Geraldton to Brisbane 8 American River, Robe and on to Sorrento (Melbourne)
As usual apologies for the spelling, inconsistent timeline and general randomness. Where is one’s subeditor when you need her!
This is not the official log. For any actual facts refer to the ships log - meticulously kept by the ship’s officers. At least you can get engine hours and fuel and water levels and other exciting details there.
Thursday 29/2/24
After wonderful dinner at Will and Cassie’s she came aboard after dinner ready for early departure from American River for Robe. The route 134nm about 23 hours at our nominal cruising speed.
We were discussing the pity that we had not been able to meet up with Cassie’s mother Annerbell Douglas Hill. Some discussion of her determination including being one of the first women to walk across Australia South to North in 1973. So, we did a search and were able to find the documentary of her trip. Feet Across Australia This is a truly amazing story. A couple of All’s ports and to bed for an early start.
We sail slowly around the point at Penneshaw. A rather different scale of boat is at anchor. The missing lifeboats ferrying people ashore.
We leave the island behind at Cape Willoughby. We get some periods of good winds but sadly we need to motor for most of the way. We estimate that some of the swells were up to 3m on smooth seas. Not a good combination as it turns out for Cassie’s Sea sickness. She can hear the dolphins though and she leaps up with enthusiasm whenever they are around. We went through a number of big pods maybe 20 odd around the boat. I did no good getting any photos or video unfortunately.
We have intermittent trouble with the auto pilot. Matthew and David had the manuals out and learned discussion with the manufacturer. Turning it off and on again did work but still every now and then it would start beeping and flashing but not steering again. Not a convincing fix. It was out for several hours, and it is surprisingly hard to steer the boat manually. Its direction does not appear to be stable. Get it a bit off line and it keeps going that way. Needs much more concentration than you would expect. They tell me that the trick is to pick something on the horizon to aim at and work to that. Not many features on the open ocean. It was light overcast and you could pick a low cloud, but they were very unreliable - they would just disappear in a few minutes. Much easier to do when sailing as the objective is to maintain the same angle to the wind. Then the wind fades and it is back to motoring.
Friday 1/3/24
We find our berth and tie up. All pretty keen to go ashore to find coffee and breakfast. Cassie especially as she had a pretty ordinary night with the seasickness notwithstanding the Kwells.
We walk for miles - well 3.5km to check out the Robe Town Brewery for potential dinner and a few beers later in the evening.
Every town it seems needs one of these boutique breweries. This one run by a young Latvian bloke. Much learned discussion of barley, malt and maltsters. Turns out that Matthew supplies much of the barley to the big commercial guys. This guy does not do his own malting for most of his brews. He is however working on something special. He has a mate that has a camel farm, and he has been looking for a way to add some camel to his offering. He is in the process of constructing a malting contrivance to fire with camel dung. He has done a trial batch. More on his subject later.
On the way back from the brewery, we come across another intriguing business. Transmutation. They repurpose various plastic items with a theme to upcycle rather than recycle. Amazing energy lots of excellent ideas and some great looking products.
Check out Robe. It has an interesting history with an initial boom. 15,000 Chinese came through here 1856 to avoid the Victorian landing tax and walked to the goldfields. It became a major port but then declined. Currently it looks as if there is plenty of new money circulating. Probably mostly tourism. Lots of flash new houses and many of the old ones restored.
Cassie is trying to find her way back to the island. Not as easy as it looks as buses run to Adelaide then you need to get another to Cape Jervis where the ferry leaves. Doable but frustrating. She lines up a lift with a bloke fishing at the end of our dock. Not ideal, but probably not an axe murderer. Turns out that a much better option comes along. We engage a couple, Bill and Pia passing by in conversation. As you do when lounging on the deck. They are travelling in a “power cat”. An impressive thing. No sails but big and equipped with big engines. They are heading for the island in the morning. The question asked “do you have room” for a passenger - answer yes. They cruise at 19knts apparently - the return trip about 7 hours. Will be interesting to get their story from Cassie when she reports in.
Their boat the PAMPANITO apparently named after a submarine of the same name USS Pampanito (SS-383/AGSS-383), a Balao-class submarine. On 15 September 1944, Pampanito moved back to the area of the original attack and found men clinging to makeshift rafts. As the sub moved closer, the men were heard to be shouting in English. Pampanito was able to pick up 73 British and Australian survivors. The father or grandfather of the bloke that built their boat was one of those men rescued. See Pampanito
Saturday 2/3/24
The rest of us declare a rest day. Apart from a walk into town for lunch we do “absolutely nothing”. Well mostly. I write up this diary and a bit of a cleaning frenzy breaks out. “You can’t take the hosing down out of a dairy farmer!”. Matthew obsessive with gumption on the rails. He is busy trying to buy defunct sandalwood land and water in Kununurra - well at least talk about it with Rob and Kim - could be “there dreaming”. Dave trying to polish the crazed plastic side windows. There is talk of hoisting Dave up the mast to clean off the last of the Geraldton red dust, but this is not on a rest day.
Light dinner after huge lunch.
Movie night. We watch The Big Steal Nadia Tass very corny but still very funny. Same people as did The Castle. With popcorn. Somehow though we have got to suggest to Matthew that the stove can be turned down a bit and take a little longer. Didn’t take long to clear the smoke from the cabin after we opened all the windows. Slow and patient are not concepts which one associates with Matthew. Not much popcorn left over though.
Sunday 3/3/24
Nice calm day but Windy has 4m swell coming through and building Monday and easterlies through till Tuesday. We stay put.
Shower at the Yacht Club facilities. Curiously located a fair way from the moorings. They evidently picked the spot around the headland for the view not the proximity.
Cleaning frenzy has broken out again. Might get Dave up in the boson’s chair but after a laundromat run. The nickers situation is desperate.
Watched Crackerjack the movie about bowls club in Melbourne. Very amusing. Popcorn much better tonight and no need to evacuate to clear the smoke!
Monday 4/3/24
Into town for groceries and new 9kg gas bottle. Dave purchased a little shopping trolley to carry the gas bottle. A bit precarious but back on board without trouble.
Did a longish walk around the coast to the east.
The owner / builder of our dock mate on our starboard side comes to his boat to do some work. He is invited on to our boat for a chat. We cover a lot of ground. His career as fisherman (mostly crays) and the construction of his boat. He says he worked on it for 11 years and got it in the water 2017. Its name is Obsession which is clearly a true statement. It is a bit bigger than ours but much more modern and “flasher”. He is a superb tradesman although he claims only to have been a fisherman. Fishing crays must have done him well. Even though he evidently did most of the work himself he suggested his budget was $660k but that it ran at least twice that. He invited us aboard and it was very clear that no expense had been spared.
A lot of discussion of fitting some wind generators as he had just about maxed out the available flat surfaces for fitting more solar panels. Need a fair bit of power to run all the appliances.
By the time our chat was over several hours had passed and I don’t think he ever got to those jobs.
Matthew spends a fair bit of the day plotting schemes with Nephew Kim. Think he is about to invoke the concept “Never underestimate the power of the unreasonable man.”.
Dave cooks up the 4-legged chicken (well two small chickens in the same bag - on special at Foodworks).
After dinner we watch Dave’s pick of movie - The Bucket List. Well worth a watch. Jack Nicholson,Morgan Freeman.
All to bed early as first light take-off with nominal destination Portland Bay but with fair expectation that we will just sail on if the conditions are OK.
This should take us about 24 hours 130mn - two days and a night.
Remind me to tell The One About the clock spring. Circa 1968.
Think I will run this post through to our next stop.
5/2/24
We see off out dock mates on the Discovery II. This is a monohull crewed by an older couple who we judge to be very experienced and serious walkers. Being a monohull “keeled” boat they draw much more water than us, so they need to head out of the marina on high tide to avoid touching bottom.
We head out at “first light”. Very calm seas and light winds. We attempt a spinnaker run but the wind fades away. Motoring for much of the day. Winds pick up in the evening and we do some comfortable sailing for many hours.
Turns out that we will pass Apollo Bay not long after dark. Fair bit of discussion about the benefits of a beer at the pub but we decide that we would arrive in the dark and need to leave in the dark - not much fun so we agree to sail on for Melbourne or at least Target Sorrento.
6/3/24
Not a lot to report from a couple of long days and longer nights. The only spectacular thing I missed was a large pod of dolphins swimming around the boat with spectacular bio-luminance - happened on Dave and Allen’s watch. We did see the bio-luminance though. The foam on the wake glowed brightly but very briefly. It was hard to distinguish from a bright moon on the foam but there was little moon. I think we sailed through a patch of sea that maybe had the upwelling nutrients. There was a slight smell. Possibly in the daytime we would have noted some greenness.
In the end we got about 24 hours of great sailing on very calm seas with enough wind to keep up a steady 5-7knots. We slowed down to 3-4 knots so that we entered the Bay on sunrise. Not much of a sunrise though as it was pretty overcast.
7/3/24
We sail into Port Phillip Bay early in the morning. Lots of traffic mostly huge and travelling much faster us. The Queen Elizabath cruise lines enters before us. A couple of other cruise liners and the Princess of Tasmania (The Tasmania ferry). Some interesting manoeuvres when a freighter exiting in front of us turns across our path to allow the pilot to disembark onto the pilot boat. Thankfully they radioed us to explain what they were doing and advise us to maintain our course and speed and that they would pass us “port to port”. Amazing to see a boat more than 100m long manoeuvre quickly in front of us.
Into town for breakfast and Coffee. Got to credit a couple of capuchino’s with keeping me awake to complete the narrative of this leg. The others got horizontal for a couple of hours to catch up on sleep.
Matthew and I do a “Durack walk” after breakfast. Beautiful coastal walk. We didn’t count on most of it being sand though so hard going.
Not sure how we will entertain ourselves here but we are booked into steak night at the Club. We plan to pick up another member of the crew. A cousin (18 years) of Dave’s from the UK. He is coming on board straight off the plane from London. Might liven us up. Plenty of Kwells on hand?
I will leave it here to cover the rest of our visit here in the 9th episode. We feel we are nearly home - back in the east. Or at least nearly - the Bass Straight not to be taken lightly. The waters around Wilsons Pyrometry we are told can be “confused” with unpredictable winds bouncing off the point. Only about 963nm to go. About 11 days sailing 24 hours a day. Won’t turn out like that we are getting there. We haven’t planned our next stop or start for that matter. Depends on the seas and winds!
I was planning to stop here but the night was yet young.
Allen back from a pummelling by the local massage therapist. He is suffering from something wrong with his shoulder after lifting Dave’s scuba air compressor kit.
Dave had booked us in to the Yacht Club for dinner after negotiating our mooring and relocating to a yacht club one - not the private one we first tied up to.
We had to test a number of beers to establish the correct one. Matthew making a philosophical point decided that he needed to order the most expensive thing on the menu. It was a for two 400gm angus steak medium rare. It turned out to be defiantly the best steak I had eaten since possibly Russel’s shout at The Rocks in Yeppoon. The point a bit hard to explain but to do with the Butchers Door concept that our meat products need to be more highly valued. There was a bit of a stuff up though as we had just bought another round of beers before we realised that the meal came with its own round of drinks. There was hardly room on the table for food amongst the glass. Allen was pretty satisfied with his dinner even though there were no onions. Dave on the other hand very scathing of his steak which he said was very good but was not the Wagyu with the marbling score claimed on the menu. Looked to me like a “too much information” problem. Publish a quantifiable number the MS (Marbling Score) on a menu and you are bound to be criticised. Much learned discussion of beef marketing and other minor problems of the world.
As a result of the drinks stuff up and having moved on to wine, the wobbling of the tables was not entirely the result of being at sea for a fair while. Somehow we got to chatting with a local couple. They insisted that we attend tomorrow’s lunch at the club to discuss “men’s issues”. Somehow, we agreed.
Other discussion was about the Couta Boats. Our mooring is surrounded by these boats. So far, our observations had concentrated mainly on the notably droopy forestay. Some thought that perhaps where were many cases of “Brewers Droop”.
Anyway, they have a history back to the 1920s when they were built to cross the bar for fishing expeditions. For the full story see Couta Boats
A very careful dingy ride back to the boat. Wearing the lifejacket didn’t look too silly under these conditions.
The movie for the night was the original Pink Panther. Still very funny but we thought some of the later ones perhaps better.
Now to move on.