December 12, 2003
42°51'S 147°21'E
Hobart, Tasmania
Happy Holidays!
We’re finding it a bit difficult to believe the Christmas season has arrived. Temperatures in the seventies, fresh strawberries and corn on the cob in the supermarkets, and the smell of barbecues wafting out to the boat are hard to reconcile with Yuletide carols on the radio, green and red decorations downtown and the press of Christmas shoppers in all the stores. Last weekend, Santa Claus arrived in the marina – aboard a forty-foot powerboat. His fluffy suit, stocking cap and boots looked pretty uncomfortable in the summer heat! It may have been summer during our last two Christmases in Chile, but the snow on the mountain peaks and the near-freezing temperatures at night were more in keeping with what we’re used to when the holiday season comes along.
We’ve spent the last few weeks sailing around the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, hiking ashore, enjoying Hobart’s cafes and markets, and socializing with friends, both old and new. We’re even managing to become conversant in the local language, both Aussie English and its more specialized counterpart, what I call Taswegian. Australians refer to their country as “Oz” and themselves as “Aussies.” Tasmania is referred to as Tassie (Taz-ee) or GLI, which means “God’s Little Island.” The continent to the north is called “the big island.” The inhabitants of this island call themselves Taswegians (our Scottish friends will no doubt be wondering about the similarity to Glaswegians – we’ve yet to hear a satisfactory answer). One of the most original words we’ve heard only in Tasmania is “rigiditch” (no idea how it’s really spelled), which seems to mean authentic, as in, “Cool diamond. Is it rigiditch?”
The broader category of Australian lingo only begins with “Good d’y, mate.” “Beaut” means very good or first class and is a shortened form of “Beauty”, an exclamation of approval. You make tea in a “billy” and tea itself is the evening meal, which used to be a smaller meal than the big midday meal. A “bloke” is a guy or a fellow, while a “mate” is a friend. The “bush” is anywhere outside of the city, not just the still-wild outback. With respect to the weather, on a good day it “fines up” to a “top” of 22 degrees. To be “crook” is to feel sick and to be “chuffed” is to be really pleased and proud. “Dinkum” means to be real, true or honest, and “fair dinkum” said after an outrageous story means “this is no lie”. A “dunny” is a toilet, and here men don’t go “see a man about a dog,” rather they “spend a penny” or “kill a snake.” “Grouse” is the rough equivalent of “awesome,” and “extra grouse” is “totally awesome.” To be “knocked up” means to be tired and that you should take a “kip” or a nap. A “mob” is any group to which you don’t belong – that mob in the yacht club or the mob in Canberra. “Me mum” translates as “my mother.” If you strike it rich, or if you figure out how to remove that stubborn bolt so you can get on with the easy part of the job, then “you’ll be laughing.” To “shout” a drink is to buy a round. “Tucker” is a general word for food and you can have “beaut tucker” or “plenty tucker” or “not enough bloody tucker.” A “winge” is a long-winded whine or complaint. A “Limey” is a Brit, a “Yank” or “Yankee” is an American, and a “Kiwi” is a Kiwi – a person from New Zealand.
We could go on, but you get the idea.
Having mastered a bit of Aussie English, we plan to head for New Zealand next to try our hand at Kiwi. We’ll be staying here on God’s Little Island until the middle of March, then heading across the Tasman Sea. We will probably make landfall on the North Island in order to catch up with friends before they head back to the Pacific after cyclone season. We hope to spend an entire year in New Zealand, and while much of that time will be spent working on Hawk (Evans) and writing (Beth), we plan to see as much of both the North and South Islands as we can before heading across the Pacific in 2005.
For those of you with fast Internet connections, we’re including a Christmas photo of the two of us aboard Hawk in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel taken by our friend Dorothy Darden from their catamaran Adagio.
We hope that the holiday season finds you happy and healthy and enjoying this special time with friends and family. We continue to be Internet accessible, so please feel free to contact us at this address.
Peace and joy to you all,
Beth and Evans
November 6, 2003
42° 51'S 147° 21'E
Hobart, Tasmania
Greetings from Tassie!
We’re tied up at the Motor Yacht Club of Tasmania in a small suburb just to the north of Hobart, enjoying getting to know Steve and Dorothy Darden, e-mail friends whom we had been corresponding with for over eight years but never actually met, and their lovely 52-foot catamaran, Adagio. Over the last few days, Dorothy has been introducing us to Hobart, and we can already understand why most of the cruisers we know who make it to this remote corner of the globe never want to leave again. Hobart feels like San Francisco on a small scale, set on rolling hills with views of the water from a hundred vantage points and an easy artsy, slightly Bohemian ambience.
It took us just over five weeks to sail the 1,800 nautical miles from Fremantle. The toughest leg of the trip was the 180 miles from Cape Leeuwin to Albany along the south coast of Australia. We had rounded the Cape with a forecast for 8-10 knots of southeast wind, but found 20-25 knots right on the nose accompanied by a nasty 3-4 meter swell. If we’d been aboard Silk, we would have been sensible and turned back, taken shelter in a safe anchorage and waited for some westerly winds. But Hawk can make headway even in those conditions, and so we pounded away to windward for 36 hours, both of us seasick and miserable. We were very glad to get into Albany and get the anchor down, and that experience was enough to convince us that we wanted nothing to do with the Australian bight, where westerly winds become a rarity after October. Instead we decided to dive south, back to the Roaring Forties, and make our way directly to Tasmania with the wind where it belongs – over the stern!
We departed Albany a week later, but just a day out one of the batten cars on our mainsail blew up, damaging the mainsail track and putting the main out of commission. We debated options, but without the main our best course was downwind, which meant Tasmania. For the first five days the wind remained strong over the stern quarter, and we were able to average 175 miles a day under the trysail and jib. The last four days turned into a Southern Ocean sleigh ride as a 944-millibar low lying near 60 degrees South brought sustained gale-force winds and average wave heights of 15-20 feet. Hawk remained in control under the storm jib, though we did deploy the Galerider drogue for twelve hours when wind speeds reached 40-45 sustained and a few waves reached 40 feet. Not a survival storm, but one where we were well aware that we didn’t have room to make mistakes.
Nine days after we left Albany, Tasmania appeared on the horizon as a series of rugged, pewter-colored peaks hidden and revealed again by the torn curtains of gray trailing from the fast-moving squalls. Only when we had the land for perspective could we really measure the size of the swell driving us toward shore. With the island a full two hand spans above the sea, the swell regularly eclipsed it, reducing our horizon to the back of a single wave for several seconds at a time.
Port Davey and Bathurst Harbor, the area we were making for on the southwest corner of Tasmania, consists of a series of interlocked channels and lakes similar to a Scottish loch. Part of a national park that encompasses almost one-quarter of the island, it is completely uninhabited and reachable only by float plane, boat or on foot. The large outer harbor is open to the prevailing westerly swell, but a battered wedge of rock aptly named Breaksea Island protects the entrance to the inner loch. As we closed with this island and the pyramid shaped rocks to the south of it, the waves dashed themselves into huge green and white whirpools before surging upwards fifty feet or more in fearsome white pillars of spume to smother everything in foam and spindrift. We surged by within a hundred yards of the tip of Breaksea Island, and the roar of the waves crashing ashore pounded away in my throat like a jet engine. And then we passed into the swirling foam downwind of the breaking seas, beam on to what was left of the swell. A few hard rolls and then we were behind the island, totally in the lee. It was as if the huge swells rolling in had ceased to exist except for the bands of white spindrift covering the water’s surface.
We spent nine days exploring Bathurst Harbor before heading around Tasmania’s Southwest Cape (some view this as another ‘Great Cape’) to the D’Entrecasteaux Channel and Hobart. It is still early spring in the Roaring Forties, so there have been gale warnings for that stretch of coastline every day since we arrived. We managed to come around in a bit of a lull, and then had a magical day sailing sixty miles up the protected waters of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel to the lovely city of Hobart. We’re back in the land of Internet, so please feel free to get in touch – we’d love to hear from you!
Fair winds,
Beth and Evans
September 23, 2003
32 degrees 04 minutes South 115 degrees 45 minutes East
Fremantle, West Australia
Hello everyone –
We’ve been a long time out of touch, hibernating through the Southern winter. It took Evans three months after our arrival here in Fremantle to attend to the list of repairs and maintenance that had accumulated over four years and 35,000 nautical miles of high latitude cruising. HAWK now has a new, leak proof hatch over the sail locker, safety glass (in place of Lexan) in the windows along the coach house, renewed non-skid on the decks, a new engine panel, refurbished sails, new running rigging, new bottom paint and on and on. I spent much of my time here beginning work on a revision of “The Voyager’s Handbook” which will be out in the fall of 2005. We also managed to see a tiny fraction of this huge country with visits to the areas north and south of Perth and ten days in Sydney.
When we arrived at Cairns aboard SILK in 1994, we had our share of preconceptions about Australia, many of which proved true but not universally. We had pictured dirt roads passable only with four-wheel drive vehicles running through dusty deserts, and arrived to find rainforest and sugarcane plantations. The size of the continental US, the Australian continent has a population of only 19 million, the vast majority living in a handful of coastal cities. That means that the veneer of civilization is very thin, and it doesn’t take long driving off in any direction from one of those cities to find yourself in the bush with kangaroos, wallabies and emus wandering around or grazing in farmer’s pastures.
The winter here proved mild after Chile and Ireland. While it was very wet and cold by local standards, we didn’t use our big heater once, and it only rained for an average of two days a week. In between the rain, we had bright, sunny days with temperatures in the sixties (fifteen to twenty degrees Celsius) though it often got into the forties (five degrees Celsius) at night. Now spring has supposedly come to these latitudes, and it is time for us to get underway once again. But a winter weather pattern seems to have set in, and we’ve had a series of frontal systems and nonstop gale-force winds for the last five days. We’re hoping things settle down a bit soon – this morning 5.5 meter swells were reported just offshore. As soon as conditions stabilize, we’ll be heading south for Cape Leeuwin – our third (and last?) Great Cape.
But leaving “Freo,” as the locals call it, means saying goodbye to all the wonderful friends we have made over the last six months. This has to be one of the hardest things about our nomadic lifestyle, especially as we have lived it aboard HAWK, spending months at a time in different places and really getting to know local people. It’s hard enough to say goodbye to cruising friends that you hope to meet again in some distant anchorage, but saying goodbye to people you will likely never see again can be heart wrenching. And cruising goodbyes either tend to be protracted, said day after day while waiting for weather, or not said at all when the weather changes for the better and the docklines must be slipped without delay. Perhaps we are getting older, but each goodbye seems more difficult than the last. Thank goodness for e-mail which keeps us in touch with our friends worldwide.
We hope to do some cruising along the south coast of Australia before the summer easterly winds set in over the Australian bight. We plan to spend most of the summer in Tasmania, in areas that look as inviting on the charts as the Inner Hebrides in Scotland, Penobscot Bay in Maine or Trinity Bay in Newfoundland. We’ll make sure and let you know what we think!
Fair winds,
Beth and Evans
March 18, 2003
32 degrees 4 minutes South 115 degrees 45 minutes East
Fremantle Sailing Club, Fremantle, Western Australia
Hello everyone!
We made landfall at Fremantle in the early hours of Monday morning, March 17 and tied up to the Fremantle Sailing Club dock at 0500 after a fifty-nine and a half day, 9,000 nautical mile passage from Cape Horn. Our course took us east-about under South Africa, supposedly with the prevailing winds. The reality of this wholly Southern Ocean, “roaring forties” passage proved to be quite different from our expectations. Whitbread and Volvo racing footage had led us to expect hard downwind sailing in near-gale force westerly winds and huge, following seas. In fact, we spent as much time close-reaching as running, and we spent way too much time trying to make headway in less than ten knots of wind and a large swell that made it almost impossible to keep wind in the sails. The reality we experienced best reflected the e-mails and postings from the crews of the Southern Ocean racing boats describing fickle conditions with lots of light air pockets.
The best word to describe the weather on our passage would be “changeable.” We rarely went more than one watch without a major sail change, and we often had winds that oscillated in strength by 15 knots and direction by 50 degrees over a period of fifteen or twenty minutes. Watch keeping was not the easy look up from the book every fifteen or twenty minutes we had known in the tropics, but rather an almost constant tending of sheets and course to keep the boat moving well.
We did have some heavy weather, but as a percentage of the total it was small. Getting north from Cape Horn to the forties proved the most difficult week of the passage with three easterly gales in a row, one with winds to fifty knots. Overall we spent a total of almost a week hove-to/forereaching in easterly gales or becalmed and rolling in the swell waiting for wind. But Hawk took excellent care of us, sailing well in everything from gale-force winds and twenty foot seas just forward of the beam to five or six knots of apparent wind over the stern. She came through it all with only minor breakages and though the list of boat work we want to get done here is long, it reflects the last three years and over twenty-five thousand miles of sailing we have done since we’ve been in a place where we could do serious boat work.
We still haven’t absorbed the reality of arriving in Australia. The Fremantle Sailing Club has extended us every hospitality, and we spent most of yesterday wandering around totally overwhelmed by the wealth of chandleries and marine businesses within a few blocks of what will be our winter home. The climate is Southern Californian – the streets are lined with open-air cafes and many of the restaurants have interior courtyards. We are enjoying summer-time temperatures even though it is now fall here and most of the locals consider it cold.
More than anything else, we feel bemused at completing this passage – if anyone had told us eight years ago when we rounded the Cape of Good Hope that we would pass it again going in the other direction in the Southern Ocean we would never have believed it. Just goes to show you never know where you might end up once you start messing about in boats!
We hope this finds everyone healthy and, for our Northern hemisphere friends, well on the way to spring. We are back in the land of e-mail and Internet, so please feel free to get in touch. We may even get a landline and Internet access on the boat for the winter! We are indeed back in the developed world.
Here’s to making dreams (even crazy ones) come true!
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk