Shark Bay

We finally arrived at Denham at 3pm yesterday.  What a relief to get into the protection of Shark Bay and out of the swells.

We left Turtle Bay at the abrolhos at 0800 hours on Friday morning.  We had no choice really,  the only weather window before tuesday was on friday and overnight, otherwise we would be stuck in turtle bay and the issue with that, was that there was a strong northerly wind and big swell forecast for the Abrolhos and turtle bay was rolly enough as it was without a northerly wind coming straight in...so we had to leave.

The forecast was for a 3m swell and 20-25 knots of wind from the south east swinging east during the day.  The truth of the matter was that the winds were up to 35 knots overnight and the swell was 4m plus with short choppy seas and the wind southerly SSE at best for most of the journey (so all from behind)  The result was an extremely rough and rolly 32 hours which I don't want to repeat in a hurry.

I can cope OK with the boat hobby horsing and rough seas and high winds don't phase me, but I can't cope with rolling side to side and as a result felt very nauseous for 26 hours, despite taking every antiemetic known to man.  I couldn't sleep at all and the nausea became unbearable every time I sat up.  Getting dressed to do the watches consisted of grabbing items of clothing and dashing upstairs dressing in the companionway in between being thrown about by the waves.  Having said that I still did my 3 hour watches overnight....not that  you could see anything..it was pitch black out there with no moon.  The milky way (in between the cloud cover) was stunning as usual, such a privilege to be able to see it in its full glory without any light pollution.  Mike was an absolute legend....donned the full wet weather gear on his watches and sat behind the steering wheels at the back of the boat.  He never gets sea sick but even he was feeling a bit queasy at times.

Had a few greenies over the boat (green water for those non sailors), gave the cockpit a good clean!!  But its a bit rude at 0300 hours to have someone throw a bucket of water over you when you least expect it!  One of these greenies happened just after I had opened the rear hatch to speak to Mike..I did shut the hatch afterwards but didn't realise it was still on vent....so the back bunk got a bit wet when the wave came over, but this dried off OK, so no issues there.

I was convinced that the boat was falling apart, there were so many creaks and groans....I am sure Mika our old yacht never made this much noise in rough weather.  The boat didn't fall apart suffice to say and handled it really well.  We kept reducing sail down to a minute amount of heady out front, the main stayed firmly put away.  Every time we reduced sail to slow down, we seemed to speed up....the end result was about 1sq metre of sail out and we were still doing 5.5-6 knots.  We had to slow down so that we didn't arrive at Steep point in the dark.  This is where you turn into Shark Bay...and we also didn't want to get too close to the Zutydorp cliffs in the dark.  The rebound of the waves against the cliffs makes the seas very disturbed and they were bad enough already!  These were amazing!  Some are 100 ft high and the waves and water crashing against them was reaching the top of the cliffs...quite spectacular.

After the awful night, it was wonderful to reach the haven of Shark bay and feel well enough to have something to eat for the first time in 18 hours...sailing at 7.5-8 knots across flat water with just the heady out.....beautiful....crack open the champers!!  :)

Three exhausted crews arrived at Denham at 3pm to a radio welcome from ACRM base and have anchored just offshore to sit out the rain and the expected 30 knot blow from the east that was forecast for the next 24hours.  The blow has reduced to 20 knots from the ENE, with grey skies and moderate rainfall.  The anchors seem to be holding well.  We need to setoff the boat for a while...go to shore and find the rubbish bins and the cafe...  need coffee!!!

My phone doesn't work here but Mikes does, so at least we don't have to use the sat phone to get into contact with people.

ADDIT:  Famous last words...talk about putting the kibosh on the statement about the anchor....we went to IGA in Denham to do some shopping and were going to go for a coffee at the cafe on the way back but fortunately the cafe was closed so we decided to go back to the boat...we were only gone about an hour.  On the way back, i said to Mike, Where is Aqua Vitae?  I can see Divided Sky and Moonshadow, but AV's mast should be behind the fishing boat and it is not there.....   A little further on we spotted her....way out in the  bay!  She had dragged anchor some 0.5 of a nautical mile and we had to chase after her in the dinghy.  it was only 2.2 meters deep and we had had 30 meters of chain out, which should've been plenty....it obviously wasn't!  Ever heard the saying anchor chain is no good to you in the locker?....guess we learned our lesson the hard way!!!  We had bought a brand new manson supreme 40 anchor for AV to go on this trip and they usually reset themselves if you drag...clearly not this time!!!

We finally caught her up after a very long ride..she had already been anchored about 1 nautical mile offshore as it is too shallow further in in Denham. When we reached her, we got on board and motored back in.  We tried unsuccessfully twice to reset the anchor, the second time with 60 metres of chain out, which then had to be pulled in again whilst we repositioned.  Third time lucky she finally seemed to hold.  It wasn't nice having to do this in 25knot winds and driving rain either!

Nick and Robyn got on board Divided Sky and put the rest of their anchor chain out.  Margi and Jeremy jumped on board Moonshadow and then we noticed that she too had started to drag anchor.  They tried 8 times to reset before she finally held!!  (and we thought we had it bad!!!)

Anyway good job we weren't too long otherwise Aqua Vitae would have been even further out.  It was a very long and anxious trip to catch her anyway.  Need an anchor alarm app on the iPhone for when you need to go to shore...I am sure someone must have invented one....!

Needless to say we both had a crappy nights sleep after that!  The anchor alarm went off once overnight but that was just because we had so much chain out and had swung round with the wind,
I am not going to make any further comments about the anchor holding before we leave the boat today :)