Impatiently Waiting

We’ve been moving around the Freycinet National Park area of southeast Tasmania that includes the Feycinet Peninsula and Schouten Island. The plan was to grab a weather window sometime in the last week or 10 days and head to the Furneaux Group on the northeast corner of Tasmania. The weather window to get up there just needs to be about 20 hours or so, but it has not offered itself up. We thought today would be a good day to head north. We are in an area that has no good all around anchorages, so you need to keep moving from one to another as the wind changes. Yesterdays forecast for the night was N, NW going W and then SW in the wee hours of the night. The SW west winds were forecasted to be the strongest at 30kts. That left us with the uncomfortable choice of taking the anchorage for the night that protects from the NW and W or from the one that protects from the  SW – but not protection from both.
Last night, we decided to go on the north end of Schouten Island to get protection from the SW winds. There are a lot of rock lobster commercial boats fishing in this area. They seem to work early morning and afternoon. In between they pick a spot to sit out any weather.  There were about half a dozen commercial boats in the same bay we went to. This made me think we were probably in the right spot. Went to bed around 10pm with light northerly wind and a small bit of roll from the ocean swell sneaking into he bay. By about 11:15pm the NW winds arrived blowing about 25kts. Within a half hour the bow was bouncing up high and smashing down, tugging on the anchor chain as wind driven waves came straight into the bay.  Even the heavy rock lobster boats were bouncing up and down. Its a night with no moon making it difficult to judge distances of the bobbing lights around us and the white sand beach 120 yards behind us. Can you say Lee Shore? We started up the chart plotter and instruments to make sure they were ready if we had to make a quick exit. The rock lobster boat that anchored in front of us on the outside of the bay started up their engine and pulled anchor. They had their super lumens, daylight-making work lights on. These illuminated the waves in a strange way, making them look even more menacing. They headed out the pass along with another fishing boat toward the open Tasman Sea.
Over the next few hours you could see the red cockpit lighting going on in the boats around us as the skippers checked on the state of the things. If it was daylight we would have pulled anchor and headed toward he other side. The risks related to doing this at night were coupled with the fact that wind would probably have changed direction by the time we got to the other anchorage- making it no longer tenable. This meant that standing in the cockpit on a cold, bouncy night ready to start the engine if our anchor pulled out seemed like the best plan of action. About 2am the wind started a fast move from W to SW and then SSW.  The boat turned bow toward the beach now and within 30 minutes the waves in the bay laid down. Time to climb into bed and get warm under the duvet. 
The plan was to leave this morning on the strong SW winds and sail overnight to Furneaux Islands in the NE corner. It looked like we had a window that would be enough to get up there. Looking at the weather forecast GRIBS, the GFS model had this gale going through the area in a few days. The purple color in the GRIB display means it is much windier than you want. The other model, aka the Euro model, did not show anything like this gale. When the two models do not agree and its only a few days in the future you can be pretty sure that the none of the forecasts are reliable. The Furneax islands have some good anchorages, but as we just don’t know the area we elected to stay where we are till the weather goddesses get in better agreement. Conservative, and a bit disappointing. Besides using the GRIB forecasts, we pick up the Tasmanian Met Service weather guesses a couple of times a day. We are getting pretty antsy and I’m not sure we have more room on board for another bag of prime scallop shells from the beach walks. Plan on getting Scallop Mobiles for your next Christmas present.

While we’d like to be gone from this area, the beaches are really nice, the shelling is enough to keep interest and the rock formations and fossils are fascinating.
Paul