managed to haul it in hand over hand so that we could get a look at it.
We realised that instead of catching dinner, we had hooked well over a metre of something that looked very much like a shark. It was muscular with a flattened body, brown above and white below, a wide mouth like a catfish, and big dorsal and pectoral fins. It wasn’t in any of our fish books, but it certainly didn’t look like anything that we wanted to share our cockpit with, so we decided to let it go.
The only problem was that it had swallowed our one and only trolling spoon, and we needed it back. For almost an hour, Bronwyn played the enormous beast back and forth, trying to tire it enough to get it close to the boat so that I could pull out the hook and let it go. We got so engrossed in the task that I forgot to look where we were going, and got a real shock when I checked our course over my shoulder and found that we were about to T-bone a sand island.
At that precise moment, the wind increased to 30 knots and stayed there, leaving me with only a tiny slot between the edge of the island and a 7-knot gybe. At the same time, the fish was experiencing a whole extra knot of speed, and Bronwyn’s shoulders were aching with the effort of keeping it with us.
NOT SUPPER
A few minutes later, with disaster averted, we pointed the boat into the (suddenly well-behaved) wind and then cursed as the big fish made a sprint under the boat. If it got the line wrapped around the propeller, we would never get it back. However, it seemed to know what it was doing, because the line went slack and the fish swam off, leaving our tackle behind and apparently only slightly exerted by several miles of hard fighting.
We woke behind Cape Flattery to a weather forecast telling us to expect 30 knot winds again in the evening and all of the next day. We could have stayed there, but it was pretty dull and not very well insulated from the swell. Lizard Island beckoned from less than 20 miles away, giving us ample time to get there and hide before the blow started again.
When we poked our nose out from behind Cape Flattery, we found a reasonable 20-25 knots which took us to Lizard in no time at all.
We’d heard good reports of the island and were keen to stay for a while to explore. When we arrived at the Mrs Watsons Bay anchorage, we were a little surprised to find more than a dozen cruising boats packed in among the coral heads, as well as a fair sized but inconspicuous resort on the shore.
ROOM FOR ONE MORE?
PINDIMARA AT THE EDGE OF THE REEF
The bay is named after the eponymous wife of a beche-de-mere fisherman who was attacked there by aboriginals while her husband was out fishing. She and a servant and her newborn child escaped to sea in a cast iron boiling tub, and eventually washed up on what is now called Watson Island, where all three of them perished.
The water was blue and crystal clear; we could actually see the anchor on the bottom. The island gave good protection from the developing swell, but very little from the actual wind, so we put out all 70 metres of chain in preparation for the night ahead.
It did indeed blow that night, 30 knots or more, and all the boats got a good thrashing. I kept being awoken by strange sounds that had me running up on deck, but the anchor held. We were a bit tired the next morning, and simply stayed below all day as the wind continued to howl.
The next night was a little calmer, and by lunchtime the waves had died down enough that we were finally able to lower to outboard into the tender and go ashore.
We found a trail leading across the island and through the Pandanus swamps that fill the level ground between the rocky hills.
OFF INTO THE MANGROVES
PANDANUS SWAMP
LOCAL BEACHCOMBER
The trail led to the ‘Blue Lagoon’, an unusual geological formation in that coral lagoons are usually features of reef rather than of continental islands. In the case of Lizard Island it also provides yacht anchorage in calm weather, but those conditions certainly didn’t apply today and nobody had tried it.
THE BLUE LAGOON
There were, however, a few kite-surfers playing around, having sailed around the island from the resort.
JUST PASSING THROUGH
Lizard Island is also famous for having a peak that was climbed by Captain Cook when he was trying to find a vantage point from which he could plan a way out of the Great Barrier Reef. We set off on his trail on the following morning. It was a pleasant clamber over enormous granite boulders, shaded here and there by gums, and the views down into the reefs of Mrs Watsons Bay were spectacular.
BRONWYN AND MRS WATSON
THE WAY TO COOKS LOOK
From the top of the hill, we could faintly make out in the distance the dark blue of lurking ribbon reef, and the lighter blue of safe passages. If Cook hadn’t successfully spotted the gap, then he might not have made it back to England and Australians today might all be speaking French. It was very satisfying to stand there on a hilltop on an island in the far Great Barrier Reef, staring out to sea and feeling the connection to the history of our adopted country. Bien sûr.
Back at shore level, we went for a welcome swim in the gloriously clear water, and used the coral sand to scrub away the weeks of sun tan lotion and grime before returning to Pindimara for a rare and welcome freshwater shower.
We’ll definitely be coming back to Lizard Island again. It has genuinely beautiful white coral beaches, a very pretty landscape, some serious rocks, and a warm and easily accessible reef. Wonderful.
But now, it’s time to move on. The Torres Strait beckons.
For all that we’ve technically been sailing inside the Great Barrier Reef for several weeks, the reef itself has always been invisibly far out to sea. From here northward, though, the Barrier comes close inshore and is a navigational force to be reckoned with, comprising hundreds of scattered reefs lurking invisibly just below the waves. There is a well-charted and waymarked shipping channel to ease navigation, but it is full of large ships moving ore and containers up and down the coast.
THE NEXT HUNDRED MILES OF REEF
After weeks of dead calm, we’d been wishing for a breeze. Dusk fell, a humpback whale treated us to an aerial display in our wake, and – wonder of wonders – the wind picked up to the low twenties. Our speed increased to 6-7 knots under full sail as we entered the channel. Harriet was doing a fine job of sailing, so while Bronwyn went below to rest, I was free to sit in comfort and idly formulate an elaborate metaphor for the process of sailing through the reef at night.
Imagine getting into your car to drive to the next town. First, however, you spray-paint the windows black so that you can’t see out. Then you tape your mobile phone to the dashboard and log on to Google Maps. You start the engine and put it into gear, and from now on you are completely at the mercy of the accuracy of the map and where your phone says that you are.
You can be reasonably certain that all the streets and intersections are marked, as well as the more obvious light poles and roadside furniture, but you just have to deal with curbs, speed humps, rubbish bins, dogs and cats as you feel your wheels bump over them.
Thankfully there is little other traffic, but you know that if you leave these twisting side-roads and venture onto the highway, you will be sharing the road with fully laden trucks. You also know that they can’t see you either, and that in any case all their brake lines have been disconnected.
As I lay in the cockpit spinning this tale and watching meteorites blaze across the milky brilliance of the starry sky, Pindimara ploughing blindly into pitch darkness at close to hull speed, I thought happily that I wouldn’t trade places with anybody.
The hours passed, and the wind crept up to the mid twenties. Pindimara was now quite overpowered, but there were few gusts and the swells were predictable, so I left the sails up. Harriet the Hydrovane was coping superbly, and tracking better than ever before; I was really coming to appreciate the Hydrovane slogan ‘survive your dream’.
In the early hours of the morning, deep inside the shipping lane with bulk carriers and trawlers passing on either side, the wind crept up into the high twenties and our speed to over seven knots. It was getting decidedly bouncy, so I reckoned that enough was enough and called all hands on deck to reduce sail. To say that the crew tumbled eagerly out of their bunks would be an overstatement, and when Bronwyn did clamber painfully out, she commented that her ‘rest period’ in the bucking bunk seemed to have consisted mainly of two hours of strenuous but inadvertent Pilates exercise.
We quickly reduced sail and got back onto course. As is our usual practice on night passages, we’d gone straight for the main’s third reef, but Harriet soon picked up the pace to a respectable 4-5 knots. I was pretty tired by now so I gratefully put my head down while Bronwyn took a watch.
At a little after 4am I took over again, and immediately got my feet wet as a wave curled over the stern. The swell was now well over 2 metres, and the wind was touching 30 knots. It had also swung around onto the beam, and even with the third reef in, we were overpowered for a reach. The wind was howling in the rigging, and the hull was thrumming and making odd little banging sounds under my feet. We were stll four hours from the safe harbour at Lizard Island, and I seriously considered replacing the main with our storm trysail for the final leg. Instead I chose discretion, and put our tail between our legs and ran for nearby Cape Flattery, which at 260 metres high looked to be big enough to hide behind.
The wind was easier to manage with it behind us, but the wind speed continued to increase and of course we were now surfing down 3 metre swells in the darkness. As the Cape loomed out of the gathering dawn light, I once again roused Bronwyn who navigated us in to shelter between the Cape itself and the chart position of a sunken wreck.
Anchoring for once in the light, we immediately fell into bed and slept until lunch time. Although we were snug in our bay, the 30-knot wind continues to howl over our heads.
We were motoring out of Cairns with no wind and glassy seas. As evening fell it was clear that the situation was not going to improve, an opinion which was backed by the GRIB data that I downloaded which did, however, intimate that things might be better on the morrow.
Rather than burn fuel all night, we checked the chart for likely anchorages and settled on the Low Islets, which are really just a mangrove swamp sticking out of the sea. Naturally we arrived in full dark, to find a good sprinkling of yachts already there – including a large number of unlit tourist punts, which our Lucas cruising guide had warned us about – and found some swinging room at the back in about 12 metres of water on a sand and coral bottom.
Bronwyn magically produced a full roast lamb dinner with all the trimmings. I don’t know how she does that.
LOW ISLETS. PRETTY LOW, HUH?
LOW ISLETS LIGHTHOUSE AND RESORT
In the morning, there still wasn’t any wind, so we idled away the early morning on little chores, grumbling in a mild sort of way about a whole week of still days and dull motoring.
By ten o’clock the promised trade winds arrived as a gentle breeze. We cleared up below and prepared for sea. While hoisting the anchor, we noticed a very large fish taking an inordinate amount of interest in our hull, over a metre long and very powerfully built. Even when we started to motor out of the bay, it kept station with us, and we noticed a big propeller scar just behind the dorsal fin. Perhaps it was used to being fed by tourists.
And tourists there certainly were, in plentiful supply. As we left, they began to arrive in droves on large commercial sail boats of all descriptions, including an enormous cat ketch and a pseudo-oriental junk. All these people were decanted either onto the beach by the lighthouse, or into one of the many fishing punts and jet skis that littered the shore.
Already far from the madding crowd, gentle winds pushed us northward. To our left, the Great Dividing Range marched impressively along the shore line, cloud-shrouded thousand-metre peaks rejoicing in such names as Mount Sorrow, Mount Surprise, and Mount Unbelievable. Captain Cook had a bad time along here, hence also Cape Tribulation, Struck Island, Weary Bay, plus of course Endeavour Reef where he grounded and only got off with quite serious damage which had to be repaired ashore in what later became Cooktown.
We’ve stayed in Cairns before and found it be simply a tourist conduit for the Great Barrier Reef, so we only popped in to run some errands and to buy some fuel.
OBLIGATORY BEACH PHOTO
We also needed to do quite a bit of printing for our schoolwork, so rather than anchor in the ‘duck pond’ in the main river we booked a berth at Marlin Marina where we could access shore power. The marina was OK, but not particularly friendly and surprisingly – and annoyingly – lacked any kind of chandlery.
What did amaze us was the shorefront development that has sprung up since our last visit. We had previously found Cairns’ night life to be somewhat dull (always excepting the excellent Kanis seafood restaurant), but now the waterfront is ablaze with interesting pubs, restaurants and cafes and local people having a good time.
BRONWYN AT KANIS
We had a great time at the bar there and met a lot of interesting people, but our chores were done and there was no reason to stay so we cast off and motored back out of the river. Unbeknownst to us, the Alana Rose, which has been a week or two ahead of us all the way up the coast, had returned to Cairns to repair some electronics, so we must have passed within a hundred metres of them on our way out without noticing. That was a shame, because we’ve only ever spoken to Nancy and John via email and it would have been great to meet them in the flesh.
Out in the channel, we discovered that yes, there was still no wind at all. We really wanted to make some northing, so we resigned ourselves to a day of motoring in the stifling heat.
As well as a few whales, which surfaced to breathe but which otherwise didn’t show themselves, we came across another of those yellow swimming snakes, which decided after a while that it didn’t like the look of us and dived vertically downwards.
Rested and content after our sojourn on Hinchinbrook Island, it was time to put in some northerly miles. We were experiencing no wind at all, but we assumed that it was still blowing out to sea. A few hours later, we poked our nose out around the northernmost tip of the island and picked up a lovely nor’easter that had us flying along towards the next set of islands, the Family Group.
As dusk fell, we came abeam of the resort island of Dunk. We passed into its wind shadow, and never came out. The wind had died completely. I downloaded some GRIB files and found that the forecast was for no wind at all for the next few days. We considered anchoring at Dunk, but felt that we hadn’t really made any progress – Hinchinbrook was still in sight – so we decided to motor for a few more hours and anchor off the Barnard Group instead.
We arrived at the North Barnard Islands after dusk but before moonrise. It was very dark indeed. We slipped into our usual anchoring routine of one of us on deck steering with night-accustomed vision and the other down below watching the GPS and chart and calling up course adjustments. We knew from the chart that we were rounding Kent Island at a distance of a few tens of metres, but we could barely make it out as we slipped between it and an equally invisible breaking rock.
When we got into the reef between Kent and neighbouring Jessie Island, we found another yacht already there, thankfully with anchor lights correctly lit, but there was room enough for both of us.
A mild but continual beam swell made for a restless night, but the morning brought no wind so we took it easy. While standing on deck admiring the scenery, I spotted a derelict old dugout canoe floating towards us. I got out the binoculars (a bird-watching present from my parents when I was about ten; who’d have thought then that one day I’d be using them on a yacht in the Pacific?) to have a closer look, but there didn’t seem to be anybody aboard.
ABANDONED CANOE?
As I watched, the canoe vanished and then reappeared, and I suddenly realised that it wasn’t a boat at all but the tail flukes of a whale hanging head-down in the water. It was pretty shallow, so I can only assume that it was resting with its head on the bottom.
There was still no wind. I attempted to update the blog, but found that I only had one bar of signal. This was an excellent chance to test out the antenna that we’d bought in Townsville. We hadn’t been able to source either a mount or a patch cable to attach it to the modem, but I’d knocked something up using copper wire, aluminium foil, gaffer tape and string. It all worked perfectly, first time, with four bars of broadband. Not a bad upgrade for $100.
While washing up after a leisurely brunch, we felt a faint zephyr of a breeze and realised that there was a distant rain squall marching across the horizon. Guessing that we were on the edge of a small weather system, we quickly cleared the boat for sea and set up the sails for the anticipated sou’wester.
JESSIE ISLAND. NOT MUCH TO HIDE BEHIND
It did come, but it came slowly, drifting us along at only a couple of knots. For the rest of the day the squall stayed stubbornly on the horizon and refused to come closer, so that in order to make any headway we had to sail wing-on-wing in the light breeze. This entails keeping the main sail hovering on the edge of a gybe and flying the jib on the wrong side, which takes a bit of concentration when you don’t have a pole to stop the jib from collapsing. In the end we pulled in the foresail and let Harriet bimble us along at 3 knots on the main alone.
As evening drew in, even that little breeze dropped and we started the motor. We were a little low on fuel, and dislike motoring at night, so we decided to hide behind nearby Normandy Island, one of the Franklin Group. The last dying rays of dusk allowed us to spot a couple of other yachts and some other mysterious floating objects through the binoculars before we arrived in full dark, which was just as well because when we arrived they were largely unlit.
One yacht was showing an anchor light, but a large cat which really should have known better had only hung out a handful of dim little garden solar lanterns. There were also two vessels belonging to the Cruise Franklin company, one with a single solar lantern that ran down its batteries and went out as we watched, and the other completely dark and which we were lucky not to run down.
We had hoped to get some shelter from the SE swell, but in the event it parted around the island into two streams which hit us simultaneously at 90 degrees to each other, rolling and pitching at the same time. We made the best of it until 3 am when it all died down and we were able to get some proper sleep.
The next morning brought the lightest of winds again, and in the end we motor-sailed the last stretch into Cairns. Where are the famed continuous trade winds when you need them?
According to the official charts, the bar at Hinchinbrook Island is too shallow for us to cross. However, there is an active three-mile long sugar loader with leading lights across the shoals to a jetty, showing that the channel is regularly used. In addition, we’d emailed Nancy and John on Alana Rose who had recently crossed the bar, and they told us that they’d had good depths at high tide.
BRONWYN AND THE SUGAR LOADER
We had no problems getting across. The leads and navigation buoys took us so close to the sugar loader and the old molasses jetty that it was possible to chat quietly to the fishermen as we glided past.
FISHING OFF THE MOLASSES JETTY
There was still very little wind, so we motor-sailed up the passage (or ‘did a Bob’ as we call it, in honour of another blogger who circumnavigated Australia in a Bavaria with, as far as we can tell, his engine running most of the time). Hinchinbrook Channel is about twenty miles long and allows you to squeeze between the mountains of Hinchinbrook Island to the east, and the coast-hugging Cardwell Range to the west. The Channel is lined with mangroves which provide a vivid bright green contrast to the darker green gums behind, while the stark rock of the mountains looms impressively in the background.
HINCHINBROOK MOUNTAIN FROM THE CHANNEL
After a very scenic day, we pulled off the main channel into Gayundah Creek, one of the many drainage creeks that cut down from the mountains and through the mangroves. The breathless quiet was broken only by the occasional call of a bird or splash of a fish in the shallows. In the background we could hear sporadic ‘clunk’ noises that sounded vaguely like a branch snapping, or somebody slapping the water. We guessed that they were either made by frogs or by air bubbling up from the swamp mud, although we never did get to the bottom of it.
MORNING MIST IN GAYUNDAH CREEK
The many secluded and winding tributary channels just cried out to be explored, so we unshipped the dinghy and spent a happy afternoon alternately motoring and paddling in the shallows.
CREEK, PADDLE
The creeks were teeming with life, from rays and bait fish in the water, to crabs and white herons on the mud, to scintillating kingfishers flashing through the air.
Paddling gently back home, we got a clear view of our stern. One way of spotting a proper cruising boat is to see how much junk is hanging off the back.
We rode a nice nor’easter out of Townsville and back past Magnetic Island, where the evening weather made a mockery of our plans for a night cruise and left us bobbing in a perfect millpond sea without a breath of a breeze. We went below and cooked dinner before submitting to the inevitable and starting the engine.
It was extraordinarily dark, but after a while a red moon rose and drowned out most of the stars, revealing the scattered islands of the Palm Group as we threaded our way between them.
Bronwyn had gone below for a nap, and in order to counteract the mind-numbing tedium of motoring, I had loaded some Spanish lessons onto the new ipod that we’d bought in Townsville. It was a pleasant way of passing the time, and nobody was around to hear me declaiming loudly about my requirement for an explanation of the precise route to Santiago railway station.
A little later, my lessons done, I searched through the music files that I had randomly downloaded from my computer onto the ipod, looking for something that would suit motoring by moonlight through a crowded island group in the middle of the night. After a few false starts, I rediscovered some old live Whitesnake recordings, and spent the next few hours cheerfully navigating to the strains of Micky Moody on guitar.
We were heading for the passage behind Hinchinbrook Island, and in order to cross the bar we needed to wait for both sunlight and the tide. There are a couple of islands to the north of the Palm Group that provide convenient anchorages, and we dropped our pick in a mirror-smooth bay behind Fantome Island.
We had a great night’s sleep. In fact, the weather was so still that we could probably have slept floating on the open sea. In the morning we woke easily to the alarm and began motoring the final few hours to the southern entrance to Hinchinbrook Passage.
We spent several days enjoying the cafes and pubs of Townsville. The Palmer Street restaurant district is just behind the TMBYC marina, and from there it is but a short stroll to the Flinders Street East pub and club circuit. We didn’t have a single bad drink or indifferent meal in Townsville. We became regulars at the Townsville Brewery, situated in the impressive old General Post Office building and home to seven or eight enormously impressive boutique beers, and Cactus Jack’s which offers excellent margaritas in its rooftop bar with views out over the town.
TOWNSVILLE BREWERY
The other big draw is The Strand, which is the area backing Townsville’s long beachfront. The town planners have done a marvellous job here in creating something akin to La Rambla in Montevideo and many other latin countries. The beach remains pristine, but is now backed by a wide boulevard dotted with palm trees, sculptures, memorials, and playgrounds for young and old alike.
THE STRAND
One of these playgrounds is a fountain designed for playing in, complete with water cannons and a big bucket which periodically soaks everybody in the area.
WATER PARK
The Strand is delightfully uncommercial. Some low-rise hotels sit unobtrusively far back across the road, and the occasional cafes and restaurants are tucked away in secluded corners so as not to detract from the sweep of the bay. Bronwyn’s favourite was Juliette’s, a gelateria that makes its own gelato on the spot and which does cracking business well into the night.
BRONWYN AND PATRICIA AT JULIETTE’S
As well as the beach itself, sections of which are protected by stinger nets to guard against jellyfish, The Strand also boasts a pool at each end. The Tobruk pool was used for training by Australia’s olympic swimmers in the sixties (the entrance hall alone is well worth a visit for its collection of photos from that period), and the Kissing Point Rock Pool is an artificial swimming lagoon designed to provide safe swimming in the stinger season.
KISSING POINT ROCK POOL
We get the feeling that Townsville is destined for good things. It has not escaped the world’s current financial problems; for instance, the central mall was closed down and scheduled for major prestigious redevelopment, but this project has been put on hold so that a large part of the centre now sits idle and locals have to travel to the suburbs to do their shopping. All around, premium apartments have been built – neither too high nor too offensive, more kudos to the town planners – but we understood that hundreds of them stand empty awaiting buyers who never came. On the other hand, the town’s prosperity was never derived from tourism, and the constant flow of mineral, agricultural and livestock wealth continues to flow from the North Queensland interior to the various loaders and refineries to the south of the town.
Day followed perfect day, and we began to think that we would never get around to leaving. It was nice to be stuck somewhere because we wanted to be, instead of – as has happened so often on this trip – being trapped by storms. In the end, though, we realised that if we were going to get around the northern coast of Australia before the advent of the cyclone season, then we needed to get moving.
After picking up Patricia from Townsville airport, we sailed across to nearby Magnetic Island for the weekend. Captain Cook named it “Magnetical” because he believed that it was affecting his compass, but it seems that he was mistaken. This can happen to the best of us; see for instance this harrowing tale from the extremely experienced crew of our friends on Pelagic.
The island may lack magnetic anomalies, but it does have some beautiful bays and walking tracks. The best anchorage is in Horseshoe Bay to the north, offering good protection from the SE trade winds, so we dropped anchor there for a few days while we explored. Although it was a busy bay, there was plenty of room for all, and there was no appreciable swell despite continuing strong trade winds.
HORSESHOE BAY
A couple of thousand permanent residents are scattered around a number of small settlements connected by a circular bus route. Apart from one notable exception (a younger chap presumably new to the job), the bus drivers tried to make the route more interesting by keeping the accelerator pedal firmly to the metal at all times. They would maintain power until a few metres short of a bus stop, whereupon they would stamp heavily on the brake. Passengers quickly learned that it was necessary to wait for the bus to stop bouncing on its springs before daring to stand up to get off.
The other mode of transport on the island is the Mini Moke. I had no idea that there were so many of them left in the world, but this may be because they are all now collected in this one spot. Most are for hire, fulfilling the function of the golf cart on Hamilton Island, being usually piloted by slightly inebriated tourists making their way home from the pub.
WHERE THE MOKES WENT
Tourism is the only industry here, but Magnetic (‘Maggie’ to its friends) has escaped the resort frenzy that has claimed Hamilton. Most of the accommodation is low key and comprises individual houses or cabins rather than hotels. The ferry to the mainland is the island’s lifeline and the key to its prosperity, as can clearly be seen in Picnic Bay which used to be a thriving commercial quarter but which is now largely a ghost town because the ferry terminal moved around the corner to Nelly Bay.
There are no such problems at Horseshoe Bay, which is the jewel in the crown and whose few but excellent beachside bars are presumably adequately serviced by visiting yachties. The Barefoot cafe and art gallery is particularly relaxing, and an honourable mention must go to the ‘Noodies’ Mexican restaurant next door for the opportunity to sit margarita in hand while watching dugongs in the surf and people messing about on the beach.
MESSING ABOUT ON THE BEACH
The island also boasts a number of easy walking trails. Perhaps the most spectacular is the Forts Walk which hits you with a triple whammy. Firstly, the views of the surrounding shorelines are superb. Secondly, the path takes you up to a historically interesting WWII gun emplacement, and lastly the trail is lined with koalas.
LOOKING DOWN
LOOKING UP
LOOKING IN
LOOKING OUT
We were sad to leave Horseshoe Bay when it was time to take Patricia back to the mainland, but the weather co-operated to give us perfect sailing conditions back down around West Point to complete our circumnavigation of the island.
SIX-KNOT READING
PATRICIA TAKES COMMAND
The Breakwater marina notwithstanding, we had thoroughly enjoyed our initial impression of Townsville itself, and wanted to stay on a bit longer when when we brought Patricia back to town. We decided to try out the Townsville Motor Boat and Yacht Club marina, which is down Ross Creek in the centre of town. Access is via the commercial harbour shipping channel, so we nipped in ahead of an incoming bulk carrier and found good depths all the way.
After the usual hunt for our berth, we tied up to a warm welcome by Mark, the marina manager, who called a taxi for Patricia and went out of his way to make our stay as enjoyable as possible. The pontoons were all sturdy and new, the club’s facilities were being completely refurbished, there was a lively bar on site, the other marina residents were universally friendly and interesting, and to top it all the berths were considerably cheaper than at Breakwater.
Leaving Pindimara in safe hands, we happily set off to explore the town.
We had never intended to stop in Townsville. However, our friend Patricia had flown out to join us for our exploration of nearby Magnetic Island, and we needed to pick her up and take her back to the airport afterwards.
Townsville has several marinas, and on our first arrival we randomly chose The Breakwater which seemed at first glance to give easiest access to the sea. The chart showed dredged depths of 1.1m which should have allowed us in at most points of the tide, but luckily we rang ahead and found that in fact the channel was really only 50cm deep.
We’d arrived only a few hours before high tide, so we hung around hove-to until it was deep enough and then motored in. In retrospect this was a wise decision, because when the tall ship Joshua C followed us in a few days later, they found themselves dredging their own channel with their keel.
It seems to be a point of honour among marinas that they never adequately signpost their berths, and Breakwater was no different. We endured the usual stress of searching up and down the narrow and crowded channels of an unfamiliar marina, until eventually we located our assigned berth. Because of the combined effects of wind, tide and surrounding boats, you usually only get one chance of getting cleanly in to a berth, so Bronwyn swung the bow round in a fast turn while I stood on the foredeck with a handful of pre-prepared lines. As the little slot twisted into view, I jumped onto the pontoon and prepared to tie off and help warp her in, only to find that the wood was so rotten that all the cleats had fallen out. Looking around for any sort of projection that I could use, I shouted “It’s up to you!” to Bronwyn, who executed a flawless parallel park while I hunted around for something to tie up to.
Most of Breakwater Marina was like that. The pontoons were all falling apart, the staff were distinctly strange, and the fee structure was impenetrable and changed from one day to the next, not only in terms of dollar amount but also with the tax charged. After a few days, we went to the office clutching a handful of mis-matched invoices and asking for clarification. We were told that although we had requested a 10m berth, “none were available” and so they had “put us in a 12m berth” and charged us accordingly. This is gibberish, because the berths are largely all the same and it is the length of your boat that should determine the fee. It wasn’t just us; we heard later that the Joshua C was also charged randomly changing amounts with each passing day. The marina also tried very hard to keep our key deposit when we left, by conveniently “forgetting” to keep a note of our card details so that they were unable to credit our account.
Patricia arrived, and we gratefully left to explore Magnetic Island.
Cape Bowling Green is, presumably, so named because it is as flat as. It’s not really a cape at all, more of a long sand spit enclosing a shallow bay. We had no intention of stopping there, because it’s so flat that it is little use as protection, and because a number of people had warned us that it is a pretty uncomfortable anchorage.
ROUNDING THE “CAPE”
Nevertheless, after a nice day’s sailing before 10-20 knot winds, we found ourselves coming abeam of the Cape with gusts in the mid-thirties and swell that was big enough that we were surfing down it. Clearly last night’s gale was coming back to blow again, and we decided that we really didn’t want to be out in it.
The wind itself wasn’t too much of a problem, as even in 30 knots we were comfortably cruising at 6-8 knots under full sail, but controlling gybes while surfing is tricky enough in daylight, and we didn’t fancy tiring ourselves out at night, especially if the developing swell was going to get any bigger.
We tucked around the end of the sand spit and anchored in 4 metres with plenty of rode and an anchor alarm (we’re learning…). There was nobody else in the enormous bay apart from a couple of humpback whales who were gently cruising around in the shallows. I guess they like to get out of the swell as much as the next mammal.
The wind went straight up over 30 knots and stayed there. Although we were sheltered from the big sea swells, we were still far enough downwind from the sand spit to experience some pretty big waves as they built up across the shallows, and Pindimara began to do a passable imitation of a nodding dog. Still, it was all on the bow and pitching is nowhere near as bad as rolling. We didn’t exactly sleep the sleep of the just, but by the morning the wind had died down enough to move on. The sailing conditions were just about perfect, and we had a wonderful cruise into Townsville.
With the dawn came the promised gale. We wrote off the morning and did some advance passage planning instead. At around lunch time, a few yachts crawled into the bay and dropped anchor, much closer to shore than us. They seemed to be much more scared of the wind than of the shallows. Presumably it was a bit rough out there.
The wind died to a more reasonable 20-25 knots over lunch, but leaving then wouldn’t have got us anywhere useful in daylight hours, and we were pretty convinced from our detailed poring over the GRIB files that the night was going to get gnarly. Still, we had bread to bake and schoolwork to do, and a new batch of novels that we’d picked up in Bowen, so Townsville could wait.
The afternoon died in a sky of lowering maroon clouds shot through with fiery red flashes. With sunset came the real winds. They came up over Cape Upstart and slammed down onto the boat at over 30 knots. Pindimara reeled with the punches. Like any keeler she is designed to point into wind, but the sheer force caught her on the bows and lifted her up and over, first to one side and then to the other, whipping her almost broadside on before the anchor chain hauled her back so that the wind could slam into the other side. This continued on relentlessly, time after time, two or three times a minute, for hours on end. The anchor chain stretched out, but looked as if it would hold.
The view from deck was somewhat alarming, but down below it was surprisingly calm, if you ignored the demon howl of the wind in the rigging and the frenzied hum of halyards vibrating like violin strings above.
We thought it prudent to consult the Bureau of Meteorology website, but (in common with many of our Queensland anchorages) the only internet connection that we could get involved standing on deck and balancing the laptop on either the dodger or the targa frame. With the boat thrashing from side to side and the laptop threatening to tear itself out of my hands and fly away, this was not the easiest task, especially when we started to get waves over the bow. I saw enough of the forecast to tell me that conditions would probably improve overnight, and went below.
With nearly 40 metres of chain out, we would usually expect Pindimara to swing through a wide arc, and could set our new anchor alarm accordingly. In this strong wind, however, she was dancing on the end of her stretched-out chain and not swinging at all, so we set the anchor alarm for a much smaller radius. After a couple of trips around the deck attempting to identify and tie down all the more obvious bangs and rattles, we went to bed. The gale continued to rage, but our bodies were quite tired from endlessly rebalancing our bodies and so we fell quickly asleep.
In the middle of the night, the anchor alarm went off. I was instantly awake and ran onto deck, but then started laughing; the wind had gone, and we were still firmly anchored but drifting aimlessly around the chain. We reset the alarm radius and went back to bed.
The anti-swell kedge-anchor worked! We had a beautiful undisturbed nights sleep, while the other yachts in the bay were obviously rolling badly.
Strong winds were forecast for the next few days, but they looked like reliable trades and we thought that we could quickly run the hundred mile trip to Townsville in a night and a day. We set off optimistically in light morning breezes, expecting things to pick up later. The sou’easter stubbornly refused to materialise, and we spent a couple of hours drifting along marvelling at the orange bloom on the turquoise sea.
ORANGE TIDE
CLOSE UP AND PERSONAL
According to some news reports (thanks, Virginia) these particular blooms are caused by Trichodesium and Townsville is waiting in some trepidation for their arrival, as it seems that they wash up on the beaches and start to rot.
Eventually our speed tailed off to less than three knots, which is our usual sign to reluctantly start the motor. After this, we made good time until late afternoon, when the wind finally started to blow, and we hoisted the sails and were screaming along at 6-7 knots. Thinking idly about dinner, I unwrapped our brand new trolling line (replacing the old one that mysteriously snapped) and began to unwind it overboard to see if we could snare our second ever fish. The spoon had barely hit the water when the reel was nearly snatched out of my hand, and before very long we’d landed another mackerel.
By the time we’d filleted, cooked and eaten it (yum) the wind had died again and we were becalmed. The promised gale was clearly somewhere else entirely, and we didn’t have enough fuel left to motor all the way to Townsville, so rather than bob around in the dark we dropped the anchor in four metres of water in Shark Bay, under the lee of Cape Upstart.
With seven times rode out and an anchor alarm, we settled down to some schoolwork before being distracted by some loud splashing outside. Shoals of Long Toms were leaping out of the water around the boat, and we found that we could trigger mass flights by shining the spotlight onto them.
Tired out from all this excitement, and hoping for wind on the morrow, we went to bed and drifted off to sleep.
We had a terrible night on the Bowen mooring although just for a change it was not the fault of the mooring itself, which behaved impeccably. Following last night’s grounding, we kept waking up at the slightest sound or movement and running up on deck to check the surrounding anchor and navigation lights. Even in our dreams we were still listening out for the ‘thump’ of a grounding keel.
At dawn we gave it up as a bad job and began clearing away the debris of the rescue attempt. The decks at this point were cluttered with ropes, chains and bridles, and liberally spattered with bottom mud. The interior looked as if a bomb had hit it after the boat was purposely knocked down to free the keel.
The wind continued to blow, and we realised that we weren’t going to get peace of mind until we went somewhere else where the memories weren’t as fresh. Fortunately Queens Bay was only around the corner, which had the advantage of being spacious and uncrowded but the disadvantage of being renowned for its beam swell.
At anchor again and with most of the afternoon still ahead of us, we worked out a few modifications to our nightly routine. Although our ship-board GPS comes with an anchor alarm which warns you if you stray too far from a pre-set position, we have only rarely used it because the only way of powering up the GPS is to turn on all the navigation systems at once, which unnecessarily uses up a lot of valuable power. I rewired our GPS onto its own circuit so that we can fire it up on its own for use as an anchor alarm. It is on now.
Secondly, we had time and space to try an idea that we have been discussing for some time. The problem with swell is that it doesn’t always come from windward, so that the boat (which always tries to face into wind) takes the waves on the quarter or on the beam, which produces an uncomfortable rolling action. We reasoned that we could hold our bow into wind by putting out a kedging anchor at the stern and hauling it in until we were angled into the swell.
We’ve never seen this idea discussed anywhere in the literature. However, given our success with the kedging anchor during our grounding, we applied our newly honed skills and tried it out. Our new tactics worked perfectly, and while we can see that all the other boats in the bay are being thrashed abominably, we are pointing directly into the swell and are only experiencing a pleasant rocking motion. Hopefully we’ll be able to get a good night’s sleep, our first in three days.
Overnight the wind changed, putting us on a lee shore, blowing over 20 knots with a following 3 metre swell. Obviously we should have noticed and changed anchorage, but we were sleeping the sleep of the just and didn’t notice that our anchor was dragging. The first we knew about it was the sound of our keel impacting the ground , not something that I ever want to hear again, although I was to hear it many times that night.
I tried to reset the dragging anchor, but found that it was wrapped in a blue nylon and rubber sheet, presumably somebody’s discarded wet weather gear which had caused it to slip. We were by now wedged on the muddy bottom alarmingly close to shore. After running uselessly at full throttle – we weren’t going anywhere – the engine overheated and had to be shut down. A quick check revealed that the seawater coolant tubes were dry, presumably mud had clogged the sail-drive intakes. The night was pitch black. The depth sounder was reading 0m under the keel. The GPS showed that we were 600m from where we had originally anchored.
I started to kedge, which means that I carried our spare anchor out in our dinghy, with waves breaking over my head, dropped it somewhere vaguely close to where I wanted us to be, and then climbed back on the yacht to haul us along the anchor rope by hand. Then repeat. It’s back-breaking work, and after moving the yacht a little over ten metres, we stuck fast and I could not move us further. I left the kedge anchor in place because it was stopping us from drifting further inshore.
I called for assistance on the emergency Channel 16, but none of the relevant authorities were listening, which was not surprising given that it was the middle of the night. Eventually I was answered by Reef Watch, a commercial organisation related to the coal industry, who passed on our message to Townsville Water Police who passed us on to Voluntary Marine Rescue Bowen. A sleepy VMR crew arrived on a small catamaran shortly after dawn and tried to tow us off, but failed because we were completely stuck.
We agreed to wait for the now thankfully rising tide. Pindimara was bobbing, but seriously listing to one side and slamming into the ground with every wave. Tony from neighbouring yacht Loyalty arrived and coordinated the second rescue attempt, using his own dinghy attached to our masthead spinnaker halyard to drag us even further over until our gunwales were in the water, thus releasing the keel from the mud. Alarmingly for him, his outboard kept cutting out, which meant that Pindimara would stand up and lift both him and his dinghy vertically out of the water until he could get it started again. Meanwhile Matt from VMR and myself worked on the increasingly wet and sloping foredeck to kedge us out on our two anchors while the little VMR rescue boat attempted to tow us out on a line. Eventually we came unstuck, and since our engine was disabled and the local harbour was too shallow for our 2m draft I requested that we be towed to one of the many private mooring buoys in the area.
Through all this time, Bronwyn had been staying out of the way below in the heaving, canted saloon. When I came below with our rescuers to dispense coffee and whisky, we were astonished to discover that she had baked fresh bed for everyone.
Once secure, with the assistance of Tony from Loyalty we cleared our blocked intakes and started our engine. We could engage forward gear but not reverse, so I guessed that we had a problem with our propeller and dived on it to remove several metres of chewed-up rope which was jamming our propulsion.
STRING, STRING, WONDERFUL STRING
Finally, we seemed to be in the clear. It had been a long morning.
During the process we’d met the crew of not only one, but two nearby schooners, Tony on Loyalty, and Annie and Robyn on Joshua C .
JOSHUA C AND LOYALTY
HELPING TO BRING LOYALTY TO ANCHOR
It seemed reasonable to spend the evening celebrating.
It was very shallow squeezing between Gloucester Island and the mainland – only a metre under the keel – but we got through just before some nasty looking weather. There were some moorhttp://www.virtualreinhard.com/wp/bowen/ing buoys bobbing around close in to the shore where we intended to anchor. They said ‘Eco Resort’ on them but there was no phone number and the resort didn’t respond to VHF, so we picked one up. As it happened, the squall passed us by, but the bay remained calm so even though it was only lunchtime, we decided to hang around until the next morning.
What a lovely calm mooring it was! The buoy was well behaved and didn’t bang against the boat at all – or if it did, it was made of nice soft plastic and we probably wouldn’t have noticed. Mooring makers, take note! It is possible to make your buoy out of something soft and squishy instead of something hard and sharp that rings like a bell on impact.
GOOD BUOY
There was little swell and we scotched our plans of an early start and had a luxurious long lie-in instead.
It was a long slow calm trip over turquoise calm seas to Bowen, where we dropped anchor and took the dinghy in through the astonishingly shallow channel (we didn’t dare try it in the yacht) to get some provisions. On the way there, we’d noticed a catamaran with ‘Jailhouse Steak House, Launceston’ on the side, which we’d seen at almost every marina on the way up, so on the way back to Pindimara, loaded to the gunwhales with provisions, we chugged over and said ‘Hi’.
Don, who had built his yacht in Tasmania and is sailing her up to Darwin (Her actual name is Cisco; the steak house had once sponsored him in a race), was glad to see us and we spent a lovely evening drinking wine and shooting the breeze, after which he kindly illuminated our yacht with his spotlight so that we could get home, because we couldn’t see anything in the dark.
Back on board, we put on some music and tucked into some welcome fresh meat and vegetables, followed by our first gin and tonics in months. The swell blew up a bit, but it was all on the nose and so just made the yacht buck a little, and didn’t disturb our sleep.
GLOUCESTER ISLAND, FROM BOWEN
We decided to stay for another day so that we could explore Bowen itself. The town is small, pleasant and friendly, and adorned with striking murals on every spare wall. It seems that there is an annual mural festival, and new ones are continually being added, usually commemorating the history of the area.
MIND THE GAP
We had a very pleasant time hunting them all down, along the way acquiring a great many bags of shopping, including torches and lamps and fishing gear and an eclectic selection of books from the local charity shop.
We also checked out the local pubs and ended up at the one that seemed to hold the most promise, the Grand View. Sure enough it didn’t take too many pints before we were chatting to some prawn fishermen, and the night degenerated into a pleasant blur.
There was no wind forecast for the following day, so we pottered gently around the boat, reading our new books, having a bath in the cockpit, and generally being nice to our hangovers.
The wind got up in the afternoon, so we’ll be moving on tomorrow.
Hamilton is a resort island currently owned and run by the Oatley family corporation, and there is very little room there for independent enterprise. This gives the whole place a slightly surreal and unearthly flavour, perhaps a bit like if Disney owned the Isle of Wight. The road system is tiny, but everybody drives around in golf carts, which are provided to staff and hired by the day by tourists.
RUSH HOUR
Most of the restaurants and cafes are stamped with a lowest-common-denominator sameness, and it is slightly strange to keep meeting the same staff serving in each cafe.
There is no beach on the island, so they made one by bringing in sand from Whitehaven and dumping it on top of rocky drying mudbanks in Catseye Bay. The effect is a bit strange if you look closely, and is anyway somewhat marred by the large amount of floating pumice that has since washed ashore… you can’t mess with geology.
CATSEYE BEACH FROM A DISTANCE
WE PLAY TOURIST AT CATSEYE
On the other hand, Hamilton Island is a pleasant enough place and everybody seems to be reasonably happy. Even the nightclub bouncers are friendly. Payment of your somewhat outrageous marina fee allows you to use any of the resort facilities, which is just as well as the official marina shower blocks aren’t really up to scratch.
We were also lucky enough to be introduced to residents Pam and Bill (thank you, Nicky) who made us very welcome indeed and showed us some sides of island life that we would not have otherwise seen. And we drank a lot of wine with them. Oh yes.
We had only really intended to stay on the island for a couple of nights while we did some chores at the post office and laundry, cleaned the salt off the boat, and overhauled the toilet system (hopefully for the last time). However, we had such a grand night at the steak house, pub and nightclub that we overstayed the third morning, and anyway Pam and Bill had invited us over to dinner, so…
We woke after a comfortable night under Shaw Island to find turtles browsing the reef, and a whole school of 40 cm batfish cleaning the bottom of the boat.
BATFISH
After breakfast it was time to close our circumnavigation of the Whitsundays Group and return to Hamilton Island.
Good things and bad things happened on our trip up through the Whitsunday Passage. There was a fair wind, but a quartering swell. We didn’t get any bites on the trolling line, but we did get a spectacular aerial display from a young humpback whale and her calf. Then, as we were admiring the picturesque lighthouse on Dent Island, something enormous must have sneaked up and eaten not only our hook and spoon, but also half of the metal trace line. All we got back was a few frayed metal ends.
The forecast was for southerlies, but we were getting northerlies, so we decided to drop anchor in the protection of Refuge Bay in Nara Inlet. It was a little crowded but we found room to squeeze in and anchored in millpond conditions as the wind raged overhead.
We woke up at 4 am to give Mikayla a taste of night sailing. The southerly was finally blustering through as we raised sail under the stars, and Mikayla took us up to seven knots toward South Molle Island as the first touches of dawn tinged the sky, topping it off by baking a bread loaf that was crusty perfection itself.
SEVEN-KNOT NOY
DOUBLE CONE ISLAND. VERY STRANGE.
You’re not allowed to go ashore at South Molle because it is a private resort, but we anchored just off the cliffs for a leisurely brunch before tackling the fast tack across the somewhat wild strait to Hamilton Island. Dreading another night on the evil buoys, we’d booked a night in the marina, who actually had a valet waiting outside the entrance to guide us in. I suppose that is the flip side of paying nearly $100 for one night’s berth.
Then… showers! Blessed unlimited streams of piping hot water! Followed by a leisurely beer as we watched the golf carts bimble up and down the waterfront, and then an enjoyable fresh fish dinner at the rather nice Mariners restaurant. Not a bad end to a great little holiday. Next week we start cruising again.
Our next plan was to go back to Lindeman Island and to have another attempt at exploring it, after abandoning our previous attempt due to an uncomfortable swell.
Lindeman lay a few hours to the south. Mikayla did the whole of the day’s sail, from motoring off the anchor to putting up the sails, steering all the way to Lindeman Island, and then dropping the sails and the anchor when we got there.
THE CREW, HARD AT WORK
There really wasn’t much left for us to do apart from laze around on deck.
THIS IS THE LIFE!
We were running low on fresh food, so we put out the trolling line to see if we could catch our second ever fish. On the way through the fast-running Solway Channel we hooked something silver, but didn’t have too long to get excited about it, because it jumped off what turned out to be a blunt hook. We didn’t get another bite all day, and made a note to get out the sharpening file later that night.
THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY
Because the wind had come round to the north, we headed for the other side of the island from our previous visit. We wandered around on the beach there hoping to connect with the national parks trail that we’d seen on the northern tip, but the plant growth was so thick that we couldn’t get more than a few tens of metres inshore.
Giving up on walking, we explored in the dinghy, and found a pebble beach where we spent a happy afternoon looking at stones and coral.
GEOLOGIST AT WORK
Exhausted after our gruelling day, we returned to the boat, where Bronwyn knocked up a fine repast from dried and canned ingredients. No more fresh food until we get to Cairns.
The night was reasonably comfortable but the forecast gentle northerly turned into a proper storm as the promised ridge came through early. The boat got thrashed about a bit, but the swell stayed on the bow so we weren’t overly unhappy.
The ridge brought with it a southerly change, so instead of continuing our exploration of Lindeman, we decided to hop over to nearby Shaw Island where there was convenient shelter. Before we left, though, Mikayla and I went back to the pebble beach and collected enough spheroidal rocks in different colours to make up a set of boules, along with a chunk of white coral to use as a jack.
Once ashore on Shaw, we put them to the test, and had a fine boules tournament up and down the beach.
We spent a gentle day circumnavigating the northern half of Whitsunday Island, finishing up at the popular Tongue Bay. A line of yachts was wedged in against the south-eastern shore, but as we approached the pack broke up and many of them left. Quite a few of these seemed to be old J-class racing yachts, apparently being run by the tourist resorts as they each had over a dozen people aboard.
MIKAYLA BRINGS US IN TO ANCHOR
Those of us that remained suffered a mild but unusual swell for the rest of the night. I went up on deck a few times to see if I could work out what was happening, but although throughout the night the wind and tide had us facing almost every point of the compass, on every point we were getting a mild broadside swell. Very odd.
After breakfast we popped around the corner to the famous Whitehaven Beach, renowned home of the finest white sand in the world.
WHITEHAVEN BEACH
It was a glorious day. We anchored a couple of hundred metres from the shore and then swam in. The sand was almost painfully white, and the consistency of flour. We amused ourselves by following nicely defined animal tracks in the dunes, and watching the numerous sting rays foraging for food in the shallows around our feet. I’ve never seen so many rays being so bold. They weren’t bothered by us at all, and one big one was perfectly happy for me to wade alongside it as it swam slowly up the beach.
Apart from some clusters of resort folk over a mile away at each end, we had the beach pretty much to ourselves. After swimming back to the yacht for lunch, everything changed; power boats and jet boats roared up to the shore and discharged dozens of people with cool boxes, and a helicopter flew in to deposit another load. Tenders came in from two super-yachts out in the bay, one of them an astonishing mirror-finished ketch which must have been a hundred feet long. It was time to leave.
POLISH YOUR BOAT, SIR?
There was no wind at all, but the forecast was for a northerly change, so we motored over to nearby Hasleton Island and anchored up against the reef in Whites Bay. There was nobody else there, which made a nice change, although a small liveaboard showed up later. The skipper commented in passing that he’d been hoping for some peace and quiet, and then anchored so far away from us that we could barely see him in the gathering dusk.
Standing in the dark with the moon still below the horizon, we noticed intermittent flashes of light in the water. This wasn’t the usual phosphorescence of tropical plankton but something different. We spent a happy half hour or so hanging over the rail with a spotlight trying to work out which of the myriad creatures was making the light. We narrowed it down to either the millimetre swarms of zooplankton, or the yellowish thumbnail-sized fish that were feeding on them while simultaneously either laying eggs or defecating, or the finger-sized silver-blue fish that were coming up from below to feed on everything else.
Satisfied that we had in fact no idea what was going on, we settled down to a quiet evening of baking, eating, and cribbage.
Having picked up Mikayla from the airport, there was no real point in staying amongst the resort high-rises of Hamilton Island. We were all tired of being tossed about on the mooring in the continuing gale, so we headed north to see if we could find a quieter spot in Cid Harbour on Whitsunday Island.
MIKAYLA TAKES COMMAND
The availability of anchorages in the Whitsundays is to some extent ruled by the presence of bare-boat flotillas. Cid Harbour is famous for its calm anchorage, but is also very close to the charter base at Hamilton Island. We had assumed that, since it was Friday and most charters begin and end on a Saturday, Cid Harbour would be packed with holidaymakers enjoying a final night. There were about twenty boats there when we arrived, but there was still room for us to squeeze into Sawmill Bay where we had beautiful flat calm and an undisturbed night’s sleep. Thanks to John and Nancy for suggesting it.
Following on from our discovery of Alan Lucas’ misnaming and misrepresenting a bay a few days ago, we began to suspect that he hadn’t actually been to Cid Harbour either. Although it is indeed a fine anchorage, Lucas talks about showers and barbecues, and there is certainly nothing of the sort there, and no sign that there ever has been. However, turtles and dolphins siam all around the bay, and there are four coral beaches to explore.
MIKAYLA TAKES THE OLD GUY OUT FOR A SPIN
We also found a short bush trail leading from the main beach to nearby Dugong Inlet, and half way along this we noticed a minor tributary trail heading straight up the hillside. A passerby told us that this led, after one and a half hours, to the top of Whitsunday Peak (434m) from whence, he said, there were marvellous views of the the island.
Naturally I was champing at the bit to climb it. The girls were more inclined to sit on the beach, so they went for a swim at Dugong while I set off. It was quite a climb, and obviously didn’t see much traffic, but the trail was reasonably obvious and the vaguer parts had been unobtrusively marked with surveyor’s tape.
After an hour of hard climbing, I came across a scattering of dome tents hidden amongst the trees. A little later the trail improved markedly to a neat path, and I began to hear the sounds of voices and tools. Half a dozen park rangers were working on the trail, painstakingly chopping out roots, marking the edges with a border of stones, and where necessary fitting steps by half-burying large boulders and packing them with dirt. They were glad to stop for a chat, and told me that they had been there for about forty days, and were expecting to finish in another month or so. When they were finished with this particular trail, they would set up camp on another part of the island and start work there. They had been living and working in the Whitsundays for at least a year. It struck me that this would be my perfect job.
RANGERS AT WORK
A YACHT SAILS OUT TO SEA
The views from Whitsunday Peak were spectacular. I could see our anchorage in Cid Harbour on one side, and across to Hamilton Island on the other. A vast expanse of islands and coral seas stretched to and merged with the horizon. It really is a lovely piece of paradise.
VIEW FROM WHITSUNDAY PEAK
Back down at the beach, Bronwyn and Mikayla had had an enjoyable if slightly cool swim, and had attracted the attention of a hungry crow and a pair of young goannas, not to mention some members of the tourist subspecies of homo sapiens. One particular group arrived after the arduous 1100 metre trek from Cid Harbour and rang their yacht to send a tender round to pick them up. They assumed that Mikayla and Bronwyn were tired and resting up before the laborious trek home!
MIKAYLA AND FRIEND
By the time that I had clambered back down to sea level, we had the beach to ourselves and were all glad of the chance of a good wash in the clear waters.
THE NOW OBLIGATORY ‘DANIEL CRAIG’ PHOTO
Suitably refreshed, we headed back to the boat and fired up the barbecue for a nice veal roast before sleeping for a full eleven hours.
A fast run to Hamilton Island to pick up Mikayla, with whom we will spend the next week circumnavigating the Whitsundays. Conditions were a bit gnarly, with washing-machine swells and 30 knot gusts, but it meant that we got to Hamilton pretty quickly and picked up the biggest mooring rope from the biggest mooring buoy we have ever seen. The rope was so big that it wouldn’t fit around our deck cleat, so I had to quickly make an extension for it.
The moorings are on the opposite side of the channel to Hamilton airport, up against neighbouring Dent Island, and the wind was still blowing nicely. It was a bit of a wild ride across the channel in the tender.
Wandering around waiting for the plane, I was bemused by all the holidaymakers decanting from nose-to-tail flights and piling into golf carts. There were golf carts everywhere! When Mikayla had arrived and we were walking back to the marina where I had tied up the dinghy, we were passed by streams of them on their way to their hotels. We got some strange looks; it’s the Club Med set, and they obviously don’t get many pedestrians in Hamilton.
The water in the channel to Dent Island was still running pretty fast on the way back and we got a bit of spray into the dinghy, but the scariest thing was watching Pindimara bucking around and flinging from side to side in some huge surf. Now we could see why they’d over-engineered the mooring buoy. Poor Bronwyn was inside trying to cook lunch.
On the way over, we’d noticed that one of the smaller free public buoys had become available, and that the water was much calmer mid-channel, so we let go our marina buoy and motored over to the other one, not only making everything so much calmer, but also saving ourselves an overnight fee.
But… there are two ways to construct a mooring buoy.
One is to attach a rope to a heavy weight on the bottom. At the free end of the rope, you attach a small plastic floating ball. In order to moor, you pick up the floating ball and bring it aboard, tying it off, and thus attachig the yacht to the heavy weight on the bottom of the sea.
The other construction method is to attach a large floating buoy to the end of the rope, and then to attach a second rope to the top of that buoy. In order to moor, you pick up the end of the top rope and bring it aboard, but the buoy stays in the water.
The first method is simple, effective, has few parts and is trouble-free. The second method is more complicated to build, and if there is any tidal flow at all, then the big buoy will spend at least a third of any 24 hour period banging against the hull. Naturally, almost every public mooring is of this second type.
I spent much of the night at Hamilton Island fending off the buoy and creating ever more ingenious cradles of fenders and ropes as it repeatedly smashed into our soft fibreglass hull with thunderous booms. Every now and then the whole buoy vanished beneath the surface and scraped its way laboriously along the bottom of the hull before popping up on the other side and starting to bang there. Stupid thing. It is quite possible to hate an inanimate object.
We had a pleasant enough sail to Lindeman Island, and then some amusement trying to find an anchorage that would protect us from the SE wind and the persistent SW swell. Lucas’ cruising guide was a bit vague, with some clear inaccuracies on his chart, but we decided to try his recommended anchorage of Boat Point anyway.
Once there, we took the dinghy to shore and found a delightful little beach, very muddy but full of life – hermit crabs and snails underfoot, cockatoos and lorikeets above, scattered with attractive mangroves.
THE MUD FLATS AT BOAT POINT, LINDEMAN ISLAND
SOME OF THE WILDLIFE IS A LITTLE STRANGE
A National Parks trail clearly led around the island, and although we didn’t have time right then – the tide was coming in and the dinghy was quite far out on the mud flats – we thought that it would be great to come back here later in the week.
FETCH THE DINGHY, WOMAN, AND BE QUICK ABOUT IT
PINDIMARA SUNSET
The anchor set well and the land gave us protection from the wind, but the SW swell continued to roll in and throw us around. It wasn’t very pleasant. We took to sleeping crosswise across the cabin, which was much more comfortable but not ideal as there is only just enough width.
Early next morning we motored round to the other side of the island to try to get out of the swell. We found a suitable bay to eat breakfast – toasted bagels and cream cheese, fresh avocados – but the sea was still disturbed even though not overtly swelly. Some of this was likely attributable to the 20+ knot winds.
We bade a leisurely goodbye to Mackay Outer Harbour, and ran gently up the coast before a light breeze. It was a beautiful day and a relaxing cruise in a turquoise millpond sea.
At one point we saw a big old turtle, drifting backwards in the current, his shell completely invisible under a waving portable reef. Bronwyn saw another snake. An enormous eagle flew out from a wooded island to see if we were edible. And those were the day’s excitements. Very serene.
THE TURTLE JUST AFTER WE STARTLED IT
We had planned a route that would take us through three island groups, all with suitable anchorages. We just kept going to see how far the wind would take us, with Harriet steering and the human crew lounging around on deck reading books.
We got as far as the Sir James Smith Group, where the cartography is delightful. Rather than the usual dull names that litter Australian charts (Black Rock, Flat Island), some unsung hero had waxed lyrical on the theme of “Smith”. Thus Goldsmith Island is flanked by the Ingot Islets, Specie Shoal, and Bullion Reef. Similarly, Blacksmith Island is accompanied by Hammer, Bellows, Forge, Pincer and Anvil Islands. Off to the south of Tinsmith Island is an islet with the name of Solder. And so on. Very cute.
SERENITY
There were only two other yachts in the main anchorage at Goldsmith Island, but there was a lot of reef lurking beneath the surface and it was hard to see if there was enough swinging room. In any case we couldn’t get our anchor to bite, so we moved around to the north west and got it down in the next cove up. We’d had sou’westers all day, and it was now blowing from the north east, but since the two arms of the cove had both of these directions covered, we thought that we’d be fine.
ALL PACKED AWAY. HOW ABOUT A SUNDOWNER?
It was quite comfortable until the middle of the night when we mysteriously got a developed swell coming in from the north west, broadside on and very uncomfortable. Shortly after dawn it got noticeably worse and the wind start to howl in the rigging, so not even stopping for coffee we quickly upped anchor and went back to the shelter of the first anchorage, where the anchor bit first time. While we were manoeuvring about, the depth sounder showed some very deep holes in the sea bed, which may have accounted for our problems on the previous night.
As we poured the coffee, a sou’easter blew up at close to 20 knots and dark storm clouds rolled in overhead. There was no internet reception, but I plugged in the satphone and got a forecast for 20-30 knots and rough seas. We changed our mind about exploring the island by dinghy and made breakfast instead.
We popped in to Mackay on the mainland to provision for our upcoming sojourn in the Whitsunday Group. The harbour is completely artificial and there isn’t anywhere to anchor, so we reluctantly rented a berth at the marina.
It has to be said that the marina is excellent. It is not unreasonably priced, and is clean and secure. It is handy for a selection of waterside restaurants and a pub, and there is a bus service into town for shopping.
After a welcome shower to rinse the thick layer of salt out of our dreadlocks, we checked out the restaurants. After some weeks of cruising, most of out fresh supplies had run out and we urgently felt the need for fresh food. There were a number of restaurants in different styles from cafe to pub steak to haute cuisine, but since all the prices were the same – $30 a main – we plumped for the best, the very highly recommended Latitude 21 restaurant underneath the Clarion Hotel. The food was excellent, the service was superb, the ambience was just what we needed to ease us back into civilisation.
We had lost track of the days, and anyway had forgotten that there are things like Sundays when the shops aren’t open, so the next morning we found ourselves on the sabbath with a day to kill. We spent most of it catching up on paperwork and then headed off to the Sails pub, where we had a very good time, met a number of interesting people, drank far too much and ate far too little.
Shopping in Mackay was a bit of a shock. It was the school holidays, and the mall was packed. Who’d have thought that there were so many people in the world? Still, nursing our hangovers over fruit juice and coffee, it gave us a chance to see what the burghers of Mackay are like, and the word that sprang to mind was: prosperous. It’s a good looking and manicured town full of good looking and manicured people. From the bus we also notice that there were a lot of infrastructure projects in full flow, so business seems to be booming. Certainly there were a great many bulk carriers outside the port waiting to get in.
PARK YOUR TANKER, SIR?
The supermarket was a real eye-opener. After the rather sad and wilted selection of fruit and vegetables at the Woolworths in Gladstone, the Mackay branch of the same store presented us with a stunning array of beautiful fresh produce. It was hard to stop ourselves from filling our trolley with more than we have room for.
We’re now provisioned up, watered up, and stuffed to the gunwales with fresh meat, fruit and vegetables. We’ve had a brief fix of night life, and even managed to hose some of the salt off the decks. Tomorrow morning we’ll refuel, and then it’s back out to sea.
We were anchored in Whites Bay, Middle Island of the Percy Isles, hiding from a surprisingly strong nor’wester. The forecast was for another change, this time from the south, blowing a healthy 15 knots directly into Whites Bay some time between 22:00 and 04:00. The dual attraction of a decent sailing wind and getting out of the bay before the swell started, saw us going to bed early with the intention of leaving as soon as the southerly change came through.
The change woke me at 03:30, and seemed to contain rather more wind than forecast, up to 20 knots inside the protection of the bay. Still, the developing swell was rapidly making it too choppy to sleep so we decided to stick to the plan. After a quick breakfast on deck to acclimatise our eyes to the darkness, we motored out of the pack of sleeping yachts and into the Percy Islands tidal race which was, for once, running with us rather than against us.
The southerly wind was working against the incoming tide to build some pretty big waves, and we had a bouncy time getting out of the group. Once out into the open sea, the wind ramped up to over 30 knots, officially gale force. With triple-reefed main and our cruising jib, we soon found ourselves creaming along at over 9 knots. The log records a maximum speed of 9.54, the fastest that we have ever gone.
Since we were moving in a straight line, we thought that we may as well throw the trolling line over the stern. This line has a long history. Several months ago, Bronwyn decided that she wanted to learn how to catch fish, and we made a deal that if she can get one on board, then I’ll kill, clean and fillet it. Since then she has been chatting up fishermen and pestering tackle shop owners in an effort to find out the easiest way of catching our supper. It was surprisingly difficult to get a straight answer. Most of them said “Ah, you just throw a line over the back and you’ll catch something. No worries”, but when you actually tried to pin them down for some specific advice, such as “What line? Which lure? How deep?” they would often as not change the subject or offer wildly divergent advice.
My theory is that since it is regarded as quintessentially Australian to be born with a fishing rod in one hand and a barbecue spatula in the other, it is not manly to admit that you’ve never done either one or the other. Certainly when I announce that I have never fished in my life, I attract pitying stares and an embarrassed shuffling of feet. Much better for a woman to do the asking.
Bronwyn did eventually manage to find a couple of guys who seemed to know what they were talking about, and by May had put together a dream kit of all the tools necessary to catch, land, and process a small tuna. Since then we’ve tossed the gear over the back whenever we thought about it, but never got a sniff of interest.
Back to the story. There we were, screaming along in excess of seven knots in gale force winds, alternately burying first the gunwales and then the bow into mountainous swell. Naturally this was the moment that I glanced back into our foaming wake and saw a large fish tail-walking at the end of our line.
We had repeatedly memorised all the necessary steps for landing our first fish. After making sure that the hook is firmly set, we were supposed to stop the boat. Yeah, right. The obvious solution was to heave-to, but in these conditions this simply meant that we were making six knots backwards instead of nine knots forwards. Still, the important thing was that while hove-to we could forget about steering for a while and concentrate on the fish.
With four pairs of hands we managed to land a rather spectacular Spanish Mackerel, some two thirds of a metre long and weighing about seven kilos. We were quite impressed!
BRONWYN’S FIRST FISH
Now we had to quickly regain control of the boat before we ended up back in the Percy Isles; in the excitement we had gone backwards for over four miles. Back on our beam reach, we shared our bucking and heavily slanted cockpit with a washing-up bowl full of salt water and a very large and slippery dead mackerel. By the time we reached the Guardfish Cluster, our feet were soaking wet with a lingering fishy smell, but our mackerel was intact and, thanks to a swaddling tea-towel, relatively cool.
As we approached the first turn inside the Cluster proper, I again glanced out of the stern and spotted a young humpback whale practising a series of launches out of our wake. Beautiful.
Once we were safely anchored between the drying shoal and the rocky reef, I hauled out our shiny new filleting knife and reduced the mackerel to four enormous fillets.
SPANISH MACKEREL FILLET
Three went in the fridge, and the fourth we had for lunch, gently heated in a little olive oil. It was sweet, succulent, and absolutely delicious.
We had intended to move on from South Percy Island the next day, but the forecast was for a light nor’wester and our route was to the north west. Tacking for hours into a light wind held no attraction, and we didn’t really have enough fuel to spare to motor it, so we decided to stay another night at South Percy. With only light winds for the previous few days, I had become a bit complacent about the weather. Although I knew that the nor’wester would blow right into our little bay, I just assumed that it would maintain the same negligible wind speed that we had become used to, and in this assumption I was supported by the GRIB file that I had downloaded (via satphone: no internet out here) that showed a predicted wind strength of a barely perceptible 3 knots.
As the evening wore on, the nor’wester began to blow a good 10-15 knots and brought with it an uncomfortable swell. By the middle of the night we were being thrashed around as Pindimara bucked like a bronco, being held side-on by the tide to an ever-fiercer north westerly swell.
We decided to wait til dawn and then run for cover in Whites Bay, a SE-facing shelter under nearby Middle Percy Island. In fact I was up well before dawn, washing up and generally tidying away, so that by the time it was light enough to see, we were ready to go. The sideways swell was getting really rough, and it wasn’t possible to stand upright without hanging on.
Whites Bay was only a few miles to the north, and we could see that there was a single yacht already at anchor there. When we were about half way across, a whole stream of yachts appeared around the south western corner of the island, all heading in our direction. We guessed that they had been caught out by the wind change while anchored on the western side of the island, which is the usual tourist destination because of the world famous “A-Frame” cruisers’ meeting place on the shore. This was later confirmed by Jace on Eveready who said that there had been a bit of a sundowner at the A-Frame the previous night, and by the time they’d all got back to their boats, the wind had already changed and nobody felt up to moving on.
VIEW TOWARD SOUTH PERCY FROM MIDDLE ISLAND
Once we had all anchored, Bronwyn and I went over to the shore for a walk. There was a dune which I inevitably climbed, and which proved to have an interesting crust a few metres from the top where the steep surface had been hardened to the consistency of concrete before being lightly sprinkled with fresh sand. Very slippery.
IT’S A LONG WAY DOWN
We didn’t explore very far into the island, though, because we intended to go to bed early and leave in the middle of the night.
There were two other yachts close in to North West Bay on South Percy Island, but we anchored farther out in our usual 10 metres, which put us a good half a kilometre off but still out of the tidal race that runs between South Percy and nearby Middle Island to the north. After a meal and a rest, we chucked the tender over the side to go take a look at the beach. We considered rowing, but were aware of the three knot tidal rip and invisible reefs, so we clamped on the outboard instead.
We spent a pleasant afternoon pottering about on the beach, after which Bronwyn sat down and sunned herself while I clambered about on the rocks and erosion gullies behind the tide line.
BEACH BABE
ROCK DUDE
BEACH DUDE
“INTERESTING” EROSION GULLY
Over breakfast next morning, we noticed the other two boats sailing out of the bay. It was only when Bronwyn said “Great! Now we have an island of our own!” that I realised that this was what I had been waiting for. Great Keppel had been nice, and I had been expecting to make use of the extensive hiking trails around it, but when it came down to it I’d been happy that we had gone snorkelling instead. Now we had the whole of South Percy Island to ourselves, and I had seen on my brief expedition the day before that there were no trails or paths at all. Perfect for exploring!
We packed some vittals and took the tender over to the headland. We landed on a different beach which showed a few footprints and signs of human passage. Behind it was a pebbled gully full of flotsam, mainly timber and empty coconuts that must have floated in from Polynesian or Indonesian vessels, although there was an interesting pile of pumice on the high tide line.
Above the gully, though, the green hills beckoned. I started the long climb to the top, and found it hard going. The tufty grass was ankle deep and crunchy, hiding rocky voids and small clumps of prickly pear cactus. This was excellent news, as it seemed to me pretty unlikely that most people would persevere, and I could continue my daydream of exploring a deserted tropical island.
PRICKLES
OUR ISLAND
As is the way with these things, the top revealed another higher peak beyond, and then a third one. From there, though, I had a great view of the surrounding ocean and islands, and of the bay far below where Pindimara sat patiently at anchor.
OUR HOME
There were no trails or any other signs of human activity. I jumped up and down and waved to the little dot of Bronwyn far below, who years ago decided that I am a loony and best left alone in the presence of climbable peaks.
Later that day we decided to explore North West Beach, which looks like a great anchorage on the chart but which is described as having a difficult-to-see reef line. We went at low tide, in the tender. The tides here are four metres, and so at that time of day we could clearly see parts of the reef that you would normally only see when snorkelling or scuba diving. It was a curious feeling to be first motoring, then rowing, and finally walking along towing the dinghy through gardens of soft coral scattered with small fish and giant clams. I had to be very careful not to put my foot on anything that might get damaged, but it was an amazing experience.
YOUR CARRIAGE, MA’AM?
O SOLE MIO
As the tide comes in over a reef, fish that have been hiding in rock pools or beneath the sand emerge and head out into deep water. We saw a few schools of fish milling around in the shallows waiting for their opportunity, and then suddenly realised that we were wading through the school of sharks that were waiting for them. We’re still not sure what species they were, but they were a metre long, brown with orange black-tipped dorsal fins, and very wide. They obviously detected that we were much bigger than them because they stayed at least five metres away, but it was still a weird experience to be paddling through a school of big and clearly very hungry sharks.
Before we left Great Keppel, Sue and Steve showed up on Tenacious D. Sue and Steve were not only our neighbours when we were preparing for our voyage back at Gibson Marina, but they were also the only long term cruisers that we really knew, and as well as being lots of fun they did a grand job of putting up with all our stupid questions during our final months of preparation. It was great to catch up. We had a bit of a yarn over a pancake breakfast and then they had a lunch date on another boat, so we hoiked up the anchor and set off to the north.
We had a long way to go, and there was very little wind forecast, but we managed to bravely leave under sail. It may have been slow, but it was peaceful. We noticed that the water was sparkling, and dipped a bucket in to see the diatoms and flagellates swimming about. We followed a lunch of chilli tuna salad on freshly baked bread with a small bottle of champagne and some lime jelly.
LIFE’S PRETTY GOOD
As the sun set prettily over the Queensland hills, we heard the dull thump of army munitions. This whole coastline is sometimes taken over for army training, and we’d heard on the grapevine that they were using it today. This meant that our intended half-way anchorage at Port Clinton was out of the question, so we were intending to travel all night to the Percy Islands.
The military zone extends quite far out to sea, so we had to arrange our course to avoid it. Pretty soon the wind died completely, and we spent the rest of the night chugging up the military boundary line under motor. Given the forecast, we felt pretty lucky to have had the sails up for as long as we did.
Bronwyn went below and I stood the first watch. Since there was very little swell, steering was pretty easy even though we were motoring, and I found that with the aid of a head torch I could steer and read a novel at the same time. The watch passed pleasantly swiftly, punctuated by the occasional yellow star shell drifting over from the military manoeuvres on shore.
Bronwyn took over from the small wee ones until pre-dawn. A sea fog threatened to roll in from the east, but it was low on the water and left the sparkling stars bright and clear above. Thankfully the fog never developed.
I was back at the helm just before dawn, which revealed another clear blue sky but still no wind. South Percy Island was in sight all morning. Most cruisers visit Middle Island rather than South, but after staring at it for so many hours we thought we decided that rather than simply steering around it, we would stop for the night.
There was quite a lot of debris in the sea, tree trunks and large branches, as well as a substantial quantity of what seemed to be an orange algal bloom. Half way up the eastern coast, and over a mile from shore, we encountered a large yellow snake swimming by. It was a metre long and looked a lot like a python rather than a sea snake, and had tied the end of its tail up in a knot, presumably for buoyancy or for balance. It stopped and regarded us with interest when we slowed and did a circuit around it, and then began once more swimming strongly out to sea. We wondered how it could see where it was going, with its head that close to the water.
JUST PASSING BY
At half past two in the afternoon, we dropped anchor in a delightful sandy bay in the north eastern corner of South Percy Island.
As the sun rose above the loading docks, we slipped quietly out of Gladstone. There are three routes out of Gladstone Harbour. The main shipping channel to the south – the way that we had come in – would be quite a dogleg for a northerly trip. The Narrows is a shortcut direct to our destination of Keppel Bay, but is dominated by a six mile drying stretch called the Cattle Crossing and you have to be absolutely sure that not only will the tide give you enough depth to get through, but that you have enough power to fight the tide all the way to the other side before the water disappears again. We chose the Northern Passage, a middle way, saving us about 20 miles on the shipping channel but with only a short drying area right by the bar.
Since the drying area is at the far end of the channel, we had to time our trip up to cross the bar at high tide. This meant that we were fighting the incoming tide all the way, but luckily it was only running at a knot or two. We were motoring up at about half tide, which was just enough to cover the sand banks and reefs. We had the somewhat surreal experience of navigating up thin unmarked winding channels that we could see on the chart, but to the naked eye we were zigzagging meaninglessly across an apparently unobstructed lake of unbroken water.
Bronwyn was steering, I was navigating down below.
“Thank goodness for GPS” I thought as we approached a particularly thin section. Just then, something crashed and we lost all our navigation systems. Great. I called course headings up to Bronwyn from memory while frantically changing batteries in the GPS and rebooting both computers, one as backup in case the main one didn’t recover. Everything came back online just as we needed to do a sharp turn to avoid another invisible sand bar. The computers behaved from then on but, thankfully, we had now entered a marked ferry channel and the leading lights took us between a couple more reefs and out into the open sea.
We were free! We grinned like maniacs and rushed to put the sails up. Gladstone wasn’t a bad place, but it had hung over us like a black cloud because we were forced to stay there. The freedom that we’d started to take for granted had disappeared, and the lack chafed our souls.
No matter. We’d done what needed to be done, and now we were on the move again.
It was one of those perfect sailing days. We were close hauled and flying along at 6-7 knots, but the sea was calm and smooth and so it wasn’t uncomfortable at all, just pure fun. We chose to steer manually all the way.
We could take advantage of the NW winds all the way up the coast, but we knew that the final westward section toward Great Keppel Island was going to be a long hard beat into wind. Halfway through the day I fired up the computer and downloaded the GRIB files for the next three days. Technology to the rescue! GRIB files are meteorological data that can be overlain onto a suitable digital map. In this case, they showed that at about four in the afternoon we could expect a westerly change, and then another one to the south-west in the evening. This was perfect! It meant that rather than taking lots of time to tack back and forth, we could just gently curve around with the wind until we arrived.
And that was exactly how it happened. After 13 hours and 58.6 miles (an average 4.5 knots, much of the latter part against an evil 1.5 knot current, so the boat was really travelling much faster than that) we dropped anchor under the Milky Way and a crescent Moon, next to Second Beach on Great Keppel Island.
After a restful sleep – how wonderful to feel the boat rocking beneath us again! – I stood on deck under the rising sun and marvelled at the blue sea, the blue sky, and the peaks, beaches and islands scattered around us. What a beautiful spot.
We had intended to spend the next day hiking over the island, but first I had to repair the electric anchor winch which had given out the night before. I quickly traced the fault to a lazy wiring job at the sharp end; I mean, if you were a marine engineer installing a wiring connection at the end of the boat that spends a lot of time immersed in sea water, wouldn’t you try to waterproof it a little? Apparently not. Luckily I had my trusty gas-powered soldering iron and spliced in a new section.
DANGER. ELECTRICIAN AT WORK
Standing on the bow, we realised that the water was so clear that we could see the anchor. This reminded us that we hadn’t been swimming in ever such a long time, so we decided to snorkel over the reef at the end of the nearby beach instead of going for a hike.
Since we’d arrived at night, we had anchored a prudent distance from the invisible shore, and daylight revealed that we were a good 600 metres out. We donned masks and fins and set off. Half way there, Bronwyn got stung in the face by a jellyfish, but after that things started to look up.
At one end of the beach is a secluded clearing marked by a rather bizarre sculpture consisting of forty or more beach-combed floats and buoys suspended with string from a large tree. Next to it is an unusual swing and an enormous hammock fashioned from a fishing net. We spent some time lazing in the hammock in the sun, chatting idly about this and that, before putting on our fins and splashing out to the reef.
It was less a reef and more a collection of rocks fallen from the island, but it was home to as relaxed and varied collection of fish as you would find on a scuba dive. We spent a happy few hours paddling around before beginning the long swim back to Pindimara. Just as we set off, we were passed by a shoal of pike barracuda each almost a metre long. Spectacular.
The tourist board brochure claims that “Gladstone is a gourmet paradise…creating flavours you will remember long after your holiday”. We are not convinced. Apart from pub food (with an honourable mention to the Queens Hotel Steak House – see previous blog entry), and a scattering of rather second rate cafes, there are only a handful of real restaurants in town, and most of those are boarded up with ‘for sale’ signs on them. The list of ‘restaurants’ in that same tourist brochure even includes the McDonalds… and mysteriously fails to mention the one diamond in the rough, the stunningly good Rock Salt in Roseberry Street. When we showed up without a reservation on a weekday evening the place was packed, although they were perfectly happy to light up a gas heater and let us sit outside on the patio. The service was cheerful, the wine list and prices acceptable, and the food very good indeed. We’re counting our pennies to see if we can justify another visit before we leave.
We found a self-guided pamphlet tour of the town, which was only two kilometres long and took in all the historical attractions. Unfortunately, most of it reminded us of a similar tour that we once did in Shanghai, where we would find ourselves looking at a car park and admiring a small plinth stating “Here stands the former site of the former Korean embassy”. The main highlight is the climb of 111 steps alongside the Rotary Club artificial waterfall to the top of Auckland Hill (“Spectacular… multicoloured vistas of the city… magnificently preserved buildings from times gone by”), from which vantage point you get a good view of the mineral loader, the coal loader, the power station, both bauxite refineries and the smelter.
GRAIN SILOS FUEL AND HYDROXIDE
This encouraged us to take a number of the free ‘Industry Tours’, in which we were ferried every day by bus to a different plant site. The Queensland Alumina refinery was an interesting nest of pipework
