Showing posts with label but. Show all posts
Showing posts with label but. Show all posts
Friday, May 12, 2017
Upwind to Cape Upstart but having a Whale of a Time
August 3, 2016
We were back to our routine of being up before the sun to prepare crew and boat for the day’s passage 55 nautical miles north where we planned to anchor in the shelter of Cape Upstart. The first task every morning is to check the latest weather. If it’s not right we can go back to bed. It showed winds of 15 -18 knots from the south west early but turning through south to blow from the south east by mid afternoon. All sailable aft of the beam so the bunk was not the option and we moved on with our prep.
Coffee and breakfast for the crew – Tick. Engine room checks – Tick. All loose items below secured – Tick. Hatches and port holes closed – Tick. Sail covers off and halyards attached – Tick. All electronics on and checked – Tick. Motor started, oil pressure and cooling water flow checked – Tick. Anchor up - Tick. Motor out of the passage into clear water and raise sails – tick. Steer the course and sail on downwind to our destination – FAIL!
 |
| Pre-dawn light in the Gloucester Passage |
With all the millions of dollars spent on weather forecasts you’d think they would be getting better at it by now but NOOOOOOOOOO! The wind was more west than anything. Not good when you want to go northwest. As soon as we came on course we found ourselves sailing to windward and bashing over lumpy seas. We told ourselves things would get better because the wind would swing around. WRONG! It hardly turned all day but what it did do was strengthen. By the time we passed by Bowen it was blowing 18-20 knots consistently. We had a second reef in the main when sailed by the Abbot Point coal loading facility with the wind now at 25 knots and rounding Cape Upstart was a bit spirited with over 30 knots howling around the points. The yacht in front of us actually turned around at that point and ran back towards Bowen.
 |
| We took a lot of green water over the bow. Let's hear it for our enclosed cockpit. |
So we definitely did not have the pleasant downwind sail we had planned and were very, very grateful for the enclosed cockpit on Our Dreamtime as wave after wave splashed green water over the boat. To her credit, our fantastic, full keeled Whitby 42 ketch handled the conditions in fine style. It was yet another great confidence builder for us seeing her plough through the seas never putting a foot wrong. You have to love these solid old girls.
OK so the sailing wasn’t fun today but the trip turned out to be AWESOME because we found ourselves in Humpback Whale central. Whales breaching in pairs off the starboard beam. Another pod crossing between us and the boat following causing the helmsman to take avoiding action. Look another pair breaching and tail slapping off the portside.
 |
| Whales breaching to starboard |
 |
| The skipper off this boat made a drastic turn to starboard to avoid a whale fender bender. |
 |
| These guys entertained us off the port side. |
 |
Then our biggest shock. Out of nowhere a massive whale surfaced right against our hull on the port side. It’s head was level with our centre cockpit as it stared at us through a huge black eye and let go a bellowing exhalation of whale breath from its blowhole. There would not have been a foot between our boat and this monster of the seas whose tail stretched back well beyond our stern. After scaring the hell out of us, it dipped below the surface and swam alongside clearly visible a few metres down. When it turned and went under the hull we held our breath waiting for a bump, bash or crash but it resurfaced just aft on the starboard side by which time we’d got over our initial fright and reached for a camera. He surfaced a couple of more times before disappearing into the deep.
 |
| Our close encounter whale surfacing off the stern after swimming under the boat. |
 |
| This massive whale surfaced so close alongside we could have stepped onto his back. |
We were now seriously on whale watch and found ourselves twice making significant alterations to course to avoid potential collisions. The law of the sea may require power to give way to sail but whales certainly don’t from our experience off Abbot Point.
 |
| The high cape shielded us from wind and waves briefly until rounding the point ahead. |
When we did make it through the gusting winds off Cape Upstart and sailed into Upstart Bay we planned to shelter on the Cape’s northern shore from what was supposed to be south easterly winds in the afternoon and through the night. What we found instead was the wind still coming from the south west at near twenty knots and blowing straight onto that shoreline. After looking at the charts we elected to furl sail away and motor straight into the wind to go deep into the bay and anchor as close to the low shoreline as possible. We felt this would provide us with the calmest anchorage possible in the circumstances.
 |
| Gloucester Passage to Upstart Bay - 55.1 Nautical Miles - 9 Hours 18 Minutes Average Speed 5.9 Knots - Max Speed 9.1 Knots |
The tide was just past the low so we knew we could close the shore until we found suitable minimum depth to safely anchor. The bay shoals so slowly that we anchored in just three metres of water but were still almost two nautical miles from the beach near Molongil Creek. However the sea state was quite reasonable and dropped out further to provide a fairly calm evening and the good night’s sleep we needed after our rock and rolling passage from Gloucester Passage.
 |
| Goodnight from Upstart Bay. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ We love to receive comments on our blog from readers. If you do leave a comment and you also have a blog, please leave a link as well. We'd like to click over for a visit and leave you a comment too. To stay right up to date with what we’re up to and see lots more photos check out and 'like' our Dreamtime Sail Facebook page at DreamtimeSail  If you have only recently discovered our blog and would like to read how it all started, or work through our previous adventures, click the link to go back to our first blog entry. Stuff it. Let's just go sailing anyway. We hope you enjoy reading the previous posts to catch up on our story. |
Thursday, April 6, 2017
Earliest Pacific Seafaring but no boats!
(Photo by Stephen Alvarez, from National Geographic, March 2008)
The current (March 2008) issue of National Geographic contains an intriguing article, Beyond the Blue Horizon, by Roff Smith, about the earliest colonizers of the Pacific. Many of us who have an interest in indigenous boats know something about the renowned navigational and seamanship skills of the Polynesians, and it's easy to picture boats not too much unlike the familiar Polynesian canoe doing the work of exploration and colonization a thousand or two years ago. According to the article, however, that wasn't necessarily the way it was.
As much as 30,000 years ago, the far western Pacific, covering New Guinea, Australia, and the Solomon Islands, had already been settled by peoples originating in Taiwan. There they stayed until 1300 BC or so, when a people now called the Lapita rather suddenly, and in very small but well-equipped groups, set out to intentionally colonize points east, island-hopping as far as Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, where they quickly wiped out a huge number of species but apparently lived comfortably for all that. The islands in this area are close enough to one another so that insightful mariners would have had a number of good clues that something existed not too far over the horizon, and this would have given them the confidence to set out on voyages of discovery. The whole wave of colonists numbered only a few thousand and, when spread across the hundreds and hundreds of islands that they colonized, population density never appeared to have been a problem or the incentive to keep moving. They left some very nice-looking pottery but, alas, no boat artifacts.
There the migration stopped for 1200 years or so, until the people whom we now know as the Polynesians once again moved east into Polynesia, ultimately going as far as Hawaii, Easter Island, and even South America (there is, according to the article, good evidence for this last). The islands in this region are much further separated from one another than in the western half, and voyages of discovery would have been much iffier propositions, fraught with far more danger and uncertainty. The driving mechanism of the migration is disputed. It could have been intentional wanderlust enabled by the confidence born of good seamanship and boats capable of tacking into the wind, or random dispersal caused by bad luck and an inability to avoid being blown to windward. No one knows what the boats were like, or whether they had rigs capable of tacking into the wind. The latter theory, however, seems weak, when one considers that every inhabitable island throughout the eastern Pacific was in time inhabited. It's hard to credit the notion that every island population was the result of an unplanned "voyage" by some hapless couple (and there must have been both genders aboard, not just a single fisherman) who just managed to survive and make landfall after weeks or months of aimless drifting.
Unfortunately, virtually nothing is know of the boats used by either the Lapita or these early Polynesians -- not a single scrap of a boat artifact has been recovered from the former, and literally just a few scraps of one boat from the latter -- not enough to reveal anything about the sailing rigs used. But unless one accepts the "random bad luck" theory, it would appear that as much as 3300 years ago, the ancestors of the Polynesians were already competent mariners with competent boats -- if only we could learn what they were like!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
