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.
