TripSailor.com® Sailing Blogs

We left Fannie Bay just after 6pm on Sunday 26th just in time to see the Sun set over an island called Australia, which we’ve managed to keep on the left all the way from Sydney en route to Perth. On board was Royce, Seawind’s delivery skipper who promised us an adventure of a lifetime as we travelled through the Kimberleys. We had a full house for this leg, with Kim, Jane, Rob, Janet, Deborah and Steve joining Royce, seven in total. Janet had flown all the way from South Carolina and this was her first time out of the Americas – what an intro to Australia.

With 380 litres of diesel fuel on board, courtesy of 5 trips to the Service Station using a dingy/hired car combination (ps. don’t ever try and fill up in Darwin on the weekend), we were on our way. Our first task was to make our way 240nm across Bonaparte Gulf, en route to King George River. We needed to average around 6 knots to get the high tide at 6am on Tuesday. The wind gods were with us once again and we had good 15 knot NE??? that allowed us to knock off 60nm by morning without having to run the motors at all. We were ahead all ready.   

Te rest of the day was spent sailing out of sight of land as we made our way across the Gulf. We ran into our first pod of dolphins early in the morning and noted they ere much bigger than those we had seen previously on the trip. Everyone was impressed with Camelot, a Seawind 1160 that had rolled out of Sydney just 23 days previously. It is really set up for our warm Australian conditions with the tri-fold doors providing a large indoor/outdoor living area with plenty of shade from the burning sun. The BBQ in the middle of the back deck meant we could comfortably cook, even in rolling seas. It may have seemed a little ambitious taking seven people on a trip across one of the most isolated regions of the world, but we all seemed to fit on board very comfortably without getting in each others way, together with a mountain of food required to meet everyone’s different requirements. The only compliant was that we had so many veggies on board for our two vegetarians on board that we didn’t have much room at the start in our outdoor fridge for too much beer and wine.