Journey’s end almost in sight!

29 July 2024

Where am I? 

Latitude: 24°05.3 S

Longitude: 154°25.4 E

60nm from our waypoint to the north of Fraser Island and the entrance to Hervey Bay, on our way into Bundaberg on the Queensland coast. Just over 100nm to go on our trans Pacific adventure!

How is the weather?

Blue skies with scattered cloud, wind at 15 knots from 160°, waves less than 2 metres and temperature around 23°c. So we are sailing close hauled towards our waypoint off Fraser Island.

What am I feeling?

Firstly, relief that we have avoided the very strong winds and high waves to the south of us, off Gold Coast, which was our originally planned destination. Secondly, looking forward to landfall and a quiet night’s sleep – the journey is the whole point of long distance sailing, but tying up alongside after a sometimes challenging passage is pretty sweet too!

What has happened this week?

It has been almost 2 weeks since my last blog – please excuse my lax attention to the weekly schedule set back in Antigua 8 months ago.

During the last 2 weeks, a lot of water has passed under our keel with our new crew of Anne, Ferry and Andrew. We sailed the 450 odd miles from Vuda Marina, Fiji into Port Resolution, Tanna Island, Vanuatu. Then, the overnight passage to Port Vila, Vanuatu and, now, the 1,100 nautical mile sail to Queensland and our journey’s end.

We had lured our crew onto Fujin with visions of champagne sailing in tropical waters with magical anchorages and calm, crystal clear seas and idyllic swimming locations dancing in their head. What they actually got was rough seas, often contrary winds and anxiety over the progress of a large storm system off New South Wales and southern Queensland. As we say on board, we just have to adapt, adjust and accommodate to the situation in which we find ourselves!

We had not originally planned to go to Vanuatu, stopping instead at Noumea, New Caledonia. But the current civil turbulence there meant that we (and most other sailors) had to switch to Vanuatu. I’m glad we did as our stop at Tanna Island turned out to be a highlight of the voyage. The people there live much as they have since the peripatetic Capt Cook came here – the villages are dominated by palm frond structures with few more modern ones in evidence. The people, now Melanesian rather than Polynesian, are very friendly and welcoming, unspoiled by mass tourism – long may it last!

And the night sky on the passage to Port Resolution was putting on a fine display again. During one night watch, I saw Mars rising above the eastern horizon, followed shortly thereafter by the glare of Jupiter. And in between, the Pleiades: Byron’s “swarm of fireflies caught in a silver braid”.

The visit to the gaping maw of Mount Yasur, the world’s most active volcano (although Etna may now take that crown), was amazing. Standing on the edge of the crater in the middle of a fire blasted hellscape with regular explosions of molten rock reverberating through one’s chest and spectacular fireworks lighting the night sky, one feels as if one has travelled back to the dawn of time and the formation of our planet. Well worth the 45 minute bone rattling trip in the back of the inevitable Japanese 4×4 pick up truck on deeply rutted and unpaved roads. Actually there was one short strip of tarmac’ed road – one wit among us quipped that the unpaved roads were the contribution of European aid agencies while the tarmac’ed section was a gift of the PRC – such projects are much in evidence in this part of the Pacific.

Port Vila was a necessary stop for refuelling and provisioning, and to clear out of Vanuatu. It rained quite a lot of the time we were there and we were quite happy to be safely on a buoy at the well-protected Yachting World Marina in the centre of town. It has the feel of a frontier town – which, according to friends who lived and worked there 40 years ago, it was then too: probably not too much has changed in the interim.

We obsessively logged into PredictWind twice a day to study the forecasts for the Coral Sea, looking for the perfect weather window for a nice reach all the way to Gold Coast and our targeted port of entry of Southport. However, rather than wait a week or more for something that might never happen, we decided to head off with a less than perfect forecast, with the fall back of clearing into Australia at Bundaberg of even Mackay if the weather was looking too vicious to make Southport.

In the event, we took the worst of the weather in the first two days, sailing at up to 9 knots in winds of up to 30 knots and waves of 4 metres – a tough introduction to 1,000 mile passage making for our crew! The middle section of the 6.5 day passage was calmer with one day of the dreamed-of champagne sailing conditions. Now we are into the last 24 hours with the coastal shipping lanes to cross and Hervey Bay to cover before heading into Bundaberg.

We took the decision to activate our “Plan B” after seeing all the forecast models telling us there would be a day or more of bashing into 25-30 knot winds and 4-5 metre seas off Gold Coast. Neither Fujin nor her crew would thank me for persisting with Plan A! So Bundaberg it is and our maxim of “adapt, adjust and accommodate” proves its worth yet again! We have been sailing close hauled most of today but are now motor sailing in order to cross the shipping lanes as quickly as possible. If the wind permits, we will switch off the engine thereafter for the last 50 miles to the Bundaberg Port Marina, 1 mile up the Burnett River from the sea.

We’re now preparing for our Biosecurity inspection – eating up the last of our painstakingly foraged foodstuffs such as reblochon and tapenade from Tahiti – but inevitably some of our stocks will fall victim to the tough Australian import rules, à la Galapagos and Fiji. A small price to pay, ultimately, for reaching our journey’s end safely after 8 months and 10,000 miles.

There is one more blog to come once we have completed the trip, including deciding where and when to leave Fujin for the next few months. Probably, Elizabeth and I will double-hand her 2 days down to Sanctuary Cove Marina, Fujin’s long-intended temporary home, early next week once the storm leaves the Sunshine and Gold Coasts to live up to their reputation for warm, sunny days and zephyr-like breezes!

Fujin out!