Drop Offs and Labrynths

9th June 2010

A day which was to end with some anxiety, started well on a crisp Mid North Coast Morning. Due to some timing demands with the Yamba arrival, we were up at 03:15 and out the Coffs harbour entrance at 04:00. The departure was dark and uneventful but for my ship mate getting his Port and Starboard mixed up and thus directing me to turn towards the wave covered rocks; advice I questioned very quickly, thereby gaining an equally quick retraction and correction.

Once at sea we set the mainsail under motor as I was happy to keep things simple until dawn some 2 hrs away. After a brief attempt to talk to the 24hrs services of Coffs VMR (whom I would guess were fast asleep) we soon settled into a very nice 6 kts in good conditions. With the sunrise I set the genoa, shut down the engine, got us a cuppa and cooked up some eggs for breakfast. All in all an entirely pleasant experience including a visit from a pod of dolphin who stayed briefly, dashing under the bow and such and, whats seemed an exceptional number of large vessel traffic.

Quite apart from the big ships, of interest on this north bound leg is that there are a number of ‘hard bits’ that need to be avoided. As our departure was night and due to my aviation bred urge to avoid the hard bits, I planned a course well off shore. This actually took us to the edge of what I took to be the continental shelf or what Nimo might have called the "drop off," a remarkable place as the water depth drops from about 70m to 880m in a very short space, a feature that was soon manifest. As we neared this region, the seas became quite lumpy as the swells increased in size considerably – not surprising really so we decided not to stay!

With daylight I could afford to be a tad more daring with the rocks so I altered course to bring us back to the coast. It was about now that we got a wind change whereby our lovely broad reach was replaced by a wind straight down our next track. This slowed our progress and as I had to make Yamba before sunset I again called on the Yanmar. With some speed recovered we soon found PILGRIM burying her bow from time to time in the oncoming seas with the occasional green water rolling all the way to the dodger. So our perfect day had diminished some but this was soon addressed by another whale sighting.

Staring out to sea I suddenly saw a picture perfect tail emerge from the water on our starboard bow at about 100m range. He/she was going north and seemed in no hurry to avoid us. Even so, an urgent call for the camera, two or three more sighting, a wait, then nothing. As we stared at the again featureless ocean we knew we had missed the shot – Again!

Now our early departure from Coffs, had been driven by the tides at Yamba. As the Clarence is such a big river, the outgoing tide stream creates breaking waves on the bar in any conditions. The aim then is to arrive near the top of the tide while it is still ‘flooding’. This is further supported by the need for depth as one negotiates the river itself. So the planned departure and the planned speed all should have worked but as we were slowed by the adverse winds another issue emerged; that of a night time negotiation of a relatively tricky arrival path in the river mouth.

Arriving at the bar at 16:30 entry was fine but as expected, the trip to Yamba required a lot of concentration and attention to the charts as the route is a tight, shallow and  circuitous labrynth defined by a myriad of small and ‘far from clear’ markers. This was further challenged at the time of our arrival, by an outgoing flotilla of fishing trawlers all seeking to share this narrow passage. None the less, a joint effort soon had us tied up at Yamba marina some 13hrs after leaving Coffs behind. Beer-O-Clock!