The plan was, to sail to Fame Cove in Port Stephens and chill out on the boat for a few days and then meet our friends at Shoal Bay for Australia Day. The wind had another idea though. We set off this morning and were headed almost directly into the wind so had to mostly use the engine instead of the sails. It was what I would call ‘pretty rough’, but what Tom would probably just call ‘motoring with the nose on the wind’. The pictures will never do it justice, but although it was probably only about 1-1.5 metre swells, it really did feel quite big and rocky to me. Thankfully though, I didn’t get seasick (but queasy at times), so we can tick that off the list of things to check before sailing around the world!
The wind really picked up as the day went on and knocked us back to a slow 2 knots of headway, so after 4 hours and only being about half of the way there we had to call it quits and head back home to Newcastle again. I’d only just gotten over feeling queasy and actually starting to enjoy the rocking and then I had a whole new kind of rocking to get used to. Now we were going with the wind and the swell, had the jib (the front sail) out and were able to ride down the waves. Woohoo, our iSailor app tells us we got up to 9 knots and averaged about 5!
On our way back I got up the courage (and the stomach) to look back at the swell coming towards us, but that brown pointy thing didn’t look like swell. Nope, that’s a mother-flipping shark that is! I’d say we saw about 8 or so Hammerhead sharks all swimming on the surface of the water. Since I was safe and dry on the boat, I was pretty excited to see them so for me it totally made turning the boat back towards home totally worth it.
We approach Nobbies lighthouse and breakwall at about the same time as a massive tanker called ‘Lambert Maru’. This thing is HUGE and you do not want to get in it’s way so we had to drop the sail, start the engine and turn back into the wind & swell again to get out of it’s way. Once it’s in front of us, we follow it in to the harbour and then head towards our home in the marina. We’re home – tired, sun-burnt and hungry!
4 thoughts on “A Sharky Encounter”