⛵ VOYAGE #12 — Lake Pedder
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⛵ VOYAGE #12 — by Nick Jaffe — April, 21, 2021
V O Y A G E
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Lake Pedder #12
Welcome to edition #12 of VOYAGE: While the seasons soldier on into winter, we continue to frantically prepare for our departure north, aboard our pilothouse cutter Euphoria — in the meantime, here is a story about Lucinda, a little lockdown sailing project/boat with my pal Sarah Andrews
Thank you to those who bought me a coffee from my last edition, I really appreciate it! VOYAGE will resume as a fortnightly newsletter from May, when The Tin Lantern renovations cease and we are living aboard our ship. Catch up on previous editions here.
Lucinda took the original owner seven years to build. She's planked in double diagonal marine ply and slathered in epoxy resin. Her steel plate centreboard drops into the ocean with a nylon belt, attached to a winch handle below decks — if you accidentally let the winch go, it will spin out at great speed and smack your hand. When she approaches 5kts under sail, there is a slight shuddering noise, as the centreboard parts the sea below. Lucinda is just 19ft long, with a draft of less than a foot. She can be walked like a dog in the shallows, tugged along the shore and coaxed into tiny anchorages.
The drive to Lake Pedder was long, the roads winding, narrow and pot-holed. The corners had to be taken with care; one eye on the road and one eye on the rear-vision mirror, to make sure Lucinda wasn't drifting into the other lane.
This isolated lake created much controversy in the 1960's and 70's, when its National Park status was revoked as a means to allow the Hydro-Electric Corporation to dam it. The original lake is now 20 metres below, forever lost in the dark tannin waters. The community backlash and opposition to damming birthed the first Green political party in the world.
Glimpses of the lake began to appear, as we exited the tree-lined road out of Maydena and entered a new kind of landscape, dominated by dramatic quartzite mountain ranges. The quartzite which these hills were made from, would later be found between my toes — the beaches of Lake Pedder were not soft Caribbean sands, but rather sharp chunks of quartz, which didn't benefit from the tides and swell of an ocean to soften their edges.
As we wound down to the lake, the first boat ramp appeared. We pulled over and studied our chart, checking the weather again and deciding launch further north — perhaps we could catch the northerly breeze south the following day, and then be lucky enough to sail a southerly back.
It doesn't matter if the body of water is a river, a lake or the ocean, life on a small boat can become very miserable should the weather deteriorate — some of most sickening and terrifying sailing I've ever done was upon the lakes of Holland.
I parked Lucinda in the shade of a eucalyptus tree and we spent the afternoon avoiding a bright sun, raising and rigging her mast. Evenly distributing and packing the contents of the car into her small cabin, we slid her off the trailer and into the lake. Sarah wrote "gone sailing" on a piece of scrap paper with our phone number on it and stuck it under the windshield wiper. We were off.
Naturally, as with all combustion engines which have anything to do with water, the outboard refused to start. With the cowling removed I traced the fuel line to the carburettor which was sucking dry. Why? Who knows. We plugged the external tank in and she started on the second pull. We were really off.
The northerly never really appeared and our little Mercury engine pushed us slowly south, the mainsail flapping quietly. In every direction we saw no one. Not a soul. I had imagined Lake Pedder to be a waterports mecca of some kind — perhaps the kind one imagines in 1950's America: Two stroke jet skis, boats towing strange inflatable objects, floating pontoons for diving. It turns out Lake Pedder is too far away for anyone to bother towing all that aqua-paraphernalia to. Whether the lake was the genesis for the first Green Party, a place of great protest, or the source of many gigawatts of electricity, none of these attributes took away from the fact that it was located in the middle of nowhere at the bottom of the world. It was my kind of lake.
After all that driving, setting up and motoring along, we decided to make camp for the night early. Lucinda wasn't setup for sleeping and we were well prepared and quite looking forward to sleeping along the quartzite shores. We found a beautiful little v-shaped nook and I disembarked into the squelchy mud, tugging Lucinda along the shore, as stiff little branches ran across her topsides.
We tied the stern to a tree and ran a line off the bow and tied it to the other side of the shoreline. Lucinda sat contently in a foot of water while we unloaded our stores: Swags, an eski, bags of warm clothes and a bottle of whisky.
We sat inside our swags drinking tots of whisky, watching an expansive pink sunset while admiring how perfect Lucinda lay in the water. I coined the mooring style a Pedder Mooring — which, for future reference, can be described as a mooring within a v-shaped body of water, where the bow and stern are tied to land in a foot of water or less.
The 242 square kilometre lake absorbs sunlight, while the bright white quartz shoreline has the opposite effect. I drank my coffee and walked along the sharp beach: A beach made up from rocks which were once a mountain range, I suppose. We had a morning swim while Lucinda watched on, the bottom of the lake being the kind of silted mud where you cringe a little bit, as it goes up to your knees and creates a vacuum as you try to pull it back out.
With Lucinda loaded back up, we set back out into the lake which had now completely glassed off. Sarah helmed while I stood on the foredeck, watching the tiny bow pierce the water into a wave. The lake was so reflective, the surrounding mountain ranges sat perfectly upside down along the waters edge — nature was doubling down on the sublime. Two for one.
We stopped on a tiny island just 20ft wide, with a west facing shore made of slated rock. The rocky sheets sat like a tiled roof and I dully suggested we call it Slate Island — Sarah wanted to call it Steak Island instead, because that’s what she was in the mood for. It is now officially called Steak Island, and you can visit it with the following coordinates in decimal notation: -42.83, 146.00
After our rendezvous with Steak Island we ventured back into deeper waters and navigated around remnant trees, which stuck out of the lake like sticks — vestiges of the forests which once lived below.
By midday we pined for an afternoon of reading books on the shore. We soon chose a new v-shaped cove to tie into, unpacking our swags once more. The afternoon was spent reading as the supposed northerly blew from every which way. The surrounding mountains and hills appeared to re-route the gusts into our camping cove — one moment it was a northerly, which blew like a westerly, yet arrived from the east. Sometimes cold, sometimes humid. It was a sign of things to come, the friendly cirrus clouds changed form into something more ominous.
The tee trees just behind our camp hid swamp waters and a haze of mosquitos — interestingly though, they never bit us, as if they didn’t know what we were or how many litres of blood we carried — perhaps they hadn’t seen people before — I wouldn’t have been surprised.
It was now darker than Vantablack, as water pooled on top of my swag. Every time I moved or rolled over, water would pour directly into my sleeping bag. I tried to remain as still as possible, intently listening to the torrential rain which was hitting the canvas just above my head. I listened, fell asleep briefly, woke up, listened, fell asleep, and shivered. Would this rain slow down? Would morning come? Maybe it was morning? I couldn't tell, I was completely covered by both the canvas swag and my sleeping bag. I was delirious.
I wondered how Sarah was fairing. Perhaps here swag was waterproof. Perhaps she hadn't even noticed it was raining. We should have moved aboard Lucinda when it started, what were we even thinking?
I could tell it was morning now. At last. The rain had subsided, my feet were submerged in a puddle at the bottom of my sleeping bag. I could hear Sarah rustling, eventually hearing her voice: "Are you ok?" She said. I didn't answer, for no particular reason.
I remained covered, not wanting to greet the day I had spent half the night wishing to arrive... I could hear Sarah standing next to me now, and she asked again, "are you alright?" — I said "yes" and started to get up.
Looking up at her, I saw a tired face of quiet horror: Without saying anything else, she exclaimed "I'm covered in leeches".
I slowly looked down under my wet, soggy sleeping bag.
So was I.
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