Watt Sailing Adventure: Robe

It was 8am and sunny as we dropped the forward Jib sail and motored into Guichen Bay and Robe.

We had just dropped our anchor and were about to turn off the motor when the radio began to talk to us. It was immediately an exciting thing as despite our best attempts to log in with each area’s VMR operators we had had no success. We knew the radio worked as we often heard others calling in and not being responded to either – but to hear someone actually talking was at once both startling and thrilling!

Even more so when I realised that the caller was actually speaking to us!

‘Owners of 40ft yacht just anchoring in the Bay,’ the caller began.

I was so surprised and immediately thought it must be the harbour master saying that we were anchoring in the wrong place!

The caller continued though by saying, ‘This is Laurrie from Steal Away, we met in Albany!’

It turns out that Laurrie, who we had indeed met when he called into Albany some months ago, and whose yacht had been left temporarily in Port Lincoln while he attended to business back home before being able to continue to sail on around to Sydney, had arrived in Robe a few days earlier and was intending to leave – right then! He had untied most of his ropes and was walking out to check the depth of the channel before leaving. We sailed into the bay just as he was walking to the harbour entrance to check it all out!

Laurrie decided to stay then for a couple more days and in many ways this reminds me of once again of one of the unexpected delights we have encountered in this sailing adventure we have begun – the camaraderie.

Laurrie has been solo sailing around Australia – a bigger adventure even than ours and we totally take our hats off to him. When he was in Albany he very kindly tried to help us get our HF radio to talk to the on-board but old computer system so that we could access weather info while out of internet access. He patiently downloaded programs and left it to us to connect everything up – but, well we aren’t so good at that kind of thing and it just didn’t happen. Since arriving he has once again shown great patience spending hours trying to make it all work!

It has been fantastic to have his assistance, but more importantly it’s fantastic to share stories of challenges, highlights, lovely places visited and worth seeing.  Over a meal and a chilled glass of wine we shared about our crossing of the Bight and heard how he had fared. We compared, shared and listened till late. We all concluded that the biggest hazard for us in these local waters is cray-pots. At Pondalowie Bay, Emu Bay and here there were dozens of them all over the place. We felt that the best way to deal with them is in daylight! There is othing to identify them in the dark, making them simply an unseen and unseeable obstacle.

After dropping the anchor and hearing from Laurrie on the radio, we put the dinghy into the water and went for a visit to the marina to checked it all out. Laurrie, who had heard ‘a big yacht’ was expected soon had half thought it might be us, so happily showed us which pen he had been told would be our temporary ‘home’.  Then we called in to the local council office to talk to Michael the marina manager. What a helpful fellow he was! He had been admiring Argos anchored just in front of the council office and was looking forward to us coming in. We chatted for a while and explained that we would wait for a bit more water in the channel.

After returning to Argos we carefully assessed tide times and decided to wait until the early hours of the morning when the tide was at its highest to negotiate the narrow channel that we needed to pass through to get into the marina.

Then the phone rang. It was Michael from the council calling to say he had been checking tide information with the local fishermen and finding out when would be a good time for us to come into the marina. He was at the channel as he called, saying the water was almost at the point the locals said was sufficiently high for a deeper-draught vessel like ours. It was delightful to see him take the trouble to help us!  Another look at the tide chart told us that we were almost at the peak of the mid-tide so we were satisfied that we had enough information to go on, encouraged that we were making a sound choice to head in.

Less than twenty minutes later it was all done and dusted. We followed the channel markers that we had dinghi’d past just a little while earlier and motored straight into our pen. Laurrie arrived back at the marina at the perfect time to catch our first rope so we didn’t even have to jump off! The depth sounder told us that the channel was at 3.5 and 3.6 mts all the way and we were never even close to our depth. We could not have been happier!

So after a two day and two night sail we were securely settled.

And so we have spent the last two days exploring the pretty town that is Robe!

We have walked through the town, found the grocery store, eaten some wonderful local fish chips and seafood, checked out historic buildings and places and generally had fun! Oh, and caught up a little on our sleep and showers! This evening and tomorrow we expect a front to pass through the area and then following that we plan to leave on Thursday heading towards Port Fairy in Victoria. There are a couple of nice sounding anchorages along the way which we will stop at. How thrilling this adventure has become!