Reflections on the passage
This
was our best ocean passage yet. We sailed 965NM which took just under one week.
Our actual sailing speed- discounting stops for repair etc- was just over
6knots. Only minor things went wrong and we only used 6 litres of diesel fuel
from go to whoa.
The Passage Planning software was a great boon and our
studies of weather seem to have paid off.
Our new device (made by David)
the SRS1 which detects ships over 300 tonnes was great. Particularly within the
Barrier Reef at night. We also had a few worries another night when we
encountered four ships- a bit of a record. Our SRS and the chartplotter showed
two ships, one just behind the other and on a collision course (with us). We
picked them up almost an hour before we could see the first one. Even then, the
second ship was almost impossible to see until it was very close. Even though we
had their names and other pertinent information, neither ship answered our calls
on either VHF or HF radio. We even called them with what is called Digital
Signalling which would have rung an alarm on their bridges. Nothing!
They obviously knew we were here because we could see them making very
small course corrections (invisible to our eyes) which moved their closest point
of approach and kept it at 1.3NM. Now, this is not very far, especially on an
inky dark night. If we ha not had the SRS and chartplotter, we would have
reversed direction to keep well out of the way. So, all was well. The ships were
obviously travelling together and were from some Slavic country as the ship
names were full of Zs. They did talk with one another once on the radio and we
could not understand them. Presumably, they had no-one with English on their
Bridges at 3AM.
Well, we are gong to spend several days varnishing,
restocking and sightseeing.
We were very excited to receive an email
from our son Paul to say he was over in Townsville (from Perth) for a few days
and looked forward to seeing us. We had an extremely pleasant reunion dinner
with him and caught up on his and our last five months.
All the best,
Dave & Penny
