My sailing companion Peter Austin and I had planned a 3-day passage from Bunbury to Fremantle: set sail sail for Bunbury on the morning of Monday, 20 April where we would spend the night at anchor, then set sail for Mandurah on the morning of Tuesday 21 April where we would spend the night on a mooring at "Doddie's Beach" just outside of the entrance to the Peel-Harvey estuary , then arrive at Fremantle on Wed 22 April. The forecast was for mild weather and there was the promise of generally favourable though light winds with the assistance of a following current.
Unfortunately weather forecast on the day before departure indicated a strong weather system on the following day, followed by favourable winds on Tuesday the 21st. Peter and I made the decision to postpone our departure for one day, which proved to be very wise because on the night of Monday the 20th the city of Bunbury was hit by what was described as a tornado which caused damage throughout the area. We also made the decision to use the expected favourable winds of Tuesday to bypass Bunbury and make the passage from Bunbury to Mandurah in one day.
Brenda and I had spent two pleasant nights at a guesthouse in Busselton and on the morning of our departure from Port Geographe Marina Brenda drove directly to her home once she knew that Bruce Diggins would collect our nearly new pen lines after our departure and convey them to Fremantle for my future use. Fortunately at the last moment I realised that the boat's diesel fuel gauge was recording 1/4 of the 142-litre tank and Bruce kindly took me to fill up my 20-litre container.
Peter and I motored out of the marina into Geographe Bay on the morning of Tuesday 21 April and were to motor that entire day and most of the second day through winds that were too light for sailing, although we managed get some help at times from the mainsail as we motored. From memory we were making about 4 knots at around 1500 rpm from the Volvo 40hp engine.
Hours into the passage we passed Bunbury and as planned decided to bypass it.
A few hours later the Raymarine C120 chart plotter stopped functioning. It would not respond to buttons and kept recycling through presentations of the home page. From then on I spent much of my time using the old but excellent Trimble GPS to plot our positions on the paper chart, which involved a lot of use of the old fashioned navigation tools parallel ruler and brass dividers.
We approached Mandurah in the dark, something that I have always taken great pains to avoid.
(During my 5-year circumnavigation I made only one night entry, up a channel of perhaps 10 nautical miles width between the Brazilian coast and a long island (think Garden Island) because strong low pressure winds were moving in from the east, which would have probably cost me at least two more unpleasant days out at sea. In the dead of night a marina security man motored out to see what was going on and helped me pick up a mooring.
Earlier, my brother Arnold and I had reached Honolulu at night. Honolulu is protected by a long reef with many navigable gaps, so in the night we saw a line of alternating green and red lights marking the passages. We wisely sailed well outside of the reef until dawn. Soon after arriving in Honolulu I was told of an Australian boat that piled up on the reef with total loss of his boat while coming in at night. Later I realised that the Aussie must have been working to the Australian system where entrances are marked with red to the left and green to the right, which would have placed him on the reef because the American system is the reverse, "Red Right Returning".)
It was late at night, around Midnight, and we were both tired. I made the colossal mistake of trying to sail around a light that proved to be actually on land. During our approach Peter kept saying that things didn't look right but I pressed on, fixated on dropping anchor. Eventually I admitted that I was confused too and we dropped anchor perhaps 50 meters off the beach to assess the situation. We eventually figured out where we were and even though we were safely anchored in reasonable calm water we decided to proceed to the moorings at "Doddie's Beach", Partly because Peter figured that the reef to our west may not give us enough protection from a rising swell, and partly because ... well ... after screwing something up I tend to try to make things right ASAP.
We weighed anchor and worked our way round the light marking the entrance to Doddie's Beach but we could not see any mooring floats with our hefty spotlight. My recollection from years past was that the area had been been covered with moorings, but something must have changed. We were tired, running low on fuel, and going back out to sea was not practical, so I agreed to drop anchor, accepting the risk that I expressed to Peter that our anchor might snag on a defunct mooring ground chain, rendering it unrecoverable.
And so it was.
We spent the noisiest night at anchor that I had ever experienced - serious clanging, banging, with an occasional jolt of the boat. Repeated visits to the deck revealed nothing, and I could see from our GPS position that the boat was not moving.
In the morning the windlass stopped winding in chain due to overload, which confirmed that the anchor was snagged on a ground chain and explained the ruckus throughout the previous night.
There was nothing nothing to be done but pay out the reaming chain and leave the 38m of 10mm short link chain and the nearly new 22kg Sarca "Excel" No. 5 anchor on the ocean floor. We still had no sailing wind, were running low on fuel, and had to get on with it. I didn't even bother to log the coordinates because I figured that pay a professional to salvage the tackle would cost more than it was worth.
During this effort Peter mentioned that in the light of day he had seen moorings much closer to the beach than we had expected.
We motored to about the latitude of Coventry reef, west of Warnrbro Sound and well south of Garden Island, with Peter at the helm. A wisp of northerly wind had appeared, we already had some sail up, and Peter decided to tack back toward the mainland. At this point I was concerned at the prospect of spending the coming night at sea with a questionable amount of fuel left for motoring, no anchor, and reports of 40 knot winds in the coming night.
Steadily the wind strengthened and backed, and soon we were sailing toward the tip of Cape Peron and the southern end of Garden island. The wind kept backing and soon we were sailing directly toward the entrance of Challenger Pass. Peter was in his element, brilliantly helming to squeeze every ounce of drive from the wind. I could see that he was having he time of his life and don't think that it would have been possible to drag him away from that wheel even if I had been foolish enough to try it.
We entered challenger pass still under sail in the fading afternoon but we were forced to start the engine as we neared the shipping channel. At that point I was quietly confident that we had enough fuel to make it into the FSC marina, but I had to keep in mind that if the engine stopped at the wrong moment we could wind up in a serious situation with no anchor at our disposal. During this passage I received a telephone call from Kim, my boating neighbour in the next pen, who was watching us with binoculars from his home in the Coogee area. We agreed to give him 20 minutes notice of our arrival at the pen, and I asked him to shine a light to guide us into the pen because they are difficult to identify in the dark.
We ran up the shipping channel in the dark, and Peter needed to know when to turn off the shipping channel and the course that me must set for the FSC entrance. I got to work, triple checked my numbers, and told gave him the latitude of the turn and the subsequent magnetic heading for FSC. It was a rhumb line well north of the shallows associated with the Parmelia Bank area. After Peter made the turn I told him that I had given him only a ballpark heading and that from the chart we should be looking for a tight grouping of red navigation lights marking the entrance leading to both the fishing harbour and FSC. It turned out that the rhumb line was for practical purposes bang on, and soon we were motoring up the FSC fairway and guided by Kim's spotlight we were soon safely tied up at Pachuca's home, FSC pen D81.
I had left pen D81 one year earlier wondering when I would be able to get back to collect its pen lines, and I soon learned that without any prompting Kim and Greg, my pen neighbour on the other side of my boat, had taken the trouble to remove my pen lines which Kim then stored in his garage until my return, and here I was now guided into my pen by Kim with all of the pen lines in position and ready for my tie-up.
Port Geographe was a marina, Fremantle Sailing Club was my home.
Postmortem
This was probably the worst executed passage in my experience. Most of the mistakes and adverse events are obvious but nevertheless I will document the main ones.
1. Circumstances forced us into a situation where we were sailing to a schedule.
This is a fundamental no-no of sailing because as one mariner told me, "It forces you to do things that you don't want to do". We had been wise to delay our departure by one day due to the expected bad weather but should have resisted the temptation of making up for lost time by making the passage from Busselton to Mandurah in one day, which was to cost us dearly. Thereafter I allowed myself to become victim to phenomena that I see over and over again in airline crash investigations: "Get-there-itis" (from sailing to a schedule), and "Confirmation Bias" as exhibited by my continuation toward that wrong light at Mandurah while ignoring indications that the situation all wrong. Fatigue had contributed to these poor decisions.
2. Insufficient diesel fuel supply.
During a full year at PGM the thought of topping up the boat's diesel fuel tank never occurred to me until the very morning of our departure day, when we took on another 20 litres of fuel. This was an inexcusable lack of preparation caused by complacency and lack of focus on the planned passage, but that meagre 20 litres of diesel proved to be crucial.
3. Failure of the Chart Plotter
It is understandable that this was totally unexpected but nevertheless I was left with sufficient navigation tools for a successful passage, but in the end the night entry combined with fatigue and confirmation bias led to my navigation failure at Mandurah.
4. No trip line at the head of my anchor.
I knew about anchor trip lines.
We had set off from Fremantle in 2008 with a trip line that I had prepared and was ready for use. On the south coast of NSW we approached the shore to meet friends from Canberra. The plan was to drop anchor for the night but I told Brenda and Arnold that the area had all of the signs of a defunct mooring field. I then found the trip line, clipped it to the tripping ring at the crown of the anchor, lowered the anchor into the water and sure enough, we found next morning when we tried to weigh anchor that it was snagged. No problem: I manoeuvred the boat upwind of the anchor, used the trip line to tease the flukes of the anchor from under the ground chain, and soon we were on our way.
But why would I need a tripping line for day sails along the friendly Western Australian coast where there would be only day sailing and I would never be dumb enough to drop anchor on a mooring field?
Well, we know how that worked out.
5. No gas for cooking
Before departure it seemed that I had plenty of gas in my primary and backup LPG gas cylinders. Soon I discovered that regardless of which cylinder I brought on line, the stove burners would light up then die in a few seconds. It was a mystery that could not be explained by the gas supply, the gas detection system, nor the gas plumbing. This resulted in a passage with neither hot food nor in particular hot coffee. Like good sailors we accepted the depravation and got on with it, but I can't help wondering if regular doses of caffeine might have lifted my game, so to speak.
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My next blog will cover the hardstanding and hull maintenance of the boat, measures to deal with the cooking gas, chart plotter, and anchor ground tackle problems, and the surprising resolution of the LPG gas supply problem..
