
On a late September morning, Tom and I left port on New Georgia Island, sailing quickly to escape the high island. We were headed for the east coast of Australia after a year’s cruise in the Solomon Islands and New Guinea and preferred the freedom of open ocean sailing but first we had to get out of the Solomon Sea. As usual for starting a voyage we had a C-MAP chart of Munda up on the computer at the nav station. It was not very accurate but it showed the beacons that provided a range for crossing narrow Munda bar. The range was convenient since unlike today, we had no chartplotter at the helm to point the way.
By nightfall cumulus clouds had built on the horizon, yet nothing felt threatening as we took up our nighttime watch-keeping with me on first shift 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. and Tom taking 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. I usually sleep well off-watch but our Peterson 44 became unsettled, with Tom rolling the jib in and out and turning the engine on and off. When it was my turn, I was relieved to go topsides. A black line of clouds stretched across the sky and Oddly Enough was pitching in a short, steep sea. She didn’t seem over-canvassed, but to be on the safe side, we tied in two reefs and kept the jib partly rolled in. For the 150-mile crossing of the Solomon Sea we wouldn’t be encountering land, but the sea was awash in currents. Until we left it, we needed to watch our course and to keep a strict schedule of checking the GPS position against the chart.

An hour after Tom went to bed a squall line swept overhead and the night rapidly deteriorated. It rained and lightning flashed, reflecting off clouds on the horizon so I couldn’t pinpoint the storm. I made a cup of tea and huddled under the dodger. As the wind built, I rolled in more jib but the sheet angle was wrong. It flogged badly as we crashed up and down the seas, and just before my shift ended, I was clipping into a jackline to move the jib car when the sail tore from the foot up. Tom was already struggling into his foul weather gear, and together we managed to get the sail rolled onto the foil without it ripping further.
We still bucked like a rocking horse and the wind was 30 knots with higher gusts. We’d been close-hauled on port tack since leaving Munda; now I tacked to starboard, tied the helm over and we hove to, setting the third reef just before the wind reached gale strength. Oddly Enough now swept up and over the waves instead of crashing, but movement below was difficult. Twenty-four hours later when the wind dropped, we bent on the staysail, shook a reef out of the main and resumed our port tack, eager to make way again.

It was September, early for sailing to Australia’s East Coast. It’s better to wait for variable winds during the transition to southern summer but that increases the risk of encountering a cyclone. The tradeoff was strong southeast tradewinds that made it dicey to hold the 195-degree rhumb line to Bundaberg. Oddly Enough sailed well to windward but we had lost a lot of easting during the storm and now faced a 75-mile gap shown on our chart between Pocklington Reef and the eastern tip of the Louisiade archipelago off New Guinea in wind that once again backed southerly and hit 20 to 22 knots. The big seas after the storm were confused, coming at us from opposing directions. If we didn’t make this gap, it appeared we’d have to thread our way through poorly charted reef channels or take Jomard Pass, the only well-charted shipping channel before the Louisiades joined mainland New Guinea, either way getting further west and putting our course to Bundaberg out of reach.

We made decent progress until with a loud pop the shackle on the staysail halyard block broke and the sail slid down the inner forestay. With an hour left of daylight I stepped into my bosun’s chair and Tom winched me up the mast, but with the mainsail raised I couldn’t wrap my legs around the mast and after the second time I swung away and banged back I gave up, and we used the spare mainsail halyard to raise the staysail.

Overnight we lost even more easting and at first light were approaching the western edge of the gap. With the wind still reasonable and the seas flatter my chance came to try again to replace the shackle. We took Oddly Enough off the Sailomat wind vane and I turned on the engine and gave it enough power to maintain our head into the wind while Tom took down the main. When he returned to the cockpit I throttled up to 1800 rpm and noticed that increased the boat’s speed to less than 2 knots. I tried 2000 rpm, and gained a half-knot. I swung Oddly’s bow westerly and then northwest and watched as her speed over ground shot up to 5 knots. I knew that the sub-tropical current flowed west below the Louisiades, and this was helping to push us toward the Calvados chain, where the first thing we would encounter was a 12-mile-wide poorly charted reef. Our paper chart showed a branch of the sub-tropical current leaving the main flow and heading north through the Pocklington Reef gap into the Solomon Sea. This could be resisting our southward efforts to get away by up to 2 knots.
We had to make a decision. From the way our plotted positions had changed, it wasn’t clear that we would miss the corner of the Louisiades. Without the jib our closehauled sailing was compromised. The voyage had changed from a simple long-distance windward slog to an imminent crisis.
Oddly Enough’s position-locating equipment was based on CDs containing computer programs collected by cruising sailors and passed along with copies of C-MAPs. All you needed was a laptop that accepted CDs, and software to open the maps. We had several GPS units, both built-in and portable, all of which were more user-friendly than today’s units (the advent of the chartplotter has made them all but extinct). None communicated with the laptop that we kept below at the nav station. We created waypoints on the computer and transferred the lat/long information to a GPS to make a route. This method was clunky but I still believe, after years of having evolved away, that it promotes studying the chart on a good-sized screen, examining what territory a route would cover and if it might cross something that couldn’t safely be negotiated. In port I used small-scale paper charts to do passage planning, having on at least one occasion been saved from running up on a mid-ocean reef that did NOT appear on C-MAPs unless I zoomed in much closer than I ever would on an ocean passage.
Electronic charts are sketchy about the eastern end of the Louisiades archipelago. Talgula Island is too far to be seen from offshore and the surrounding reef rises from ocean depths so we wouldn’t have much warning before drifting on it. One innovation that would have helped is the ability to quilt Google Earth satellite photos with electronic charts; the edge of the reef is then startlingly clear.
Ultimately, we decided to ease the mainsail and abandon the problematic staysail, turn north and let the current take us west around the top of the Calvados chain to Wuri Wuri pass, a relatively detailed unbuoyed entrance into a lagoon where we knew cruisers were currently anchored.
The ripped jib and broken staysail shackle altered the course of our cruise, but today’s updated suite of electronic instruments might have given us enough information to fight southward of the Louisiades into open ocean and go for another port on Australia’s East Coast. Our current Simrad GO7 XSE chartplotter works well on our 30-foot coastal cruiser, but on a Peterson 44 I would have at least a 9” screen, and a plotter at the helm with knobs because trying to negotiate a touch screen in bumpy conditions is frustrating and inaccurate. The B&G Zeuss 9, Raymarine Axiom-9, and the Simrad NSS9 evo (upper 3) all have touch screens plus buttons. The Raymarine Element 9 omits the touch screen and just has buttons.
Even my little GO7 is a multifunction display. An mfd on Oddly Enough would have projected realtime integrated data about depth changes and speed directly on the chart. The tracking function would record our course over ground changing if we chose to continue to try to sneak around the reef. One piece of equipment that is less common today is a speedometer. The speedo relays boat speed through the water and combined with GPS gives a better sense of unseen water movements. Airmar’s ST850 Speed and Temperature Analog Output transducer which includes a paddlewheel can be integrated into an MFD.
The Calvados blanketed the south seas as Oddly raced outside the reefs into a clear, soft night, arriving off Wuri Wuri at 9 am. The chart shows overfalls and a 12-foot spot in the middle, but our depthsounder was good and we had good visuals. By late morning we had anchored off Bagaman Island and were surrounded by villagers in canoes wanting to trade vegetables and fruit. The next day Australian cruisers helped take down the blown jib.
Five days after the storm we left Bagaman Island with local info about a pass through the southern reef and headed west to Darwin. We never made it to Bundaberg, but we did complete a circumnavigation of the island of New Guinea. n