Sailing around Australia; Straight across the Strait

9^th 3 2015 Straight across the Strait

It’s fair to say that our sailing around Australia adventure aboard Easy Tiger has not been without a degree of anxiety and apprehension. For example the apprehension caused by knowing that the next step was across the Great Australian Bight, was measurable, when we were in Esperance WA. That was when we were sailing with two other boats.

Over our last week in Portland, we have had another “elephant in the room”. Our next leg or stage would be sailing through Bass Strait, alone. I say it was an elephant in the room, because we new it was next up, but neither Leanne nor I really brought it up for discussion.

I suppose another reason we hadn’t discussed our anxiety at sailing across Bass Strait, was that we had planned do it in as many “hops” as possible. That is we would go from Portland to Port Fairy, then to Apollo Bay then into Port Phillip bay, Across to Western Port then around Wilsons Promontory to Refuge cove and the to Lakes Entrance.

Each of these was a day trip. Each of these would also mean waiting at each location for the next weather window. Weather windows are about a week apart, so that could mean that our Bass Strait crossing would take about 5 or so weeks.

After hearing that Stephen and Sharon Bone on their boat Shiraz were going straight across the strait, the possibility of being in the Gippsland lakes in a few days instead of a few weeks was too hard to resist and to do it with good company, would be the icing on the cake for us. We have a rule that say we don't do overnight passages unless absolutely necessary. We threw our rule book out the window and decided to go for it.

A last check of the weather conditions on Friday evening for the next few days made us all catch our breath. Bass Strait is known for storm cells that conjure up very strong winds and big seas without warning. The latest weather report on Friday, for the weekend, was for big seas and winds of up to 30 knots. The only thing that didn’t stopped our plan right then and there is that all this would be behind us pushing us across the strait in good time. In fact, if we could average 2 more knots than usual it would cut at least 10 hours off the journey.

It was decided that another briefing with Shiraz would be held at 6.00am to do a final weather inspection. The morning revealed calm and gloomy conditions with very little of the predicted wind.

Optimistically, we hoisted our sails to the first reef and turned Easy Tiger eastwards. The anxiety and apprehension reached their peak as we rounded out of the breakwater, expecting t o be greeted by 4 metre high waves and swell.

Normally we would be disappointed with an inaccurate weather forecast. Saturday was, however, the exception. The forecast was for 25 knots plus. We found only a perfect breeze of around 12 knots that pushed Easy Tiger along nicely at our projected speed of 6knots, for most of the day. The forecast 4 metre seas didn’t eventuate either. We had about 2 metres behind us that gave us a regular “skate” of about 2 more knots for a few seconds as we surfed the following seas.

As night fell, the wind dropped out and one motor was brought to life. At around midnight as we were rounding Cape Otway, Shiraz called up to say that due to problems with their auto pilot, they would head for Western Port. That left us on our own.

Day break found us with little or no wind, tonking along on one motor. This was way behind our predicted speed and was adding hours to the time we would take for the journey.

At mid morning Sunday, the half way point between Cape Otway and Wilsons Promontory, the wind was kind enough to give us a delightful four hours sailing with our MPS (the V8) sail out. But we were still way behind on our forecast speed. We did not want to spend another night out alone in Bass Strait, but it was looking like that was to be.

As our second night out fell, we were very excited to be rounding Wilson Promontory the south eastern most part of the Australian mainland. This would mean that after 18 months and more than 2000nm Easy Tiger finally gets to turn north.

To get “round the bend” I had planned a route along the mainland side of the shipping channel. This was actually the east to west side of the shipping channel, we were going west to east.

I was thinking to myself that afternoon that it seemed very quiet shipping wise, we hadn’t seen a ship all afternoon. It looked like we would get away with sneaking along the edge of the channel without the excitement of an oncoming ship. Wrong!

As the laws of sailing say, we approached the narrowest part of the shipping channel right on nightfall. We would be squeezing past some rocks in about 1 hour. This was when the AIS system alerted us to the oncoming ships. Yes, Ships! 4 of them, including a cruise ship travelling at 18knots. I couldn’t turn out of there way as we would hit the rocks. We just had to hope that Shcitano, the Costa Concordia captain wasn’t at the the helm and wanting to have a close look at the island we were passing.

The AIS also gives really good information on ships passing by. The Proud Seas for example is 1000feet long, 120 feet wide and draws 9 metres of water. This is very useful information when the Proud Seas is motoring at 13knots straight towards you on a dark moonless night and your only direction of evasion contains a 90 metre high rock island.

Fortunately we managed to keep our course and the ships passed on the other side of the island.

We were so relieved that it was all over as we anchored in Refuge cove, on the eastern side of Wilsons Promontory at 1.30 am on Monday morning, finishing our journey of 240nm in just over 41 hours of non stop express motor sailing straight across "the strait".

Wilsons Promontory off in the distance, but I had to take a photo while it was still light.

Our chart plotter as we rounded, The black boat shape is us, the grey triangles are ships. The yellow brown bits are islands, the red crosses are our path and the green line is the current course we are steering.