Nathaniel in Port Denison

Hello again and welcome to the 30^th Orca Update.

Beachcombing in Shark Bay

At Port Denison, midway up the west coast of Australia, Kara hopped a bus for the ride down to Perth airport for 40 days of quality family time back in the States. I, meanwhile, would skulk around in the PD harbor for the duration, with only my twelve gallons of homebrew and 40 packages of ramen noondles for company. Well, that's what I thought, anyway. The Australian personality has a well-known weakness for beer, and twelve gallons of it gives off some sort of quasi-gravitational field which the locals found irresistable. Before long I knew all six people in town, and each day slid by in an unremarkable malaise of comfortable similarity, good waves, new friends, and sunny weather.

That all ended when Kara returned. She'd brought Nathaniel, her little brother, along; he said he wanted a taste of the sailing life and the fates certainly provided it. Perhaps we all got a little more than we bargained for.

Shallow water soloing

Lobster & rum cookout

The night their plane landed, an extremely violent cold front swept through Western Australia—they called it a once-in-a-decade storm. Power was knocked out to much of Perth, lightening flickered across the sky. White-out conditions prevailed in Port Denison, with gusts to 70 knots. Orca was ready for storm conditions with double mooring lines and extra chafe gear, but other boats weren't so lucky. Many broke loose from their moorings and at 3am one unmanned sloop went flying by Orca, pushed by the sustained pressure of 50 knot winds. With a dingy rescue rendered impossible by the 4-foot whitecaps rolling through the harbor I threw on my wetsuit and dove overboard, striking out to save the other boat before she crashed onto the rocks. Scrambling aboard, I searched frantically for an anchor, the engine start switch, or any other way to avert disaster—unsuccessfully. I braced for the crash as a resounding boom set the mast vibrating and and triggered an avalance of gear down below. The cabin lights flickered, electrics knocked loose by the impact. I leapt overboard and scrambled up the rocks to where a few other live-a-boards had gathered. With the boat pinned to the rocks by the wind and chop there was little to be done; in a testament to the strength and durability of fibreglass the boat ground against the rocks for 4 hours in gale force conditions before being towed off—still afloat. This gave me some much-needed confidence for what happened to Orca the next week.

We loaded Nathaniel, now with a healthy respect for Australian weather, aboard and set out for Shark Bay, 250 miles up the coast. The leftover slop and onshore conditions made for fast but miserable sailing. Nathaniel was confined to his bunk, groggy and nauseous. At night, the cloud cover and new moon left us in complete darkness, the horizonless sailing causing even Kara and I to feel varying degrees of seasickness. The shallow offshore reefs along this coastline bend the seas in strange ways, and occasionally the refracted swells combine beyond an unpredictable and uncomfortable motion into breaking crests—one of which plowed into us amidships and sent several gallons of seawater cascading below. Nathaniel groaned and buried his head in his now-wet bunk. Kara slogged her way down the companionway from the filled cockpit and I took the watch. I was huddling in the dubious protection of the dodger, a trickle of cold seawater running down my neck, when there was a horrendious crash. The bow lurched several feet upward and Orca was quickly inclined, bow pointing upward at an unnatural angle. She ran up onto the obstacle and there was a second thud under the keel, the stern briefly lifted before we settled back into the water normally. The whole incident was over in a second.

Outward bound with SV Shaddow

I lept to my feet, eyes on our wake but could see nothing in the darkness. Kara wrenched open the bilge covers and reported no ingress of water. As I grabbed the wheel to feel for feedback from the rudder—hopefully we still had one—I glanced over the side and a whale, huge and terrifying in the blackness, spouted along side us, nearly close enough to touch. As we sailed out from amongst the pod of whales, invisible in the murk, Nathaniel groaned and rolled over in his wet bunk.

We diverted to a nearby anchorage and the following morning we dove under the boat to inspect the hull. Despite a distinct whale-textured impression in the antifoul paint near the bow everything was fine. Since Orca's keel was already looking rather battered below from running onto that reef back in New Caledonia, we were able to file the whole thing away as a great experience for Nathaniel, who let out a small snore from his wet bunk. We went back to sea.

This one didn't survive The Whale

Two—dare we say it?--nice days of sailing brought us to Shark Bay, during which Nathaniel gained his sea legs and stood several challenging night watches. Inside the Bay, the water was clear, the sailing smooth, and the weather settled. While sealife was plentiful, the land was spookily devoid of life other than stunted brush, skeletons, shipwrecks, and ruins. Vultures circled the sand dunes and sharks prowled the shoreline. Nathaniel was game to spearfish amongst the sharks, but the 8-foot venomous seasnake that snuck up behind him was more than he could handle; I've rarely seen anyone swim quite that fast. We ate lobster, fish, and a giant clam cooked on an open beach fire. We speared squid in the shallows, trolled for tuna, and Nathaniel battled a sizable black-tip reef shark before tackling it in the cockpit.

Time rushed by once we were safe in Shark Bay, and soon it was time to find a bus stop to send our guest home. Carnarvon boat harbor has no commercial value, and consequently the channel markers are in the wrong places and the entrance hasn't been dredged in years. Six feet of water, during spring high tide, is the most one can hope for and all boats run aground--several times—when entering. We bounced our way over the bar, packed up Nathaniel and sent him home. Six trips to the supermarket have topped up the larder and now we're off into the Indian Ocean.

Thanks!

John & Kara

Carnarvon, WA, Australia