Sailing Around Australia; Adventure and Anxiety

12/1/2014 Location; On a swing mooring at Hopetoun Western Australia

We are now two months into our sailing around Australia adventure. As I reflect on the last 2 months, 2 words keep coming into my mind. Adventure and Anxiety.

According to the oxford dictionary, the word adventure means “to engage in daring or risky activity”. The result of carrying out daring or risky activity is anxiety that the dictionary says is “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome”.

For the past 2 months, or really for the past twelve months as we prepared for this journey, we have had big doses of adventure and anxiety.

Leaving Quindalup, to sail around Cape Naturaliste and then Cape Leeuwin, knowing that we would have no landfall until Albany 2 days later was definitely “carrying out a daring or risky activity”. Our friends Neil and Jan on their boat Annie had tried this passage just a few days prior to us and were turned back by huge seas, strong winds and damage to their boat. Their experience in itself served to dramatically heighten the worry, nervousness, un-ease and had an uncertain outcome for us.

For Leanne and myself, every day so far has been a good mixture of each. I thought that the passages (when we travel from one place to the next) would be the most anxious times and when we were anchored the adventure would be in exploring the places we have stopped at, such as Hopetoun.

In fact it has been nearly the reverse. The passages have been an adventure, as we try to get the best performance out of the boat within the given conditions. Of course three boats going in a line to the same destination basically constitutes a race. On several of our passages that has been quite exciting as we converge on the anchorage from different directions depending on our navigation techniques and different boat performance characterisitics.

Conversely, our time on anchor in strange bays, surrounded by reef, very close to the beach while sitting out 30 to 40 knot wind gusts has been times where anxiety has kicked in for me.

At Bremer Bay one of 2 anchor bridle shackles that attach the boat to the anchor chain (so pretty important) came off and left us swinging on one side. Then sea small swivel shackle came off the dinghy lift cable. When that one came undone it resulted in our dinghy floating away. Luckily, the “b’s” were on alert and carried out an impeccable dinghy rescue routine. Thank goodness they had practiced that at Two Peoples Bay when we didn’t really need it.

Today we are battened down in the small anchorage at Hopetoun, the wind is blowing across our bows at nearly 30 knots. The gusts sound like a freight train passing by the window and it is blowing in a direct line towards a rocky shore. This has been a normal pattern for the few days here in Hopetoun. At least we get to adventure in the morning and then anxiously wait out the wind in the afternoon and evenings.

On a more positive note is that we have become very good students of the weather and are yet to suffer any surprises in that department. This means we know what to expect and can prepare accordingly. So this morning we got up bright and early, walked around to the next bay and had a swim. We still had time to walk back, sit on the beach watching the locals for a while and then share morning tea with Brian and Eva on Zofia.

Now we are back on our boat, battened down and will be doing “indoor sports” as the wind turns from morning zephyr into afternoon raging beast.

There is a wind direction change forecast for tomorrow, so we will use that to carry us to Esperance.

I am now anxious about the next anchorage that we have heard many a horror story about, but I am really looking forward to the adventure of the 20 hour sail we need to do to get there.

In the mean time I ‘m reminding myself that without the anxiety it wouldn’t be an adventure and that the adventure is producing anxiety.