Day 44, Year 3: Sunday in Seisia

Day 44, Year 3: Sunday in Seisia
Date: Sunday, June 22, 2008
Weather: Sunny Day with Squalls; Winds SE 20, Gusting to 35 at Anchor
Location: Seisia, Queensland, Australia

Windy, windy, windy describes today. Not many people left their boats as I think we were all afraid of dragging anchor. The 35 knot gusts were constant throughout the day. Things seem slightly more settled tonight, but these heavy winds aren’t going away for another day or two. We are in the protected anchorage, or at least as protected as you can get from southeast winds blowing over the very low land of Cape York, but the anchorage is small for the 16 boats that are in here, and that compounds
the worries. It will be mid-week before things really start to settle down as that BIG Fat High is moving very slowly across Australia. So while we wait, we plan for the next stage of our trip. When we leave here we are heading into the Northern Territory. We are learning a whole new set of rules. Tides here can be semi diurnal, with a high, low, then another high, low every twenty-four hours (tides as we know them) OR they can be diurnal which means you just have one high and one low in a twenty-four
hour period. And one anchorage might be semi diurnal and the one next door diurnal. We have had currents that run north and west on the flood, but now they will flood south and east. So there are many things to learn. We have gotten some great information from other cruisers and Runae on Blue Marlin even had an electronic copy of the cruising guide for the Northern Territory that is so coveted. Almost no one has the book as it is out of print, but it is the only complete cruising guide for this
area. Now that we have that, we feel much more confident that we can at least make informed decisions.

I worked on organizing photos today and Mark did a lot of planning in addition to helping Patrick and Margaret on Aqua Magic do some repairs. We had dinner on Scot Free II tonight and talked more about our plans for leaving here. The library here has internet, so we are told that cruisers line up for their turn at checking out the latest weather reports on the web. I guess we will spend part of tomorrow standing in that line and will report our decisions in tomorrow’s log.

Day 43, Year 3: Cape York to Seisia

Day 43, Year 3: Cape York to Seisia
Date: Saturday, June 21, 2008
Weather: Overcast with Drizzle; Winds SE Variable
Latitude: 10 degrees 50.908 minutes S
Longitude: 142 degrees 21.757 minutes E
Location: Seisia, Queensland, Australia
Total Miles Today: 20.44 nautical miles

The weather is definitely dominating the scene and all decisions we are making right now. I really wanted to stay at Cape York another day so I could climb to the top of York Island, but that didn’t happen. A huge high pressure system, a 1041, is moving east across Australia and causing havoc everywhere. Neither Mark nor I ever remember hearing about a high pressure system greater than a 1036 since we have been in the Pacific, so this one is what they call a BFH-BIG Fat High. We have had drizzle
off and on all day, so our twenty mile trip from Cape York to Seisia was not as nice as it could have been. But visibility was okay and it wasn’t raining hard, so no complaints mate. When we heard on the net this morning that boats that left Seisia to cross the Gulf of Carpentaria in the past couple of days are getting pounded with 35 to 40 knot winds and 6 meter breaking seas, a little drizzle was fine with me. We have heard that you should never try to cross the Gulf of Carpentaria during spring
tides. These are the tides around a full or new moon each month. Neap tides come around the half moon which is next Thursday, so we are going to pay attention to what the old timers and fishermen say and wait to cross. They also say that you should go south from here about three days or 120 miles before starting the westward cross. So we are going to do that as well. We had hoped to go straight across the Gulf to the Wessel Islands that extend northward from the western coast of the Gulf of
Carpentaria, but instead we will be stopping in the small outpost of Gove and then head through a pass in the islands that extend northward in order to continue our trip west to Darwin.

I’ll bet you are asking yourself just where the Gulf of Carpentaria might be. If you look at the continent of Australia, you will see a pointed peak on the east side. That is Cape York. Then there is a dip before the next hump of land. That is the Gulf of Carpentaria. Our destination of Darwin is on the far side of the next hump. Just north of where we are now is where the Coral Sea from the east coast of Australia meets the Arafura Sea that runs across the top of the continent. Evidently
there is always a struggle where they meet, so that is why it is wise to head a little further south into the Gulf before starting the crossing.

Seisia (say-shuh) is a very tiny little northern outpost, but it has great amenities. There really is no town here, but there is a campground for those who venture this far north by land and the campground has a laundry and a little restaurant. There is a BP station for those who need fuel and there is a very nice little grocery store. We were shocked that it was so well stocked with fresh veggies and most everything you could want-except pretzels. Mark loves pretzels as a snack and they are
just really hard to come by in this part of the world. There is a library here with internet and a clinic that are open during the week, and there is a little town, Bamaga, not far away that has a small hospital. Patrick and Margaret arranged a ride with someone and went to the hospital in Bamaga to have a doctor take another look at Patrick’s hand. It is healing nicely, but the doctor would like him to come back on Monday for one more look before he heads off to Darwin. Patrick and Margaret
had another bit of bad luck today. When they came in to anchor, they somehow hit another boat in the anchoring process and broke one of their stanchions. The other boat was Oz. Steve on Oz was trying to help them with anchoring, but there is a wicked current in here and things went pear shaped (as Patrick would say). Both Aqua Magic and Oz were part of the Class of 2005 that went through the Panama Canal together. There are not a great number of us that transited from Panama early in 2006 that
are here in Australia. Some are already in the Mediterranean, some are headed for South Africa, and some are still in the South Pacific. So those of us who are here will always be there to help one another.