Nordlys is an S&S-designed Swan 47, built in 1980. She has looked after us well for nearly 50,000 miles, 44,000 of them since we left Lymington in mid 2000. Early January 2006 found us in Pittwater, just north of Sydney Harbour, with Annette and myself plus Stuart and Annabelle Ingram, both OCC members, on board. Troubadour, their own water-home, designed by Mike Pocock, had been left to fend for herself on a mooring while they came to Tasmania with us.

  Sydney to HobartThings did not pan out quite as planned (how often do they in the sailing life?). As we came abeam of Sydney Heads the sky went black and a brisk wind from the south sprang up to replace the gentle easterly that we had been enjoying. I understand that the family motto of the Ingrams is ‘he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day’. We obeyed this and reached the few miles into Sydney harbour and up to Rushcutters Bay. Securing alongside at the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia with a by now strong southerly blowing, we congratulated ourselves on a sensible decision.

Two days later, after an easy sail south, we anchored as the sun set in the shelter of Gabo Island having rounded the magnificent red granite lighthouse on its southern tip. As Nordlys lay quietly at anchor, the only noise was the mooing of some grazing cattle and the cries of roosting penguins.

First light and Stuart and I got underway, treating the girls to a slow get up. The forecast was for northeast 20 to 25 knots, with perhaps 30 knots offshore. The Bass Strait was about to show us what it can do. Two hours out and the single reef was replaced by a double. The genoa was rolled well down. Nordlys rolled happily on at 8, 9 and 10 knots. Soon, however, we had a full gale up the chuff. As Stuart said, while helming with 12 and once 14 knots on the clock, ‘good character-building stuff’. Annette was heard to mutter that she had enough character to last a lifetime and had no need to build more! The seas shortened as we entered the shallower water of the continental shelf, and all I will say about the wind speed is that very little was being said by anyone. The entire surface of the water was streaked with white, and the tops of the waves were being blown off in a blur of spume. For the first time in our ownership Nordlys suffered a mini poop. I was helming, with the others down below listening to the weather forecast, when suddenly the wind appeared to calm, Nordlys slowed, and the next wave arrived down my neck. However by evening time the wind was down and the night was spent motoring over a glassy calm sea!

The islands of the Kent Group lie to the northwest of Flinders Island, uninhabited except for two volunteer rangers who do three month stints on Deal Island, which has many wallabies and a flock of Cape Baron geese. Yachties and the odd maniac kayaker are the only visitors, though the group provides some fairly snug anchorages. Even so, it was in this group that HMS Beagle dragged and was nearly lost while seeking shelter, some time after her famous circumnavigation with Darwin on board. We walked to the original lighthouse, a five mile round trip with a 1000 foot climb, visited the mini-museum situated in the old lighthouse keeper’s cottage, and enjoyed the company of the ranger and his wife. At the time of our visit the ranger was the chief pilot of the Victoria search/rescue/police helicopter fleet; his wife had run a helicopter fleet in Mozambique and also on Christmas Island. They were interesting people, enjoying a three month sabbatical from ordinary life. The mini-museum tells a story of a fairly frugal life and much hardship over the years that the lighthouse was working – from around the 1890s until 1992. Altogether the visit was a magical one and will not be forgotten quickly by any of us.

Leaving Deal Island behind us we motored out towards Lady Barron, the small village on the south end of Flinders Island, but the Tasman was about to do its trick again. After just under two hours of motoring the wind arrived. At first a lively breeze, soon a full gale from the northwest was speeding us on our way. The final turn across the sound into Lady Barron put us almost into what was by now force 9, so we elected to anchor under the lee of a small island some two miles south of our destination. Here we enjoyed a peaceful night and, waking to sunshine and calm, we motored across to the harbour – though perhaps the word ‘harbour’ gives the wrong impression, as it comprises simply a double jetty made of girders. However, the attitude of the locals was a pleasure and we were invited to tie up alongside a fishing boat. An hour’s walk to the local hilltop gave us a splendid view of yesterday’s windy passage. Dinner in the local hostelry was followed by a good night’s sleep.Next morning, 0730 produced sunshine and a gentle westerly, 0800 sunshine and 50 knots across the mast, and by 0900 Nordlys was tied in a veritable cats-cradle of lines to the fishing boat on our starboard side, the head of the jetty in front of us and the rest of the jetty to our port side. To windward the sea was a mass of white, and ashore I found I could not stand up to film without holding onto the fence posts. Our anemometer constantly read over 35 knots and most of the time over 40, with the odd trip into the 50s. The noise was deafening. A local man arrived with two huge, 5ft diameter, balloon fenders. These were invaluable as Nordlys bucked and fretted at her lines and against the steel fishing boat.

After a guided tour of Flinders by 4-wheel drive, and with the wind down, we left Lady Barron at first light sailing out into a grey dawn. The next half hour was to provide one of nature’s great spectacles. For minute after minute there appeared to be a black, snake-like object just above the water either 100m in front of us or 100m behind. This was created by thousands, perhaps almost millions, of mutton birds flying from their roosts to their feeding grounds at sea. As it got lighter the birds became more obvious. These amazing creatures – among the most travelled of the world’s creatures – make an annual migration which involves both Tasmania and the Aleutian Islands. In Tasmania and Flinders Islands they have traditionally been caught in their burrows and killed for their meat and, perhaps more importantly, for their oil, a filthy job but one which gave a lot of comparatively well-paid employment in times past. It has been shown that even when mutton birding, as it is known, was at its height and the numbers killed were astronomic, it hardly made a dent in the overall population. At the end of the war the US Navy was attempting to clear the Aleutians of Japanese. Thinking that they were being approached by the Japanese fleet, as shown on their early radar, they opened up and millions of dollars’ worth of shells were let loose. Nothing was ever found, and it is now accepted that the radar returns were probably of mutton birds in flight.

The promised northerly never came and most of the day we motored in grey drizzle. At night fog came for a few hours, but cleared to allow us to enter Wineglass Bay on GPS and radar and drop our hook near another yacht. The morning showed her to be a beautiful Swan 82 owned by the CEO of Ericsson. Wineglass Bay is very special, and also an area with excellent walking, so we all enjoyed some 12km and pleasantly aching muscles before spending the evening drinking and eating aboard the aforementioned Swan.

Next day we beat, then reached, into a cold 20 knot southerly. However the sun shone, and by mid-afternoon we were approaching Shoal Bay on Maria Island. On the chart this looks very similar to Wineglass, but in reality it was much more exposed and also – living up to its name – a good metre shallower than charted, giving us just 20 cm under the keel in the open approach. We therefore anchored some half a mile off the beach, decided against staying for a day, and carried on next morning to Port Arthur. We had an excellent 8 knot sail down the coast and round Tasman Island at Cape Pillar. By now it was blowing 30 knots, and once round the Cape the 100m cliffs did not, as I had hoped, give us shelter but threw horrendous down-draughts at us. With this wind forward of the beam and suffering the rare experience of Nordlys’s lee deck well underwater, we quickly dropped the main and carried on up towards Port Arthur under a pocket of headsail.

Port Arthur is the site of a purpose-built convict prison, which today is semi-restored and makes the most delightful stopover. One point that comes over strongly when visiting the museum and site ruins is that much of the convict system was ahead of its time and there was a genuine attempt to develop the inmates so that, in time, they could rejoin society. Floggings were rare, although the solitary confinement cells for troublemakers apparently reduced many to insanity. The majority of prisoners did, however, serve their time – usually seven years – and then got the chance to make good, which many did very successfully.

Two days later we sailed up the Derwent River to the city of Hobart, where Nordlys was put to bed at the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania and we went on a two-week motoring trip of Tasmania, which was in every way a success. Tasmania and its capital city are, in our opinion, a jewel which is often overlooked by travellers. After the motor tour Annabelle and Stuart left and Annette and I set off south. 

Hobart to the Great Australian Bight. The D’Entrecasteaux Channel lies between mainland Tasmania and Bruny Island. Running about 30 miles south-southwest from just south of Hobart, it provides delightful cruising with an almost endless series of beautiful and sheltered anchorages. We spent several days exploring a few of these, including one off the hamlet of Lymington. We had to spend a night there because Lymington, Hampshire, on the south coast of England, is our and Nordlys’s home.Our last anchorage at the southern end of this waterway was in Recherche Bay, where we were lucky enough to meet several Australian yachts from Fremantle. It was one of those times when we were sad that some of them were going in the opposite direction to us, as friendships could easily have been made. Recherche Bay had been in the local news lately because the owners of much of it wanted to sell and the logging companies wanted to buy. An outcry ensued as the cutting for pulp of first growth – ie. virgin forest – is a very thorny subject here. It is a classic case of greens versus those with commercial interests and those wanting jobs. It seems that at the moment the woods have been saved by one Dick Smith, an Australian entrepreneur who owns a nationwide chain of electrical goods shops, who has put up the money to keep the land away from the logging companies. While touring by car we drove for miles through forestry land that had been cropped in the 1960s and 1970s and was now regenerating. As a PR exercise the logging companies made the area available to the public for recreation, and there were many signs up saying the year in which each area had been cut. To my inexperienced eye this seemed a happy compromise between financial gain, with all that that does for the community, and saving the land from long-term damage.

The passage around the southern coast was relatively easy. The frustration of calm conditions followed by a brisk headwind when some 20 to 25 miles from our destination was more than made up for by the beauty of the scenery we were passing. Dolphins played for hours round the bow, albatross wheeled around us, and always the wild shore was there with its colours changing vividly in the clear light as the sunshine came and went. The anchor dram, after logging 75 miles from dawn to dusk, was enjoyed in perfect calm in a cove just two miles into Port Davey – though the name is a misnomer these days as nobody lives within 70 miles of this area and it is complete wilderness. On the way in we experienced 3m swells due, no doubt, to a Southern Ocean storm many miles away. One moment we were seeing the beaches or rocks at water level, the next only the tops of the cliffs.During the next few days, in this place of splendid isolation and raw beauty, we climbed hills, moved around several anchorages up to nine miles inland with Nordlys, and motored in the dinghy another three miles up the Melaleuca River to the short, crushed-rock airstrip that brings in the walkers and kayakers who were our only companions other than the crews of two other yachts. When we dinghied up the river it was so calm that it was difficult to see where bankside trees stopped and reflections started. I could go on and on describing the area because it had the same magic for us as the Scottish coast from Oban to Cape Wrath, which in many ways it closely resembles. We did feel very privileged to be enjoying one of the world’s last great temperate wilderness regions.

The weather closed in for our last three days with the cloud-base just above the masthead. The rain fell in torrents and the wind blew – I suspect normality was returning. At Maatsuyker Island, just off the south coast of Tasmania and only 25 miles from our anchorage as the crow flies (or perhaps I should say the sea eagle, as there are no crows in Port Davey), the reported actual on the second day of this weather was northwest 43 knots with 5m seas on top of 4m swells. I say no more. We were anchored in a reasonably sheltered bay known as Wombat Cove, but the chain tugged and groaned and the boat shuddered as the gusts hit.

On the fourth day a window of escape opened and we were off. Twenty-four hours later we were north of Macquarie Harbour and Strahan and enjoying a fine sailing breeze from the east. The morning forecast was for east-northeast 15 to 20 knots, becoming northerly 15 knots in 48 hours’ time. With our course for Portland, Victoria, being northwest we reckoned on a fine sail, with perhaps half a day’s reasonable beat at the end – but it was not to be, and by early afternoon we were down to two reefs and the tiny staysail. We had to shout to make ourselves heard as Nordlys flung herself forward with sheets only a fraction eased and 35 to 40 knots across the deck. Morale was not high. As if to make her feelings clear, Nordlys developed a rather alarming noise from her steering, though there was no friction in it. Investigation (an interesting exercise opening and emptying the stern locker in order to get at the rudder quadrant in these conditions) showed nothing wrong with the steering mechanism, and a half-hearted squirt of WD40 on the top seal produced silence.

To be honest we were rather frightened. Either we went back, a horrible thought, or we went on across 200 miles of Bass Strait with the prospect of this wind going right onto the nose, our only way out being to run off into the great Southern Ocean. We settled down to the next 24 hours, which were not to be the greatest in our lives. Twenty minutes later the sacrificial bar on the Monitor self-steering broke, whether from strain or due to hitting something I will never know. Hand-steering or our 25-year-old Neco autopilot were the remaining options. However, as the hours went by the seas never got that bad and the boat behaved fantastically. Luckily ‘he who decides our fates’ had decided we needed a break, and the wind abated in the early hours without going into the north. We ended up reaching in 20 knots to within 10 miles of our destination, into which we motored in a flat calm!

Although Portland is one of Australia’s earliest settlements, today it is a small, rather sleepy, town owing its existence only to its huge pulp mill and loading port. One surprise, however, was a most delightful and unexpectedly sophisticated restaurant – fine food and excellent wines with service to match, in well decorated surroundings with starched table cloths, and all at a sensible price. The ocean was soon forgotten. One morning a cry of ‘Nordlys’ brought us out to find some friends we had not seen since Fakarava in the Tuamotus. A sheep farmer and his wife from Kangaroo Island, having returned from their own circumnavigation, saw our boat as they motored through the town on their way to an old school reunion. Fellowship of the sea also occurred when Ted Meissher called down to see us and it turned out he remembered both Mike and Pat Pocock and Hugh and Cathy Marriott, Lymington sailors who called in here in 1993 and 1998 respectively.

Another 240 miles of easy sailing brought us to Backstairs Passage, a doubtful name in my view for the strait between the mainland and Kangaroo Island. We were, alas, two hours after dark and also into the last half of an ebbing tide, so we were too late to enter American River. Sadly, we decided not to wait at sea for the night but to sail on past, using the fair wind to make Port Lincoln by sunset the next day. I am sure a great stop was missed, as was meeting up with friends, but the Bight was beckoning and we wanted to get going on this hurdle. 

The Great Australian Bight to Fremantle. Two days later we left Port Lincoln, a prosperous if rather soulless fishing port, and beat into a gentle breeze and against a 1 to 2 knot current for some 17 miles to Point Catastrophe (another doubtful name). Rounding said point we were back into the Southern Ocean swells and, with a freshening breeze from the port quarter, proceeded to run off 96 miles in the next 12 hours. After three days at sea and a boisterous, bumpy night ride onto the continental shelf, dawn came up with not a cloud in the sky and two of the outer islands of the Recherche group exactly where they should be. This group is only partially surveyed, as the chart tells the user in no uncertain terms. It consists of 150 islands and over 1500 islets, all uninhabited, and is rarely visited. We had crossed the Great Australian Bight and not suffered the same as Gulliver: ‘We set sail from Bristol May 4, 1699 ... (and) in our passage from thence to the East Indies we were driven by a violent storm to the north west of Van Diemen’s Land. By an observation we found ourselves in latitude of 30 degrees 2 minutes south.’   ‘The Head of the Bight’ – Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift.

After four days three hours at sea, and 688 miles, we dropped the hook in the weird surroundings of Keyhole Cove, Middle Island. Our landfall coincided with my 60th birthday and we celebrated in style. Annette had been feeling rather seasick as we came in across the continental shelf, but she soon perked up and produced a lovely cold lunch of smoked salmon and trout plus avocado salad which was washed down with a good bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.

Keyhole Cove has steep sides that have, over the centuries, been worn into a collection of caves where a band of pirates are said to have lived during the 19th century. It appeared impossible to climb the sides of the cove, so with the brisk northerly wind dying we motored round to the more commonly-used anchorage off the northern beach. Here, after some trouble, we got the anchor in through the weed and a magic evening followed. The sun set slowly over Flinders Peak, highlighting the pink granite. The white sand of the beach sparkled, and Annette produced an excellent supper. Two happy, tired sailors slept well and calls of nature during the night showed us a million stars and a gentle breeze from off the shore. Perfection. The Bight was behind us and the islands and coves of this archipelago were to come.

During the next few days we experienced both of the phenomena for which this coast is known. Firstly, difficulty in getting an anchor to go through the grass that covers most of the sea bed and then to dig into the very hard sand crust underneath the grass. (Locals often use an old-fashioned Admiralty pattern anchor, filing the flukes down and the points very sharp. We did not have such a beast.) Secondly, we would be sailing along with a brisk, northerly, offshore breeze that felt like being in a draughty oven, then three minutes later in a quite cool breeze out of the south. This produced, apart from some rapid sail resetting, a fantastic series of mirages as the cold air worked its way under the hot.A few days of island exploring and we arrived in Esperance, another fairly sleepy small town based around a port through which are exported some four million tonnes of grain a year. It is shortly to begin handling the export of many tonnes of semi-refined nickel ore. This will be in containers, partly because it is very valuable but also because the ships will need to pass through the Great Barrier Reef on the way to Townsville and final refining. Should a disaster happen, the ore is much less likely to cause irreparable pollution if sealed in containers.

We left Esperance at 0615 on 15 March, along with our French friends Michel and Jacqueline in their lovely aluminium Garcia 52 Calibistris. She is an Ovni-type shallow draught design, only without chines, and is built to a very high standard. A horrid night of light winds and big seas followed, during which we resorted to the motor almost ten hours. Morning brought the wind back and while Calibistris went into Albany we carried on as the weathermen were promising a fine and settled few days.

We were rewarded with a lovely sail. The whole way from Tasmania we had been surrounded by albatrosses and shearwaters. Our feathered friends were back with us again, the black shearwaters flying at great speeds while the albatrosses wheeled with their apparently effortless flight – in reality they use the up-draught caused by the approaching swells to give them lift. Many pleasant hours were spent watching these birds and trying, with only some success, to identify the type from our bird book. Each night, about an hour after dark, an almost full moon rose giving near-daylight conditions. Apart from the wind and seas getting up round Cape Leeuwin we had a perfect sail. Even the 25–30 knots that blew for some six hours was from astern. On the final night we had just enough wind to keep her going, with the sea now smooth so there was no slatting of sails. The rather complicated entrance to Fremantle was tackled under engine in no wind. After 540 miles, and three days six hours since casting off, we were tied up in Fremantle. So ended over 8100 miles of sailing, and more anchorages than I can count, since we launched in Whangarei in May 2005. Of those miles, 3100 had been covered between leaving Sydney in early January and reaching Fremantle in mid March. The passage along the southern coast of Australia was an interesting challenge in an area underrated by the world’s cruising yachtsmen. There is far more to do and see there than we had realised and we are very glad we chose this route, yet to our knowledge only three out of the hundred or so foreign yachts which traverse Australian waters each year left the continent – and Tasmania – to starboard in 2006.  

CAPTIONS Nordlys going to windward Nordlys’s skipper Nordlys’s mate, Annette Running into Bass Straight Morning after the Bass Straight Gale Nordlys off Deal Island in the Kent Group Anchored in front of our bigger sister, a Swan 82, in Wineglass Bay Wine Glass Bay – we are the dot in the distance Cape Pillar, Tasmania Sunset in the Recherche Group, Western Australia Typical 'apres anchor' showing the weed problem Nordlys in the Pacific