Vanuatu to Mackay Australia

Rob Lydon

Motored around thunderstorms leaving Vanuatu, then pretty calm for 2 days. Reasonably good sailing, though a bit bumpy. We double reefed the main and triple reefed the jib to make a smoother ride. Still made around 8 knots for a couple of days. Caught the tide race wrong coming in via Hydrographers Passage through the Barrier Reef. At one point, we had the engines at full throttle and were making 1.7 knots SOG! Water speed was 8.5 knots. That’s some tidal flow! The border control folks laughed about it and said a lot of folks don’t know about it and get caught out like we did. They said that it’s not in any of the usual reference materials, charts, etc and you don’t find out unless you look for it specifically. Then laughed again. I guess it’s some kind of rite of passage (pun intended). Had one of the PFDs deploy at 4 in the morning! We left it on the bench in the cockpit and it got submerged when we had a wave break over the side and flood the cockpit. Good to see it deployed correctly. It needed to be serviced next month anyway, so no harm done, and we got a few good laughs! Tied up in Mackay watching the tide come in- today is about 14’ from low to high tide. Which explains the amount of tidal flow we experienced.