A philosophical question
'Sarf & West mate, Sarf & West'
Pete Bernfeld
Thu 16 May 2013 06:12
Pancake Creek 1530 on 16/05
All UK readers are familiar with 'Sod's Law'. You remember, the one that says if you drop a piece of buttered and jammed bread, it lands butter/jam side down. Not a lot of people know this but it was actually first put forward as a working hypothesis by Friedrich Soddze, b Oder-Mein-Haupt 1792 d Brandenburg 1843 whilst conducting an experiment into the best method of detecting a gas leak. The experiment was apparently successful but not repeatable.
So you depart Moon Point at 0737 with the forecast promising SW 5-10kts, seas less than 1 metre. As always the Coastguard would like you to be aware that maximum gusts may be 40% stronger than forecast and wave heights twice the size. Coupled with this is the fact that you are heading North towards the tropics so logically it is getting warmer.
Soddze's Law is unable to explain why for most of the one hundred-odd miles the maximum gust was about 5 kts. The rest of the time the wind was seemingly generated by an anemic butterfly who obviously needs a holiday. Try Rio would be my suggestion. Also a mystery is why it appears to be getting colder as I approach the tropics. Perhaps Logical Positivism can provide the answer?
Most of the trip was conducted in light drizzle, or at least after a bright(ish) couple of hours it was. I arrived in Pancake Creek to find it actually quite crowded. There's three of us in what might be termed the outer anchorage and what looks like four, peering through the wet mist, in the inner anchorage.
Now I thought that I had the measure of my depth gauge. You coast to a halt, hand over hand the anchor whilst counting the number of times you do so, then when the anchor is on the bottom pay out 5X the number of hand-over-hands. The DG responded to this by apparently working OK. Until I arrived here. I didn't want to spend fifteen minutes (more) motoring into the inner anchorage as I may leave tomorrow IF it's not raining and IF there's some wind. I and my wallet are fed up with motoring. So, we coasted to a halt and I dropped the hook. I obviously was in a shallow patch! Never mind it's sand and I've dropped back twenty metres. The water was cloudy but cleared just enough for me to see the anchor on the bottom. I may dry out, which would be nice. Everything is extremely damp.
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