This turned out to be one of the worst nights of my life.
The wind increased to around forty knots, but the sea
increased to well over five meters and every second wave was breaking.
Even though I reefed the night before it wasn’t enough and
we were way over powered and it was too dangerous to go onto deck to reduce
sail, so all I could do was to almost stall the sails to reduce speed to around
two to four knots and because of this I could only steer into the wind.
At one point in the night we had a thousand-foot iron ore tanker heading
right for us and there was no way I could alter course. It passed in front of
us doing ten knots only about two hundred meters away and I didn’t breathe for
over an hour and had white knuckles on the wheel.
The waves were so big several times white water broke over
the hard top on Sirocco and showered down all around us. We had waves constantly
crashing over the bow washing over the cabin and we were getting thrown about
and the noise was deafening.
It was a relief when the sun came up but even more scary
when you could see the size of the breaking waves coming at us. I down loaded a
weather report and the current conditions were predicted to last until 7 PM, so
it was going to be a very long day.
At some stage there was a loud bang and the boom went out of
control. I now had no choice and had to go on deck to sort out the issue. With life jacket on, I attached my harness to
the mast and attempted to lower the main sail.
At one point a large breaking wave was heading directly for
me and I hugged the mast with all my might and hung on as the wave crashed over
me and I cut my thumb badly on one of the mast fittings.
I managed to get the main sail down and secured and roll up
the genoa. The mounting hardware on the boom holding the main sheet pulleys had
broken, so I secured the boom the best I could and started both engines and set
a course for land to try to get to calmer water as soon as possible.
We were still sixty miles offshore and I could only steer
south east to make any progress through the large breaking waves. Over the
hours the wind and sea gradually moderated and slowly I could gradually change
course to head for Port Headland for shelter.
In the previous twenty-four-hour period, we had covered over
150 nautical miles, and for about twelve hours during the gale we covered only
about 30 nautical miles and it took us all day to travel the 60 odd nautical
miles back to Port Headland.
The last thing I wanted to do was enter one of Australia’s busiest
shipping ports at night, but once again we had no choice and we just wanted to
get out of these rough conditions and recuperate in sheltered waters.
As super tankers were being moved in and out of the channel,
we snuck in between two tankers and at 19:30 somehow found the tiny anchorage
in the dark and dropped anchor next to another catamaran (Playground) who was
also heading towards the Kimberly.
Track Sirocco’s
progress
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