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August 7, 2000
Solomons to Australia voyage - Update #20
Lat/Long as of 12.00 hrs local time
13 degs 17. 18’ S
149 degs 58. 30’E
Day 21. Wind ESE 10 knots. Heading 170M
The Coral Sea isn’t half giving us the run around.
At 10.00hrs yesterday morning April and I were convinced by all the information sent in from our land based support crew that making it to Cairns was out the question and altered course to 260M accordingly. With the bright lights of Queensland’s official party capital all but extinguished from our mental horizons we turned our imaginations loose instead on the mysteries and intrigues of Thursday Island, the Torres Straits and the untamed wilderness of Cape York. In a way we were both quite looking forward to the prospect of making landfall in such a bizarre place. Strange places like this are guaranteed to provide great journal writing material.
And it may still be so. But at 0800 this morning after realising how many miles south we’d inadvertantly made in the past 48 hours, we looked at each other over our bowls of morning gruel and thought - why not? Maybe there is a snowball’s chance in hell of making it to Cairns, still our first choice of destination all things being equal. Let’s give it one more crack. It’d be quite a coup if we managed to pull it off! The worst that can happen if the current and the wind do turn against us and we revert to Plan B once more is that we would have earned ourselves a few valuable miles south to better our chances of crossing the reef at the optimum area of around 12 degrees 30.
Either option promises a good tussle - and what better way to end this first ever 8,000 mile crossing of the Pacific Ocean by pedal power than with a formidable finish! If over the next 4-5 days we pull out all the stops and manage to claw our way to the entrance of the Grafton Passage leading through the Great Barrier Reef into Cairns, then we’ll have achieved at least one victory over this Coral Sea that has been kicking our rear-ends hard since rounding the western edge of Guadalcanal three weeks ago. If on the other hand we have to give up Cairns, instead navigating our way through a ½ mile cut in the reef further north using photographs of charts that our base crew have taken digital photos of and emailded us via satellite – either this or Kenny manages to locate us in a light airplane and physically drop us the charts before we hit the reef – then we will have also managed something a little out of the ordinary.
So, time to quit talking about it and go give it some welly. Watch this space.
Jason
Posted on August 7, 2000 2:45 PM