The Birds

OK, so about three lifetimes ago I made a living for five or six years as a seabird biologist.  And thus the bird life of Bass Strait was a total kick for me.  If you'll indulge me...

First, the WANDERING ALBATROSS!  There is no other bird that evokes the inhuman loneliness of the Southern Ocean like this bird...  It comes from a place that haunts the minds of the adventurous, the great watery expanse of the aqueous globe where the graybeard seas reign, unimpeded by any land but the specks of rock where these birds nest.

Which is to say that I was totally choughed to finally see a few myself.

There were also a heap of shy albatross, which nest around Tassie.

Check out the angle of the head in this pic.  It was blowing about 30 knots and the albatross were swooping all over the place, never flapping their wings...

OK, still with me?  The last treasure of the crossing was a whole passel of common diving petrels, which I somehow managed to never see when we were in Tassie previously.  They all went by fast, and this was the best pic I came up with.  These critters are SO cool because they look just like members of the alcid seabird family of the northern hemisphere - the puffins and their kin.  But diving petrels and alcids are totally unrelated.  They only look alike because they've independently evolved this great seabird adaptation of using their wings to swim with and to fly with.  If two species use their wings for both tasks, the physics of optimisation mean that you get identical-looking, non-related animals at both 40° South and 40° North.  Classic convergent evolution...biology is too cool.

No longer our problem

Hard to imagine Hobart as a sunny city at the other end of this passage, full of people in the middle of their summer routines. All day Bass Strait waves rolled by us under a carpet of low grey clouds. We saw only one fishing boat; otherwise our day was spent in the domain of the shearwater and the albatross. Bass Strait felt like a body of water that lead exactly nowhere.

Yesterday we were making an easy seven and a half knots and I was wondering if we wouldn't inconveniently be at our destination long before sunrise on the second day out. But then the wind came around to the southeast - headwinds! Our pre-trip review of the weather forecasts missed that. So we sailed as close to the wind as we could, until Flinders Island blocked our way.

We tacked and started sailing as close to the wind as we could in the other direction - on a course roughly for New Zealand. Once again we were passing by Flinders and the other Bass Strait Islands, just as we did the last crossing. Gales are coming tomorrow, and wind shifts, and those anchorages will be a poor place for a boat with a 40-kilo anchor that needs to be pulled by hand.

So we started sailing slowly towards New Zealand, and by the time we tacked back towards our destination getting there in the dark was no longer our problem. Our problem now is getting there before the winds build tomorrow. Really no problem, as the winds are meant to be behind us, and are not forecast to reach gale strength until the evening. But it sounds like we should have a ripping ride from noon on.

But now it's still the middle of the night, and everyone but me is asleep. Alisa and I are doing three on - three off - two on - two off to get us through the span of the night, from kids' bedtime to kids' breakfast. We're sailing wing and wing, the sails banging in too little breeze, slowly creeping down the east coast of Tasmania.

South

How could this feel routine?

Saw a wandering albatross today, that ambassador of the Southern Ocean, a nearly mythical bird in my mind. It was huge, much bigger than the shy albatross we've also been seeing. Huge enough to glide all the way around the globe on the endless wind of the far south. It was the first one either of us had ever seen.

And then an hour later, a red-tailed tropic bird flew low over the boat. We've seen lots of those, but, of course, all in the tropics, and it was fun to see one south of our wandering albatross. What a transition zone this is.

We left Eden at nine-thirty last night. I was really tired from two pretty crazy days of getting various things done, and we talked about sleeping on the mooring in Eden and getting an o-dark-thirty start the next morning. But a review of the weather showed the winds getting strong and squirrelly on Sunday, and it was already Thursday night, and we had a more than 340 miles to go. So we slipped the mooring and motored through the night. Alisa woke me for my second watch shaken by the experience of being overtaken by a container ship making 18 knots and showing every inclination to run us down.

Today, overcast skies and the red-and-white spinnaker barely holding the breeze. Eric puking in the cockpit, but only once, and he's generally been fine. The family found its way through the day, the way we always do at sea. And now we're banging along at eight knots, everyone but me asleep, with mainland Australia out of sight in the dusk behind us.

Across-across-across...

...Bass-Bass-Bass...Straight-Straight-Straight....

That's where we're about to go - our route from Eden, NSW to Tassie is drawn in above.

Bass Strait is one of those bodies of water that has the reputation of being BAD when it's bad, but quite nice when it's good.  The forecast for the next few days is excellent, so we'll jump off tonight after the kids are in bed, and get started on the 340 miles of sailing that lie between us and our first anchorage in Tas.

We waited out a southerly gale while we were here in Eden - that wouldn't have been the time to cross!  Check out the sky above as the gale approaches in the form of a line of thunderstorms embedded in a cold front.  When we were waiting out southerly weather in this same anchorage two years ago I managed to flip the dinghy when we tried to land on the beach - all of us, including Elias and seven-and-a-half-months-pregnant Alisa, ended up in the drink.  So this time through we just stayed on board for two days while the winds blew themselves out.

Luckily, being boat-bound can be... fun!

Alisa read to Elias.

And Elias and I had a go with his new squirt guns.

And Alisa baked pain raisin, her go-to treat ever since the good ship Pacific Bliss introduced us to them way back in the Tuamotus.

About an hour before dinner on the second day I was feeling cooped up enough to think about doing some yoga on the front deck.  But then Alisa suggested cocktails instead.  Here she is mixing up a couple of gin and tonics and a milk for Elias...

The anchorage where all this took place is dominated by an Australian Navy dock.  Imagine our surprise when we were drinking the above g and ts and heard an announcement over the radio that due to planned explosives loading, the anchorage would have to be cleared by 0600 the next morning.  Remember, our windlass is still not working, so we would have to pick our 40-kilo anchor and the 175 feet of chain we had out by hand.  Rather than doing that right when the kids were waking up and clamoring for a clean nappy, mother's milk and weet-bix, we decided to get up at 0430 so that we could work together to get the hook up without little people screaming at us:

As an old sailing friend said, you've got to bob and weave in this life!

Here we are after the anchor had been pulled and we were safely back in the anchorage right at town, away from any loading explosives.  Dad a bit weary, but one-year-old and his stuffed dog ready to go!

It's not a bad life...