Turn Right for Tassie

Raby Bay to Port Stephens
Thursday, 1 January to Saturday, 4 January 2015

This year we have decided to participate in the Van Dieman's Land Circumnavigation run by the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania in February. We are excited about sailing new waters and facing new challenges including crossing Bass Strait for the first time. This also meant we turned right as we left home instead of the usual left turn to head north.

Warren as usual has Phase2 in excellent order although she is a bit low on the waterline. We departed at 1445 and had a good sail down past Jacobs Well to South Stradbroke.

Sad sight south of Jacob's Well

At 2000 we anchored at Currigee next to Beach House with our friend Kel and son Adam onboard after sighting them on the AIS. We had a few last minute jobs to complete so didn't cross the Seaway until 0800 (daylight saving time) the next morning. Regular readers of our blog will know that I always have a photo of Mum waving good bye to us.

Mum is a bit hard to see in this one as she is at Burleigh but we both waved to keep the tradition going. After passing Point Danger we continued out to sea to a depth of about 100m, where a sea temperature of 28 degerees meant we were in the East Australia Current heading south. This gave us an additional 2-3.5 knots most of the way to Port Stephens.

We had a great reach with genoa all day to average over 9 knots in the first 12 hours in a 15 knot north-easter. At dusk we changed to the self tacking jib and put a double reef in the main as we usually do at night. This slowed us, however the current meant we still made good speed over the ground (SOG).

3.2 knots boatspeed + 3.4 knots current = 6.6 knots 

We elected not to motor even when the windspeed got down to next to nothing as we were still moving south at about 5 knots and the person off watch had a nice quiet boat.  We passed many ships and had to dodge a few storms that we picked up on the radar but overall it was a glorious night in light breeze and very little swell.

Beautiful sunrise off Nambucca Heads

We shook out the reef at dawn and the breeze slowly built until we could raise the spinnaker about 1030. The wind continued to freshen during the day so at 1600 we dropped the spinnaker and then put in the double reef again at dusk of our second day at sea. We entered Port Stephens at 0200 on Saturday after covering 310 nm from the Seaway in 42 hours at an average of 7.4 knots. Print this post