⛵ Voyage #14 — The Strait
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⛵ VOYAGE #14 — by Nick Jaffe — July, 12, 2021
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The Strait #14
Welcome to edition #14 of VOYAGE: The first time I crossed Bass Strait was aboard the expedition ship Blizzard, an aluminium schooner full of Camembert cheese and aged beef — a culinary story for another time perhaps... We departed Launceston, navigating the river Tamar at midnight before spilling out into the rolling but otherwise glassy Strait. Some 20 hours later we passed through Port Phillip heads and tied up. It was memorable only in its ease, success and fine dining — herein lies some thoughts on my second crossing, aboard our good ship Euphoria in the first weeks of winter.
Thank you to those who bought me a coffee from my last edition, I really appreciate it! Catch up on previous editions here.
260 nautical miles (or for the metrically inclined, around 480 kilometres) is the span of sea between St Helens on the northeast coast of Tasmania and Eden on the southeast coast of mainland Australia. It is both a technical hurdle and a mental hurdle to exploring warmer climes during the southern winter, a uniquely Tasmanian challenge which all mariners must complete on their search for warmer waters.
I think as humans there is a kind of intuitive terror in not being able to see a clear path in front of us, or remnants of where we have come from. Our tracks are immediately erased upon the ocean, a constant reminder of impermanence.
When I sail I never look behind the vessel unless I have to (to check for a forgotten line which may become caught up in the prop, or to monitor a passing ship). I stand firmly with my gaze struck forward, surfing the boat from the cockpit or the pilothouse, acutely listening for the tiniest audible inconsistency which may hint at a problem or something requiring my attention. It's meditative and precautionary — a kind of anticipatory no-mindedness.
The bathymetry of Bass Strait is such that the roaring forties send megatons of accumulated energy across a shallow seafloor, which at some point may have been the actual floor of a human foot before the tectonic plates shifted and created the moat we are now challenged by. The winds here have many miles to collect their fetch, throttling across from the Indian Ocean and along the windswept Bite with little resistance, before being funneled and compressed through a Strait named after George Bass: Bass Strait.
Bass, a small boat explorer from an English hamlet far away, found himself at the bottom of the world navigating small open boats on perilous journeys. If the sea did leave tracks, I dare say we had crossed those of Bass & Flinders aboard their longboat Norfolk (the first circumnavigators of Tasmania), on numerous occasions already, giving me a strange sense of comfort.
As I sight Lady Barren island to port, the sun is quickly setting and momentarily I feel a tinge of fear-induced seasickness, as the bow plunges forward into darkness — the first hours of night sailing always feel like running blind until the new environment is adjusted to. There was no moon on our crossing — that friendly light of lunar comfort, lost on the wrong end of the month. The stars do provide a sense of stationary comfort though... Perhaps I can join the dots and impose myself upon them, to discover an animal in their randomness or some sense of the familiar.
The phone in my chest pocket is vibrating, but my ears hear nothing. It's been twenty minutes since I set the timer, my brain having delayed the chiming tones as I reluctantly wake for my checks — I perform three an hour during night passages. My body wishes to fall back asleep, but my mind overrides the impulse: the body is always so unreliable; fragile; the weakest link — a strong mind on the other hand is desirous of the eternal and perhaps capable of it. I lift myself up, climb the companionway stairs and carefully scan the horizon, ensuring my eyes do not catch any bright lights within the pilothouse — like a moth, I want to stare at the dazzling digital charts. Even the shortest glimpse of bright light will ruin ones night vision for another fifteen minutes at least. The gentlest visible light to work under while still retaining helpful vision at sea, is a dim red glow above the navstation: the red lighting aboard Euphoria is annoyingly bright, I will fix it someday.
The Bass Triangle which shares its namesake with the Bermuda Triangle (a latitude I have also cautiously sailed through), has its own intriguing leaderboard of mysterious disappearances and natural anomalies: a light plane; a UFO; a cargo ship or three; a litany of wreckage lies beneath the keel. I look forward, not back.
My attraction to the sea is how it reminds me of my size in the universe. With every gust and rolling crest, I'm reminded of both how fortunate I am and how meaningless my concerns are. It also positions me into a place where I am given a brief opportunity to manage my own raw survival — that dwindling instinct which is chipped away from us in our endless dependency on bureaucracy and the state. For many, what remains of the wild is closely and externally managed — any connection to nature is now largely relegated to numbered campsites inside tightly controlled forests which are measured in square metres — a piece of dirt to pitch your tent which is carefully cordoned off and booked with an app.
The oceans (and perhaps certain deserts) are some of the last remaining bastions of human freedom. Not because they have escaped our consumptive and exploitive grip, but rather because they are some of the last remaining spaces we can immerse ourselves in and feel profoundly alone, free, insignificant and limitless.
The Overview Effect is a term for the cognitive shift and spiritual awakening many astronauts felt as they gazed down on earth: an overwhelming and deep realisation of how fragile and small our existence is. Floating in the vacuum of space, atop a rolling ocean or stood in a searing desert, the common spatial theme is seeking natural grandiosity beyond self.
There is a two dimensionality to sailing at night, requiring new techniques of seeing in order to ascertain what is moving, in what direction and at what relative distance. As the sun rose on our final night on the Strait, the world began to make familiar geographic sense again. The third dimension slowly returned as the coast of mainland Australia made itself visible as a low-lying streak across the horizon.
Tied up at the dock, we kissed Euphoria for bringing us safely to shore and squarely across the moat. I made an entry in the logbook to mark our arrival — not because of an adherence to the strict practice of maritime record keeping per se, but rather to acknowledge we had arrived from anywhere at all — for behind us, lay not a trace.
Recent outputs
- Tied up in Port Stephens — 11 years ago I was here aboard my first boat, Constellation after crossing the Pacific. Today we are here aboard Euphoria - little has changed but the size of the boat (use the left<>right arrows on the photo to navigate the images on Instagram).
Elsewhere
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