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The second leg of the trip is a 1755NM sail from New Caledonia to Thursday Island, Australia. It involves crossing the entire Coral Sea and transiting the passage between Australia and Papua New Guinea known as the Torres Straits. We finally left New Caledonia with a favorable weather forecast after days of high winds and rain. One yacht decided to venture out a day early, suffered a severe knockdown, tore all of its' sails, flooded it's engine and was being towed back in. Fortunately no injuries that I know of. The winds were still in the 25-knot range when we cleared the reef and the seas large and confused with a 3-4 meter swell from the SE. Our course put us dead down wind so with a double reefed main and polled out Genoa we set off wing and wing. As usual nighttime seems to bring on more wind and larger waves and we were routinely surfing down the swells at 12-13 knots, fast but dangerous with our rigid sail configuration. The wind vane, aka "Shirley" was doing a fine job steering until a larger than average wave threw the boat around into a violent gibe from which Shirley the wind vane did not recover. A quick inspection revealed the reason, her collision tube, which holds the steering oar was broken, and some other parts were bent. This tube was designed to bend, not break, when hit by an object, but the object in this case was a large fast moving wave. With her steering oar dangling behind on its safety line like a broken useless appendage we tried to sort out the mess. It took some doing since the main was held down with a preventer and the Genoa held out with the spinnaker pole. Fortunately there were two people on deck at the time. Once under control and back on course we engaged the Cetrek autopilot to relieve us of the difficult hand steering, it did well for an hour and then failed getting us back on the wheel again for a very long night.
The morning brought lighter winds and much smoother seas which made living easier. The autopilot problem was a communication failure between rudder and CPU, we tried it again and fortunately they were "talking" so it freed up time to try and repair the wind vane. All the parts were recovered the night before and with a spare collision tube that I had she was rebuilt and working again although it took an entire day to do it. The seas were smooth, the spinnaker was up but the events of 12 hours ago were still vivid. The next several days were uneventful as we continued to count down the miles. After two nice days the Coral Sea decided it had been too pleasant for too long. Winds started to build and the seas became much larger than the wind would dictate. "Des" on Russell Radio saw nothing in the weather faxes he had. "It's not on the progs" (prognosis) he kept saying in his gravelly voice which sounds like he comes right from the very center of the Aussie outback. Early the next morning we were running dangerously fast and sometimes out of control so the main sail came down completely leaving us with just a small poled out Genoa and sailing a consistent 9-10 knots. The waves became another factor building to 7-8 meters and breaking causing us to start surfing again at 13-14 knots with only a small sail up. This continued for 2 complete days with constant rain making a most unpleasant journey. The surfing was not just a sporadic event but was occurring constantly with two huge bow waves spraying straight into the air totally obscuring the bow and vision ahead, there was even a rooster tail from the stern. This was stuff of adventure reading but when it happens several hundred miles from anywhere, constantly day and night it tends to lose some of it's literary intrigue. I talked to Des the next day and tried to find out what was causing the heavy seas and when we may be out of the difficult conditions because we were tired of just hanging on. When I told him that our barometer dropped 5 millibars (which they call Hector-Paskels) in the last few hours he took note. Hector- Paschal a unit of measurement like a Newton (as in Sir Isaac not fig) but different. An intense Low in the Tasman was compressing the isobars of the High we were in causing the difficult weather situation which should start to ease in 48 hours, good news if it happens. It did in fact start to ease but we were still running at 8-9 knots with just the one sail, which made the ride much more pleasant, and we had no desire to put up more sail just yet. We didn't always keep up good 24 hour run times but one midnight to midnight period we did 240NM and considering this was point A to point B and we were swinging all over the ocean it was probably considerably more. The boat does surf like a rocket. The wind vane broke its steering lines twice during all of this; big winds and seas do take a toll. Sailing is livable again and we will approach the Straits tomorrow in daylight.
The Torres Straits live in legend of early seafarers as a very dangerous place where the slightest error would cause the ship to be lost on a reef and the crew to be eaten by the salt-water crocodiles or the early inhabitants of New Guinea. It's major dangers are the numerous large reefs which completely fill the area and the unpredictable currents that are caused by two major bodies of water, the Coral sea and the Indian Ocean having to funnel through a relatively narrow and very shallow space. The water shoals from 4000 meters in the pacific to 15-20 meters in the Straits confined within a distance of less than 120 NM between Australia and New Guinea not counting all of the islands and reefs that lie within. It was a feat of seamanship and cartography for the early explorers to have found their way through this maze; we have it easier although it still takes careful chart reading and plotting. Today, instead of dealing with the 2 NM error found in most sextant sightings from a small boat, we put the sextant away and took out the second GPS as a backup and check on the first. Very small errors can easily mean the loss of the boat.
It was late afternoon when we left the deep water of the Coral sea and approached Eastern Fields a large 15NM diameter reef at the beginning of Bligh Entrance. This 100NM leg would bring us to Bramble Cay and the true start of the Strait. I was concerned about the rapidly shoaling water since we had large seas of 6-7 meters and shallow water could turn this into chaotic and breaking waves. Fortunately little happened and we were left with similar conditions to what we had before. We spent the rest of the night winding our way through unseen reefs by plotting out GPS positions on the chart. It's always a bit frightening never getting an actual fix by sighting an island and totally depending upon your instruments to guide you. Morning came as we approached a major turning way point with still no fix but 2 hours later sighted Stephens Island and then several others exactly where they should be, always a relief. We proceeded down the Great Northeast Channel with 25 knot winds pretty much on the nose which made for very uncomfortable sailing, but that's what we have had this entire trip so another 24 hrs. shouldn't be so bad. The rest of the day sighting numerous islands and reefs built our confidence and confirmed our position, but the ride was increasingly uncomfortable. We had to motor sail with the wind almost head on and now blowing at 30 knots. Night time came again with its uncertainly, and a scary moment when we had to make a 90 degree turn to thread our way through 2 reefs for 11 NM. Then another 20 degree turn since the reefs turned for another 10NM finally to exit them with a 70 degree turn back to our original course all without seeing a thing. The rest of the journey became easier with more space between reefs and better sailing angles with the wind and waves. We entered Prince of Wales Channel and we could see some lights on Thursday Island in the distance. Dawn was starting to break and Wednesday and Hammond Islands came into view and 3 hours later we were anchored in Thursday Harbor. Paul and Morag alternated watching and sailing the boat, I navigated and steered the boat with the autopilot during the night, it was a very long and stressful period. We experienced the unpredictable and strong currents crabbing as much as 25 degrees into the flow off our course line. The Magellan GPS made it possible to do this at night using cross track error and true course over the ground functions since there were no visual clues to rely on. A long and difficult trip; time to explore the town and restock and repair the boat. Next stop Cocos (Keeling) Island, 2665 NM, at least it's a straight course.
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