The last few days we have been day hoping up the New South Wales coast. Port Macquarie was a nice place to wait for a suitable weather window, we waited for the right moment, the run-in tide and headed to Coffs Harbour, getting to Coffs was a bit of an effort as we were pushing against 3 to 4 knots of current and to make us go a bit slower the wind almost dropped out to zero, even with our cast iron top sail we were only managing around 3.5 knots of speed over the ground. We were just on half an hour late, we gave Marine Rescue an eta of 2130 and we entered the harbour at 2200. Once inside Coffs Harbour we were lucky enough to pick up one of the public moorings with the help of a lovely gentleman on his catamaran called Knee Deep, he shone his torch on the free mooring so we could find it. Early the next morning we left Coffs and headed to Iluka/Yamba.
This day on the water was a lovely sunny, warm and just a nice day to be out there kind of day, we had to close haul for the entire passage and were pushing hard to get to the entrance of the Clarence River at the start of the run-in tide. Just as the sun had set and the twilight was about to give way to the night sky, Annie spotted a flare between us and the shore line, I reported the sighting to New South Wales Marine Area Command, giving them our position and the direction and the path that the flare took, I completed several radar searches without result and there was absolutely no radio traffic on the VHF and there were no AIS targets on our system at all, I received two call backs from them just as we were approaching the bar, it was dark and we had to navigate across from a different direction than the leads as the bar had shifted because of the recent floods. Just as we made it right into the middle of the entrance we had a series of breaking waves crash just off our starboard beam, we did get pushed around a couple of times but we made it into the calm waters and proceeded to anchor in almost the exact same spot we had been anchored in over Christmas.
This morning I saw the online news and there had been a meteor sighting at about the same time as the flare sighting, we will never know for sure but that would most likely be what it was.
The photo shows our track as we head north from Sydney to where we are now.
Life is not about how you survived the storm, it’s about how you danced in the rain.