Wednesday September 4^th   2013, Lizard Island,  Northern Queensland  13.41.2S  145:04.1E  

Today's Blog by David (Time zone BST +9.00; UTC +10.00)

All stand ….. Today is Terry’ s birthday – and it’s a BIG one so he’s Royalty for the day!

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The crew assembled as arranged last week, Peter diving off and Terry nodding off as planned ahead of my arrival on Friday. Our plans of leaving on Saturday probably never were realistic -  the logistics of provisioning and Jet Lag made a Monday departure more realistic. That gave time for the weather to pick up.

So we left before dawn yesterday with a SE 20-25 forecast and motored out into  a flat calm. We weren’t motoring that fast either because of the accumulated crud from being moored for a couple of weeks. All of that soon changed. The wind picked up and delivered on its forecast from our starboard quarter building to 25-30 kts serving to clean the bottom quite effectively.

Yesterday we had a pleasant enough sail, downwind, eventually settling on a poled out headsail rig which was both fast and comfortable. We hoped to get to Hope Island (Sorry, Ed) in daylight and our achievement is evidenced thus:

Hope Island

As anchorages go the entrance was tricky,  but it  was flat enough inside but not exactly peaceful with 30+kts  through the anchorage -  which was rather rolly but secure.   It certainly wasn’t somewhere that one would want to drop a dinghy into the water – if the engine failed we would be blown for miles out to sea.

We had a comfortable enough night – occasionally getting up during the night to see if we were still anchored in the same place. In the morning we got up for a long 82 mile sail to Lizard Island.  The wind yesterday was on the beam 25-30 knots with well over 40 in the occasional morning squalls with a short 1.5m chop . Depending on  your point of view, this was either ‘Hell on Earth’ or a ‘Rollicking Good Sail ‘– reefed staysail and four “reefs” in the main.

As I said, we like a good blow :  

A Good Blow

Lizard Island is a secure anchorage protected from the trade winds  with good holding – the wind still blows but is protected from the chop and so we had a reasonable night’s sleep – again with the occasional up and down to make sure we were still where we thought we were!  Here we found two other Oyster Rally (OWR) participants, Aequitas, Purusha and Spent (well, OK, three)  at anchor.  No-one was launching dinghies there either!

The morning of Terry’s birthday broke with the wind forecast 25-33knots – a full Force 7.  Our plan was to sail downwind so we set uo a poled out head sail rig before we left and we are now having a great downhill sail averaging 9.0kts with both the wind and the current behind us.

Our destination is Stokes Bay, Stanley Island in the Flinders Group. Stokes Bay, because Terry’s home  in the UK is in Stokes Bay in the Solent. All Stand…….