Saturday 18th May 2019 – Port Denison to Pelsaert Island Group (Middle Island), Abrolhos Islands

For the second day in a row the temperature dipped below 4 degrees and we woke to freezing conditions with dew all over the boat. My bare feet were freezing as I prepared Sirocco for departure.

After some toast and coffee, we departed Arurine Bay Port Denison around 08:00 and made our way through the fringing reef out into the Indian Ocean and turn to starboard setting a course for either Geraldton or Pelsaert Island in the Abrolhos Islands depending on the weather and boat speed.

Weather conditions are quite good with a 12 knot south easterly with sea state choppy and a 1.5 metre swell.

All was going well as I was reading the Western Australian Cruising Guide and the Admiralty Directory when I discovered that the Fisheries Department now require every private vessel to register with the department stating their purpose for visiting the Abrolhos Islands and before you arrive, you have to go on-line to the Fisheries Departments web site and fill out a 3 page form of all your details.

Really? Do all these government wankers really think every recreational boat has internet access? So here I am with my mobile phone on tethering hot spot, in a bag hauled up the mast to try and get a signal while I spend an hour filling out their stupid form when every time I hit send the page just times out and I have to do it all over again.

Finally, I got it completed and sent through, so no doubt we will receive a visit from the men in black tonight or tomorrow who will want to check our fridge and freezer. I hope they don’t get offended when I ask them to take their dirty boots off first.

Anyway, I got that all sorted and all the time the genoa was flogging as we are going down wind. So I decided it might be worth moving the barber hauler further towards the bow. As I un-clipped the barber hauler, the vacuum behind the main sail sucked the genoa around the furler a few times.

Normally this is not an issue as you just pull it back out with the genoa sheets, but as I had my spinnaker halyard attached to the cross-beam tensioner cable, the sail went around this as well preventing the furler from operating.

So here we are with a massive pile of tangled laundry flogging in the wind and no way of freeing it. I tried gybing several times without success and then I started the engine to increase the apparent wind and using the boat hook I eventually I was able to unravel the mess and get it back to how it was previously.

Lesson learnt – put the spinnaker to the side well clear of the genoa and furler.

Barber hauler

Cross-beam tensioner cable

Despite these couple of issues, we really had a superb run today covering 60+ nautical miles.

I timed it perfectly arriving a the Coral Patch around 16:30 to inspect the mooring that I didn’t have high expectations for and I wasn’t disappointed as it was in a pretty crappy location and quite exposed so I swung into plan B and headed for Middle Island which has two moorings.

I knew I would be cutting it fine now arriving there just on sunset. The Abrolhos Islands are amazing and amazingly notorious and extremely dangerous. There is no DPI chart for the Pelsaert Group and this area hasn’t had much surveying done since Wichham and Stoke first charted the Islands way back in 1840 in HMS Beagle. (Darwin was on holidays writing his book at the time)

The Islands are very low and the whole area is a mass of coral reef and you can’t see anything until suddenly you see the surf breaking on the outer reef and then you start to see some low Islands covered in cray fisherman shacks.

Shacks on the low Islands

My Navionics charts on Sirocco are quite inaccurate and lack detail. The latest Navionics charts I have on my phone showed more detail and some new navigation aids that have recently been installed.

So as I changed course to head into the mass of coral reef and a few low lying Islands just as the sun was setting I was using Sirocco’s main Navionics display, Sirocco’s radar, Navionics on my phone and also Google Earth imaging running on OpenCPN on my laptop to safely guide us in.

As we entered the anchorage and turned to the lee of Middle Island where the two moorings are, we saw to large power boats. One of them was already on one of the moorings and the other power boat was anchored, but as soon as the anchored boat saw me, he quickly raised anchor and headed for the only free mooring leaving us with nowhere to go.

By now the sun has disappeared and the western sky was glowing red while I quickly assessed the area for a good sandy bottom to anchor for the night. There wasn’t much room as we were surrounded by coral reef and I had to maintain an adequate swing distance from the other two boats.

I found what I thought was the best place and dropped the anchor in 7 metres and laid out about 40 meters of chain. By now it was dark and when I put some load on the anchor with the engines in reverse the anchor started dragging. My worst nightmare, a poor holding bottom.

I up anchored in the dark and cautiously moved around looking for a better bottom using Google Earth imaging running on OpenCPN on my laptop as the charts showed no detail in this area. At one point it shallowed up really quick and there were some crunching sounds coming from the bow’s as we kissed the bottom and I immediately gunned it in reverse.

A few moments later I was ready to try again. This time the anchor appeared to hold but I wasn’t entirely confident, and the wind was blowing 16 knots. I set Sirocco’s anchor alarm and also the anchor alarm on my phone. As the wind swung around a bit Sirocco’s alarm went off several times and I adjusted the alarm radius to compensate.

We didn’t appear to be dragging, but its very hard to tell at night when you are swing back and forth in the wind. I had a few beers after dinner and watched the election results on TV. I was blown away to have TV reception out here, but these cray fishermen are very well setup and have all the luxuries from home. We had no mobile reception though.

A had a terrible sleep as both anchor alarms went off many times and I had to spring out of bed to make sure we weren’t dragging anchor and to make things worse the two boats on the moorings were now behind us. I sat up for several hours until I was satisfied we weren’t dragging anchor and I collapsed back into bed exhausted.

The anchor alarm on my phone kept going off the power saving software was turning of the GPS after so long, so I ended up turning this one off and just relying on Sirocco’s anchor alarm.

The night was much warmer out here only getting down to 19 degrees, compared to 4 degrees the past two night on the coast.

Track Sirocco’s progress

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