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Adventures of the Deck Family |
Just a quick post from a public PC to let all know where we are… We are staying high up near the source of the mighty Murray River, in the Biggara Valley, above Corryong and below Khancoban.
There’s hardly any phone or data service up here, so no posts for while. We’ll be here until around the 8th of October.
Yesterday we went into Shepperton because Dad needed his hair cut. While he was getting his hair cut, Mum, Alex and I went around looking for a coffee stall. He could find, so we asked the owner of a book stall and he said “I’ll take you there, I’m going myself”.
We went to the coffee stall And had a hot chocolate, with two sugars, but Alex had four. Dad still hadn’t finished, so we went to a pet shop and played with kittens and baby puppies. The kittens where only a month old and the puppies were so young they couldn’t see and were the size of large mice.
Then it started to rain, so when dad got back he suggested ten pin bowling. It is surprisingly difficult for what you do, rolling the ball to hit the pins. But you often knock more pins over than you think. The ball always goes a lot further than you think, but it’s hard to get a good aim.
Alex lost a tooth a while ago, and we. Finally put it out for the Tooth Pirate to collect, but that’s Alex’s story, not mine. Anyway he got two dollars and spent it on a video game after our game of bowling.
After bowling, we went to a place where they bred horses to see foals. A big brown and black mare came up and I patted it. They had puppy too, called “Matrix” who has a dark gravel co our and played with him a lot. Me and Alex ran around in the big wheel where they run the horses.
Tomorrow we leave Shepperton and go to where Mum’s family birthday is. It rained a lot last night and got really windy.
I liked the trip here. I remember the bushwalk that we did at Canoe Bay. There was a creek on the beach that I went walking through, and I got wet up to my waist. I played with the waves breaking onshore. I waited until the waves would break and wash up to me, then jump back. Then it was time to go back so I got changed into dry clothes, and I got them wet on the way back too.
The trip into Dunalley was a bit windy, but I could stand it. I had a muesli bar or two. When we tied up at the jetty, I played in Grandpa’s trailer.
We went into Hobart, and we bought a movie called “Tangled”. I like it a lot. My brother and I know the words to it now, we can talk to each other using the movie words. There’s a chameleon in the movie, named Pascal, and think Pascal is the funniest character in the movie, but Maximus, the horse is right up there too.
I hurt my hand. My brother and me were doing a duel with sticks and Lachlan hit me on the hand. I just ran inside and showed dad, and he fixed it all up, now it’s a big scab.
Yesterday we had a BBQ with lots of people. My cousin Will came around. He had a game on his iPod called “Infinity Blade” and it was really good. Dad got it for the IPad, so now we have it too. Only in a day we made a character more powerful than our cousin. He’s got an insanely good sword, a good helm and good armor.
It was really good to wrestle with Will, we wrestled so much I got a headache. He knocked me back so a I pretty much flew over my bed, and I landed on the floor, and that’s when I got the headache of death.
This week i’m pretty much sometimes going to help Dad, sometimes play dungeon siege or infinity blade, or sometimes do nothing. I think it’s called infinity blade, because that’s the best sword in the game. Oh! Tomorrow we are going on a plane trip and that going to be very exciting.
In my last post I got the engine room lights working, something my dear wife has been at me for quite some… She even bought the strip lights. Talk about dropping ze hint…
Anyway, in that post I have a panoramic stitch together of the engine room. In this post, I thought I’d use that photo to give you a guided tour.
Now, I warn you, I’m going to talk small boat systems at length here. If that bores you, click here for something more entertaining. If not, read on…
That Optima cranking battery in the lower left is the one I talked about here. This new one is still growing strong. Despite my earlier dramas. I still recommend them for a serious cranking battery… Just don’t cycle them. Ever.
Up behind the cranking battery on the bulkhead is the negative bus bar. It’s a serious 300A unit that links all the negatives on both batteries together and earths the engine. The feed for all negative DC on the boat comes from here. Note that the feed from the house set runs through a shunt before arriving at the bus bar, so the Xantrex LinkPro battery monitor can keep track of amps in and out.
Also on the bulkhead, out of the shot, is the circuit protection for the cranking battery; a big 200A fuse from Blue Seas.
The start selection switch was also replaced recently, with this 2500A item from Blue Seas replacing the old bakerlite 300A unit. The old unit had a loose pole, and I didn’t want it shorting. The switch also serves as the cranking battery isolation switch, and the selector for the anchor winch source.
Just below the selector switch is the raw water intake filter. This was a sexy stainless unit impulse bought from Brierley hose and handling. I have been looking for a good unit after being disappointed with the plastic ones on offer. Not keen on breakables below the waterline.
I spent this afternoon in the engine room fitting LED strip lighting… And boy, am I happy with the results:
I can see my engine! Is that great? All boats should have engine room lighting, even if the only use to show off to visitors.
I can now see all sorts of things. Lamentably, or possibly fortunately, I spotted this:
That’s a bronze or brass elbow on top of the engine sea water inlet. The seacock is stainless, and that corrosion looks pretty horrible. I’m thinking it may be galvanic. Anyway, it’s clearly in need of replacement. Anything that blue has probably dezincified and isn’t going to be far away from porous if isn’t already.
On the row back ashore, the setting sun caught ERIK and I was struck by how nice she looked… So I took another photo.
Don’t you think she looks nice?
I have been thinking today of the lessons learnt from our trip, and thought I should write them down. Where better than the blog?
Lesson 1. Keep it fun.
Obvious if you have kids, but just as important for us grown-up’s too. If it isn’t fun, or if you can’t look back on the trip and find something fun about it, then cruising is going to get old pretty quickly. Making light of tough situations, while acknowledging that they are tough is not cheating, and neither is congratulating yourself on minor achievements. It all helps to keep it fun. Liss took it upon herself to keep everyone’s spirits up when things were getting bit tense during the rounding of Cape Pillar, and I appreciated it; it kept it fun.
We set limits; we decided that we wouldn’t go out if the swell and sea were going to be over 3 meters… not because we couldn’t handle it, and certainly ERIK could, but because its no fun sailing in those conditions and managing kids at the same time… you have to keep it fun.
Lesson 2. Put stuff away.
Two rough legs, the one to Port Arthur and the other from Port Arthur, had stuff falling down or rolling around below. It’s too late to do something about it in the middle of the lurching, so do it right before you depart. My seriously solid torch made a seriously decent dent in the woodwork when it launched itself from its spot up above the chart table. the sugar jar lost its lid. some bits and pieces forgotten about on top of the instrument box went to roll around on the floor. Finding ways to put stuff away so that they can still be grabbed in hurry with ease will be a challenge, but it needs to be done.
Lesson 3. Have everything you need to fix anything onboard, on the boat and usable.
We’ll be leaving the boat for three or four weeks to her own devices while we stay at my Dad’s place and fly to Victoria later this month. That’s pretty much the longest time we have left her since moving aboard 5 years ago. To make sure she’ll be okay, I decided to finally fit that float switch for the bilge pump so I could leave it on automatic for the duration. My Dad came out to help me and bemoaned that fact that we could have achieved the result much quicker if he’d bought a cordless drill. We could have used a decent work light in the bilge too. But, and this is a biggie for me, we did the job with everything on board. The butane powered soldering iron, BBQ lighter for the heat shirk, two speed hand-drill to drive the fasteners; these all could have been replaced with power tools. Yes, the job would have been quicker, but there’s no 240v power out on the mooring. You really need to be able to fix everything yourself and have the tools on hand to do it.
Lesson 4. Don’t schedule. No, I mean it, really, don’t do it.
We had a thing Liss had organized 8 months ago. She was keen to be in Dunalley before the weekend so that we could either attend or reasonably sort things out if we couldn’t. I didn’t mind the early start from Fortescue, and although the tide would have been later the following day, the weather forecast wasn’t that good. Without the need to be back I think we would have enjoyed Canoe Bay for another 3 or 4 days; we had food and water and the anchorage was delightful. But we decided to push on… and while it all worked out okay, we shouldn’t have let ourselves be pushed by a schedule. If you want to be somewhere on time, take a plane.
We left Fortescue at 5am, with the setting moon.
It was cold but refreshing to be underway early. I really like an early start. We needed to maintain 5 knots to cover the distance and arrive at the Marion Narrows by high tide, or just before. 9:44am was high tide along this part of the coast, so we had to have an early start.
Our trip up started off very peaceful and placid, but by the time the sun came up an hour and a half later, ERIK was setting her shoulder against a 20 to 25 knot north westerly with a short sea coming out of Pirates Bay.
The coastline is spectacular here, just amazing. Cliffs rise up sheer from the water, topped with trees. It looks so fantastically rugged and untamed.
Once we got into the lee of the cliffs you can see in the picture above, the conditions backed off for a while. However, as we followed the coastline north, the north by northwest, conditions became very gusty and challenging. We were hit by a 40kt gust from the northeast, blowing spume off the water in all directions. ERIK heeled heavily while I put the helm hard over to bring head to wind as the sails flapped and the boat shook. The gust knocked 4 knots off our speed in one hit.
I figured that these gusts were turbulence from the cliffs. There was a fishing boat going north with us, but much, much closer to the cliffs, only a few dozen meters from their base. I wasn’t keen going in that close… The alternative was to head further offshore. Looking out that way the seas were picking up, although the swells would have been with us. I didn’t want to risk our 5 knot average and miss the tide. I figured that we weathered the 40kt blast okay, so if they didn’t get any worse, and I kept an eye out for them, we should be fine. If not, offshore we would go and shelter in Lagoon Bay if we missed the tide.
As it turned out, we didn’t get another as bad, and as the coastline rounded to the north west, the wind steadied and built to steady 25 to 30 knots. ERIK plugged away, under staysail and mizzen with engine on 1500rpm helping us point. We kept up a steady 5 to 5.5 knots albeit with spray washing the boat from stem to stern. Oh for a pilot house!
I sent the good wife up the mast as we approached the Narrows, and set the eldest to calling the depth from the sounder. We downloaded the chartlet from MAST to aid us, and we had chatted to a fisherman in Port Arthur to get a bit of local knowledge of the bar.
Coming over the bar was fine, the wind shifted westerly and faded as we approached, thankfully. As per our advice, we kept close to port on the way in, swinging heavily to starboard as soon as it shallows and keeping close to the sand spit on the way around. Once inside, weeds obscure the bottom and cause the depth sounder to give some alarming readings, but there’s at least 2.5m of water at high tide (0.8m above datum) all the way in.
We tied up to the jetty at 11am, exactly 6 hours after departure. No rest for the wicked, however. We needed to take all perishables off the boat and pack clothes for our next trip. A call to my dear Dad had him showing up with the trailer at short notice. We loaded the trailer up while the boys played inside it. We will stay with my Dad for a week or so before flying to Victoria for a big family do! Does this adventure never end?
*smiling* I hope not.
Canoe Bay is up in the north-west corner of Fortescue Bay, and it’s a beautiful part of the world.
The anchorage is in 3 to 3.5 meters of water behind the wreck. The approach is deep water, past a few kelp forests and then it starts to shallow. The shallowing comes up to about 4m before it deepens again on the way in. The area behind the wreck is bigger than it looks from the approach, and there a good depth of water right up to the shore. If swing room is a concern, you can always drop an anchor and run a line to the exposed bollard on the wreck.
We had west north westerly winds while we were there, and the weather report said they blew 20 to 25 knots elsewhere, but we never saw more than a few 10 knot gusts.
On the southern side by the point near the wreck, there is a track that extends down to the camping area in the southern section of the bay, and continues north along the coast as far as Pirates Bay. The track offers some fantastic views of the sea coast…
After we dropped anchor and tidied the boat up a bit from our rounding of Cape Pillar, we launched the dinghy and lacking a nice shore to pull her up on, med-moored her by a rocky shore using the dinghy’s anchor to hold her off.
While waiting for us grown up’s to get everything sorted, the kids ran amok. The sea anemone that our youngest found had dried and started to smell. The eldest thought it would be fun to smash it into tiny bits, with his fist. Unsurprisingly, he got bits of it in his hand and was bleeding. Sea anemone thorns are a nasty source of infection, and we took the opportunity to impress the importance of safety especially in remote places on the boys while I cleaned his hand first with disinfectant, then applied an antibiotic, then a bandage. I think he got it….
The walk south to the white beach in the southern end of the bay takes about an hour, and while the track goes up hill and down dale (and is quite muddy in spots) along the rugged coastline, it’s a pretty easy walk.
The boys enjoyed the beach and ran around, playing chicken with waves breaking ashore. Of course, we took a spare set of clothes for them!
We found some rubbish washed ashore, so we went looking for a rubbish bin. We found one near the Park Rangers office. After completing the now obligatory facebook update, we headed back toward the boat. We must have looked a sight; walking in sea-boots and foul weather jackets, in the wrong direction with no camping gear or food…. We found the dinghy where we left her and sat down with the CYCT Tasmanian Anchorage guide to work out when we had to leave in the morning to make the tide crossing the Marion Narrows.
High tide in this area is about the same as high tide in Hobart (it’s 16 minutes earlier as of September 2011). High tide on the next day was 9:44am, and given the distance, it would take us 4 hours to get there. That meant a 5am sail, or a 4:30am start. Ug.
We left Port Arthur on Wednesday morning with a storm force wind warning in place for SE coastal waters, and 45 knot winds blowing off Matsuyker Island with 7m swell running.
The idea was to scurry around the corner before those conditions reached the Tasman Island area, with the front forecast to pass through around midday.
We poked our nose out of the bay in the confused seastate and banged our way about 2nm south into the 3 to 4m south westerly swell, reaching in the building north westerly winds. When we got “far enough” we turned to run with the seas, making for the gap between Cape Pillar and Tasman Island. In hindsight I should have kept heading south for another 30 minutes, I think we turned too soon. I spent much of the approach to the gap trying to get a bit more offing from the Peninsula side of the shore.
We took video footage of the trip, starting from about a mile or so out from the gap. As is often the case, you never get much footage of the really bad bits, because you are too busy holding on!
The footage was originally in .mov format, is about 2 minutes long and is 12Mb in size. Here is a direct link to the file.
The seabed comes up from about 80m to around 10 or so in the gap, so waves start maturing as you approach.
We had been warned to avoid making the passage when the tide was against you, as the waves square up and get nasty. As the waves start getting a bit peaky, the reflections from the peninsula and the island side get bigger too. One bad set had us bow down coming down a wave front when a big wave caught us off the forward port side. As we rolled heavily to starboard we caught another wave reflection coming from the island. There was nothing I could do, the boat was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure enough, just as we rolled up and over onto our port side, the wave caught us on the starboard side and then we really rolled over. I think that’s when we lost the contents of the drinks locker, and the sugar jar lost it’s lid.
The coastline in this area is amazing, with huge pillars cliffs soaring up from the sea. As you can see from the video, we had nice sunny weather and a rising sun for our trip, and to see the cliffs in the low angled light was fantastic.
We had nice weather for our transit. The place see’s 4m of swell and at least 2 or 3m on a regular basis. Can you imagine the drama in 7 to 10m of sea and the usual 25 to 30kt’s of wind? Its enough to give you the heebie-jeebie’s!
An interesting feature of the rising seabed is that it, of course, drops away on the other side too. This means that no sooner than you transit the gap, the sea state just seem to vanish. As we rounded the cape and headed north, we were in virtually no wind with a benign 1m southerly swell. You could look back and see the washing machine not 50m behind you. Somebody said later “Imagine coming the other way…”. Yuk.
Our destination was Canoe Bay, in Fortescue Bay about 10nm up the coast from Cape Pillar. There was a nice 10 or 15kt westerly we reached against, motor sailing north. As we rounded The Lanterns, we beat in against it in darkening conditions as the front closed in.
I’ll write more about Canoe Bay in my next post…
Since we got here last Thursday, we have been looking around the ruins of Port Arthur. We took a ghost tour (our youngest was quite disappointed he didn’t get to see a ghost, and wondered why it was called a ghost tour if your didn’t get to see any), took a ferry ride over to Point Puer (Latin for boy, as in puerile) and took a guided tour of the site with two of their guides (amazed at how passionate the guides where given that they repeat the same stuff day after day).
I thought I’d share a few photos and write up some of my impressions of the historic site, rather that give a blow-by-blow description of what we have done here. There is heaps of info available on the web, check out here and here as good starting points.
The first observation is that the place is largely empty compared to it’s heyday. After two or three bush fires, a government auction and a fair bit of recycling by the locals, theres not a lot left.
It’s the government auction that caught my attention. When the site was being wound down, the convicts left were old and invalid, still serving their time. The government of the day was growing increasingly uncomfortable with it’s convict past and debates were had on what to do with the place when it finally shut. the government auction allowed you to come and buy the property, buildings included, so long as they removed in something like 20 days! No wonder the place was stripped bare.
The Commandants house was interesting too. Firstly, there is a clear geographical hierarchy in the site that becomes obvious by the time you get the the Commandants house. All the convicts are on the low land, the free and the military are on the higher land, and overlooking the whole thing on the best patch of grass is the Commandants House. The house started life as four rooms, but got added onto fairly regularly by each successive Commandant. The patchwork quilt of rooms that where once corridors, windows that appear on the outside but are hidden by a fireplace on the inside, and successive lean-to’s on the back to house the increasing number of servant staff are fun to explore.
The study is a in the middle of the house, and has it’s own separate access from the outside. I got the idea this was so the commandant could take work related visits from all the various officials that lived here without disturbing the rest of the house with their arrival. If it looks like a dark pit of a room from the photo below, that’s because it is… Can you imagine working in here all day?
The drawing room, in contrast, is right on the outermost wing of the house, furthest away from the rest of the settlement. It’s heavily furnished with thick drapes, and is accessed by a long corridor which takes you away from the rest of the house. I can imagine the women of the house, improving their needlework or studying their letter here, looking out over the harbor, the nasty business of brutal punishments being inflicted less than 300 meters away being almost in another world.
As you travel up the hillside, inside the house, you reach the servants quarters. A large part of the rooms here are for food preparation and storage. the kitchen, seen in the photo below, compared with the rest of the building, is austere and purely functional. How they cooked for 20 people in this room is beyond me.
Even after convict settlement shut down, life down here was pretty rugged. There are buildings onsite made 60 years ago out of recycled fuel drums. There was no road in here until 1903. The store, post office and local bank where all the same building run first by the Mum of the family for 40 years, then by her daughter for another 30. I listened to the recorded memories of the older locals, retelling how the husband worked as a saw hand in the local mill for 20 years before he got a promotion, while she polished floors, on her hands and knees, everyday, with beeswax, for the same 20 years so they could scrape together enough money to house and feed their 4 kids and build a home on a block of land here. When 44 young men from the local area didn’t return from WW1, it had a big impact on the small community down here… They planted an avenue of trees, one for each fallen soldier that makes an interesting counterpoint to the convict history of the site.
I have been giving a fair bit of thought to crime and punishment too. The modern prison system is really no different than what they were trying to do here. Modern prisoners might get TV’s and pizza, but there’s no better chance of them getting successfully reintegrated into society than there was for the convicts that worked in the labour gangs here. Many of them reoffended when they got out, and ended up straight back here, with it’s solitary confinement, bread and water diets, and fire and brimstone preachers. Corporal punishment didn’t work, it just made them heroes of sorts to their fellow prisoners. Solitary confinement, sometimes in the dark for 30 days or more, just sent them irrational. The trick seems to be to get potential criminals before they become socialized into that life. Easier said than done, I suspect.
While on crime and punishment, I first thought it a little odd that there was no mention of the Port Arthur Massacre here. The guides don’t talk about it, and it’s not mentioned in any of the material on the site and the perpetrator is not mentioned by name at all. The building where it took place is just a shell, with a row of obscuring shrubs in front and a very nice memorial to those that died behind it. Up Jetty Road, on the way out of the site, there are a couple of small plates set into stones remembering the mum and her daughters that died there. They have fresh flowers and new toys set beside them. There is a small display with pictures of the staff that died, downstairs in the main visitors center, by the exit. There’s a stone by the waters edge with a man’s name on a plate… When I found these things over the few days we have been here, I realized there is more than enough to remember and reflect on the malevolent depravity that was unleashed here, on the pain it caused and continues to cause so many people, that nothing more need be said.
