Whaling and gnashing

How many times have I wished the weather were otherwise! This morning I sit at the computer with my cup of tea, looking over my shoulder at a perfect morning with a bare whisper of wind and clear blue skies. Kukka creaks on her mooring lines as she moves back and forth with the turning tide. It’s time to be gone from Coffs Harbour, but this damn weather has us boxed in.

There are two weathers, you see. There is what’s outside, and then there's what’s on the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) website which I crawled out of my warm bed at 6.30 am to check. It wasn’t beyond hope that the cold front would have sped up overnight, was it? If I didn’t look, I wouldn’t know, and if I didn’t know, then perhaps we would miss another opportunity to go…

For five days after we got in from Noumea, we stopped ‘looking at weather’ - by which I mean, the regular monitoring and endless conversation about weather charts and forecasts. We settled into the loveliness of being still. What did it matter if it was blowing a gale outside? We weren’t going anywhere, and it was snug inside the boat (Swedish boats have wonderfully decadent diesel heaters). One very rainy day we went to the movies in Sawtell. A couple of mornings we had coffee and breakfast out. I stopped making bread because there is an interesting bakery in Coffs (K-pane Artisan Bakery). I walked up Muttonbird Island (pictured below) to watch the whales in the distance. Whales, in my experience, look much, much better from a distance.

But then on Sunday, we felt the tug. The rain had blown over, the sun was shining, and we’d thawed out in all senses. We had had enough of stillness. Just a short 230 miles of coastal sailing from here to the safe-as-houses refuge of Broken Bay, and from there a mere day sail to Sydney. Let’s do it! We pulled up the weather charts and decided they looked good to go. So we told the marina office we were leaving at dawn the next day, and paid our bill. Then, for goodness sake, we went ten-pin bowling with Panacea (Alex, below, had a style which out-classed us all)). Too easy, as Australians say.

What was I thinking? When have we ever been able to move down – or up, for that matter – the Australian east coast without paying our dues to the weather gods? On Sunday night, as if some malevolent sprite were monkeying with the BOM forecasting tools, what had been a sweet-as-pie forecast turned mean-mouthed and sullen. Winds blowing from the south were predicted down the coast the following day. Add to that a southerly swell of 2 metres. Oh no, said Alex. No way we’re sailing south into southerly winds and a southerly swell. We canned our departure. And then, as if to spite us, as the day progressed, the wind blew harder and harder from the north-east. I could have cried from frustration.

With hindsight (who needs it?), we should have gone on Sunday morning, as the yacht below did.

We’d have had two days of strong north-easterlies and slipped into Broken Bay just ahead of this pesky cold front. But we weren’t thinking weather on Saturday. I was flat out like a lizard in the weak spring sunshine, deep in the stranger-than-fiction lives of The Mitford Girls. Alex was pottering, doing boat jobs, his favorite. We’d relaxed - and we’d skipped our devotions to the weather gods. We hadn’t been watching their shifting shapes, following their bulges and their ridges and their toothy menace. We deserved to miss a turn, in other words. Sailing – or rather, long-distance cruising (for what we do is different from day sailing, and has nothing in common with racing) - is a game of patience. The weather always wins but if you are patient, you can take a few points off it. Did I mention that patience isn’t my strongest suit?

So today I’m back to my familiar agitated, pre-voyage self. The next BOM weather chart comes out mid-morning, and the four-day charts appear between 2 and 3 pm. Those are the ones I trust most because a human being, as opposed to a computer only, has had a hand in producing them. The way things are looking, we won’t get out of here until Thursday. Wednesday at a pinch. We’ve got to wait for this next cold front to pass through. In usual run of things, it will be followed by north-easterly winds flicking down from the next high. You see how boring I become when I’m ‘looking at weather’? The Mitford girls wouldn’t have stood for it! But there’s no easy ride for the neglectful sailor. You have to earn your fair winds.