I had a great sleep and we were up at seven and gone by
eight heading for Norwegian Bay.
We had perfect sailing conditions with eighteen knots on a
close reach with a confused sea cruising along at seven to eight knots. The swell was huge at around four meters and I was concerned
about getting in through the reef at our destination.
After about seven hours of nice sailing the wind fizzled out
and I had to motor sail the last hour.
The massive swell was smashing huge surf onto the reef as I
approached cautiously, using the radar to see the surf breaks on the chart
plotter. We donned life jackets as a precaution as I cautiously approached the entrance.
It was deep water and looked fine, with just a large swell rolling through.
At one point a large roller came up behind us and I surfed
it in, getting over sixteen knots as I worked the engines to stay on the sweet
spot.
Norwegian Bay is huge and so much bigger than I thought. It
was windy and choppy so I negotiated a passage through the bomies close in to
shore where I dropped the pick in three meters.
After a quick bite to eat, I lowered the tender and we
headed into shore to check out the old whaling station. It was an exciting
beach landing with the shore break crashing onto the beach.
Remains of the jetty landing foundations
The whaling station was established in 1912 and finally
closed in 1957 due to pressure to reduce the kill of hump back whales. In the
fist year of operation over 2000 whales were killed and in the four-year period
1925-28 nearly 3500 whales were slaughtered.
These winches were used to winch the whales up out of the water and onto the landing so they could be cut up and the blubber placed into the reducers.
There were still whale bones scattered around
I was amazed just how much equipment was left rusting away, both
on the beach and back behind the dunes. On the beach are several large winches
used to winch the whales up onto a large jetty platform so they can be chopped up into small pieces.
Behind the dunes are all the boilers (reducers) and the remains of two huge oil storage
tanks. Whale bones and beer bottles were scattered everywhere.
The remains of two huge whale oil storage tanks. I wounder how many whales it took to fill these?
There were the remains of an old jetty, several old engines
and the remains of an old truck which must have been a fun drive in over the huge sand dunes.
There is a small Island to the south west of the bay where
lots of equipment was dumped over the life of the station that I had hoped to dive on, but the weather was
so bad and the water was so dirty, so we just went back to Sirocco and prepared
the boat to move on to Tandabidi tomorrow.
It blew all night and as we were on a lee shore, I was
nervous all-night listening in case the anchor alarm went off.
This bad weather is getting us down and I really hope it
improves soon as it is spoiling all these good places and so far, I have only
been in the water once since leaving Perth nearly nine hundred nautical miles
away.
I had a nice long chat to VK6HDY (Bert) on holidays at
Karajini on 80m tonight.
Two beautiful little swallows rousted in the cockpit on my
fishing rods out of the wind and rain and refused to budge every time I walked
past them. In the morning they sang for fifteen minutes before flying off into
the wind and rain.
Track Sirocco’s
progress
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