Lady Barron

Where Next?
Bob Williams
Fri 17 May 2019 09:29

Position: 41 12.84 S  148 14.79 E
At anchor off Lady Barren, Flinders Island
Wind: NW  F4 moderate breeze
Sea: slight. Swell: NW 1 m
Weather: partly cloudy, morning shower, cool.
Day’s run:  23 nm

This morning I cast my eye around the bay where we had anchored in the dark the previous night.  We were a little ways off the beach but given the scale of the chart I was well satisfied with where we had ended up and, seeing as we were not going ashore, it was not a problem that we were some distance from the shore.  The sand spit that is marked on the chart in text but not in contours could be seen clearly some hundred odd meters to the north of us. The sandy white beach looked alluring, but Kate needed to be in reliable phone range of lawyers and real estate agents, so, at 1030, I commenced cranking in Sylph’s cable with the reliable (well, mostly reliable) Armstrong patent windlass (actually it’s a Muir Hercules but sailors call anything that is done by hand an “Armstrong patent”).  The anchor broke free after ten minutes of morning calisthenics, the bow fell away from the shore, and I set the headsail and headed east for Franklin Sound. Once clear of Badger Island, the wind shifted into the north, presumably channelling between the islands, so I set the mainsail with one reef to help hold Sylph on the desired heading.  An hour later we were barrelling along wing on wing with a fresh breeze behind us and the ebb stream once more giving us a shove in the right direction, Sylph making close to eight knots.  We wanted to make for Lady Barren, a small town with a nice secure anchorage on the southern shore of Flinders Island. We wended our way through the small rocky islets that dotted the channel separating the spectacular granite peaks of Flinders and Cape Barren Islands, enjoying the cool brisk breeze, the sunshine, and the sparkling clear waters, Sylph’s slipping along, fast, smooth and quiet, with her fresh clean-painted bottom.

At 1435 we dropped anchor 1.7 cables east of Store Point and what smelled like a sheep loading jetty.

All is well.