When the new sounder and cable arrived on 16 May at 2.30pm it took only half an hour for us to test it, confirm it all worked, pay the nasty bill for it, and get out of Paynesville! You have never seen a crew moving that quickly!
At dawn on Sunday 29 April, we crossed the bar at Lakes Entrance after the most sedate of Bass Strait crossings, and put a serene end to our Tasmanian Voyage.
It is funny how you worry about time running out, but a few days of solid sailing changes everything. We have made great progress on our southerly journey. We left Jibbon Beach last Friday and 5 days later crossed the Lakes Entrance bar – a 256 nautical mile dash!
Our leaving the Victorian coast has seemed elusive. This is a bit frustrating and proving to be an exercise in patience. We left Melbourne on 30 July, 2 weeks ago, and are still in Victoria! We keep having to remind ourselves that for us now there is no rush, so absolutely no point taking risks!…
At long last we have left Wilsons Promontory and reached Lakes Entrance at the Gippsland Lakes on Tuesday night in record time. It was a bit like coming home, the Lakes were after all our home port for many years. But this time Take It Easy turned into Speedy Gonzales, even with reduced sails!
Red sky in the morning at Killiecrankie, sailors’ warning! Only we got a surprise, not the mean old Bass Strait we know and love, but a sedate, slightly boring, flat as a tack crossing, requiring both engines! This was our 24th Bass Strait crossing and the most benign of all.
After weathering bad weather for four days in the Gippsland Lakes, we finally got a short window to get out in the ocean for our final leg of our odyssey to Port Albert. This is about a 70 nautical miles passage involving crossing the notorious Lakes Entrance bar, then crossing the even more dodgy Port Albert bar,…
