Bunbury Cruise, Day 14-17

The 12 mile passage from Quindalup (32S38, 115E08) to the Port Geographe Marina (33S38, 115E24) was pleasant and uneventful. A fair wind was not expected until the late afternoon so Brenda and I decided to motor to the marina rather than trust the advent of the promised wind. We were the first boat out and had the marina manager Craig and his assistant Doug take our lines when we arrived at our slip F80.

At Port Geographe Marina, Pachuca 3rd from front

We spent the bulk of the next day (28 Feb) on a bus tour that included a guided tour of the Cape Naturaliste lighthouse, a very interesting and informative visit to Australia's first and only silk factory, where the silk is produced in laboratory-like conditions, lunch at a winery, then visits to a large shop filled with exotic liqueurs, sauces, and spreads, and finally the coupe de grace of a chocolate factory. Terry had planned the bus tour well, and on the way back to the boat we stopped in Busselton for 30 minutes of much needed food shopping.

The group returned to Bunbury (33S19, 115E39) in two groups. The first group elected to make the passage of 23 miles on the planned day of Sat 1 Mar even though the wind forecast was for a light northerly into the afternoon. These boats motored.

We were in the second group of six boats who decided to make the passage under sail in the forecast southerly winds of 10-20 kts. Unfortunately the forecast proved to be much too optimistic. I set sail at about 8.30 AM with jib only but 30 minutes later when I could see that the wind was light (less than 10 kts) and almost on the starboard beam I raised the mainsail and we proceeded on a beam reach. Boats ahead of us increased their lead and Merv passed us and left us for dead in his smaller ferro cement boat Leola. Brenda then had to put up with my grumbling on how Pachuca was optimised for heavy weather and could not match the lighter boats in these conditions. But this could not explain Merv's great performance even though he had 4 sails up on his ketch rig. After several hours the wind veered to S and died down to less than 5 kts. When our headsail was beginning to flap and our COG was below 1 Kt I rolled in the headsail and we began to motor. 30 minutes later we had enough wind to make about 3 kts under sail but an hour later the wind died down again and we motored for the last 12 miles with jib rolled in and the mainsail giving us some assistance on the port quarter. Merv and Lee dropped by after we anchored at 4 PM and I asked him how he had been able to make such great progress. The answer was that he had motor sailed with all his sails up. (DUH, why didn't I think of that?) I suspect that all other skippers had been sensible enough to motor sail when their COG had dropped below 3 kts, which explained Pachuca's comparatively bad sail performance.

After 30 minutes of fretting that we had anchored too close to Jim Putt's Morning Tide we moved the boat to a better position and settled down for a peaceful secure night. Some of the crews went ashore for a meal at a Chinese restaurant but I was too tired to go through the effort of inflating the RIB and fitting the outboard engine.