Pushing up the coast

There’s nothing so yesterday as an uncomfortable sea voyage. In Coffs Harbour today, the air has that lovely clean after-the-rain feel about it, and the sunshine is working on my memory like an erase button. The line of wet weather gear still hanging in the cockpit tells of the weather that was, but already we’re looking ahead. When’s the next break coming? What day will we be leaving for New Caledonia?

We didn’t get the typhoon – who do I thank? Today’s newspaper tells the story of small towns up and down the NSW coast dealing with flash flooding and, in the case of Lennox Heads further north, a typhoon which came in from the sea and all but flattened the place. What we got were deepest and darkest rain squalls which enveloped Kukka for close to 24 hours. 

If we’d thought we could avoid them, we were dreaming. At first they kept their distance, ominous banks of cloud sliding up and down the near horizon as we ticked off the lovely capes and headlands leading up to and beyond Crowdy Head. We were doing battle with the current – the East Coast Australian Current, that is. Great when you’re going its way, terrible when you’re not. I was reading up on clouds in an excellent summary of a TAFE course on marine meteorology which Shauna lent me, and at one point the sky offered me a sampler of every cloud type from high to low (cirrus to cumulus). Within a few hours however we were down to one type of cloud only – dark grey ones, dumping rain and winds which swung around the clock. Even they couldn’t help us with the current though. At one point I saw the instruments read wind 25 knots and boat speed 3.2 knots. Depressing stuff. 

Oh well, it’s over now. Coastal sailing is no-one’s favorite, what with the current and the heavy duty shipping (our AIS system combined with the radar is a magic combination for combating shipping anxiety). We’ve got nothing on our plate today except for a walk into town. Yesterday’s exhaustion has passed, and being tied up to a pontoon with shore power and water on tap, plus a Laundromat along the boardwalk, still feels novel. Within in a day or two I’ll be getting marina claustrophobia, I know. I wonder what’s on at the movies in Coffs?