bum scraping

Before I get to the title of this post, a little background. We sailed out of Gove Harbour 10 days ago with a beautiful NW breeze, a friend Ross, was working on the ship loader as we sailed past and sent us this photo of Butjikit gliding past. Once again we caught a nice mackerel as we sailed out so dinner for the first night was sorted.

We headed North and for the first time passed through Shark Alley in the Brombie Islands, its a narrow passage but in certain conditions its very advantageous to be able to take this route. We have done it in power boats but never in the yacht. All went very smoothly and we now have a track thru there on the plotter for future use. 

We ended up heading back to Australian’s Bay on Marchinbar Island as it was the best angle for sailing to, we had a great sail up there, only having to motor sail with one engine for small parts of the trip when the breeze dropped, and the last hour into the anchorage motoring as the wind ended up on the nose.

We spent a pleasant few days there, I caught quite a lot of squid that were hanging round the boat so that was a bonus, we also got 1 nice little tuna out in the bay from the tender and a couple of reef fish for another meal. Lots of waterfalls and wet season streams running so plenty of trips in the tender for showers and swims!

Next we moved north to Cray Bay which is a stunning anchorage, it has steep cliffs, 2 waterfalls tumbling off them, a small sandy beach, a rocky beach with a great waterfall for a shower and tub and presumably crays in the coral! It also allowed us to explore the beautiful bays either side, Whale Bay to the South & Hand Spear Bay to the North. We spent a couple of days here before the building Easterly swell made it a bit uncomfortable, we tried moving to Hand Spear Bay, but it was little better, so we sailed back down to Australian’s Bay and anchored in the Eastern arm of it which is the only bay other than Raragala that offers protection from the Easterlies. (generated by the effects of Cyclone Alfred off Queensland.)

Part of our plans for this trip was to explore these bays between Australian’s Bay & Burston Bay because really no one ever goes to them, but they looked interesting and in fact turned out to be incredible, we shall certainly be back again. They were all nice, but Hand Spear bay was truly stunning with more fresh water than any other bay we have found at the Wessel’s previously.

 

 

The persistent Easterlies will probably prevent us revisiting them this trip, but thats ok, plenty of other opportunities! Here are some of the fresh water spots we found.

So we found ourselves back in the Eastern arm of Australian’s Bay, which brings us to the title of the post, “Bum Scraping”! We realised the beach here at low tide was perfect for beaching Butjikit and giving her hulls a much needed scrape to get the barnacles and weed off, its over 2 years since we anti fouled her and its actually amazing how good the hulls are once we scrape them. I think using the boat a lot and scraping the hulls every 3 months or so has been the reason for this.

We did lots of exploring and calculating the day before to try to work out exactly when to drive onto the beach as the tide dropped and have enough water to float off again on the high tide that night. This was mainly done in the tender and its little sounder came in very handy for the calculations!

So at 10:45am we went aground and then as the tide went out we scraped her clean, it went really well and we had her all done in a couple of hours, which is the quickest ever. The fact that the beach was very flat meant she sat more flat and we were able to work quicker. Anyway it was very pleasing that it all went so well. We had also chosen the specific part of the beach because a small freshwater creek comes out at that point so it gave us a spot to go and have a swim and wash after scraping the hull because you end up with lots of oceanic micro fauna and flora all over you!

So she is all nice and clean for the next leg of this trip, hopefully she will slip along a knot or two faster! We are probably going to head down towards Raragala Bay at some point, but while these Easterlies keep blowing we will happily stay in our very comfortable anchorage!

(dont forget to click on the ‘i‘ above the gallery if you want to see the image captions.)