Almost. Or how our S&S 36 Boambillee didn’t quite make it to the 2025 Australian Wooden Boat Festival.
CYAA member Georg Fisscher recounts his crews voyage to Tasmania – or thereabouts.
The Genesis.
The idea proposed by our sons Hamish and Joe was simple, let’s take our old one-tonner to Hobart for the Australian Wooden Boat Festival. After all, Boambillee is a wooden boat, and a beautiful example of the S&S design ethos of the 1960’s.
It’s not as if the boat doesn’t know her way. Built to be a racer, Boambillee completed two Sydney Hobart races before coming to Melbourne and doing at least five Melbourne-Hobart ocean races.
Founded in 1994, the Hobart based Wooden Boat Festival is Australia’s premier celebration of all things related to wooden boats. Advertised as the biggest wooden boat festival in the Southern hemisphere, 60,000 people visit this bi-annual festival.
It’s great. With over two hundred boats on the water, ten tall ships, many more boats displayed on the dock, a hall filled with ship models, and lots of music and food stands. Hobart is also a very attractive, historic city with a great waterfront character.
We applied to be an entrant (there are always more boats that aspire to be on display than there are places), were accepted – and the preparations began.
The two owners – Michael Rhodes and myself, our sons – Hamish (Michael’s son) and Joe (my son), plus Mark Adams – a forty year crew member, were to make up the five crew.
The to-do list.
But first we needed to bring the boat back to ocean ready sailing. Over the last twenty-five years we had simplified the yacht to reduce weight and complexity. We now had to reverse that process.
A list was prepared – and added to time and time again. The galley was re-installed. A B&G chart plotter was purchased and fitted. Tanks which hadn’t been used for twenty years were removed and the resulting under bunk storage was readied for water and food. Another anchor and anchor rode was bought, charts were purchased and stanchions and lifelines were renewed. Two new compasses were fitted, plus a hundred other smaller items.
The most comprehensive list pertained to safety. Jack-stays, harnesses and tethers were borrowed. A life raft, a satellite phone, five PLB’s (personal location beacons) were rented and an EPIRB was purchased and registered. Ocean flares were bought along with an offshore medical kit to complement our inshore kit.
Storm sails – a new No.4, the try-sail and the storm jib were all hoisted and checked – all good.
Finally the motor was serviced, and serviced again as the fresh water pump was found to be faulty and needed replacement. All the hoses, clamps and filters were changed. We were good to go.
With a departure date scheduled for the 25th January, we began to fill the boat with food, water, diesel, fuel for the stove and all our personal gear. I don’t know exactly how much weight we added, but it was substantial! The yacht was slightly down in the stern because that’s where we located most of our spare water and diesel fuel.
The journey begins.
St.Kilda where our boat is moored, is situated at the top of Port Phillip Bay. To enter Bass Strait for our trip to Tasmania we first had to transit the bay, and then find a suitable time to exit the bay via the infamous entrance known affectionately as “the Rip”. More than two hundred vessels have come to grief crossing the Rip. When the wind opposes the tide it can be truly fearful. However, by choosing an appropriate time – slack water, or an ebb tide, the passage out can be made safely.
So it transpired, on the Saturday morning of the January 25, in light winds and flat water we motor-sailed and exited along the eastern shore through the heads into Bass Strait. Our journey had begun in earnest.
Bass Strait is an interesting waterway. To quote Wikipedia: “Bass Strait has a well deserved reputation as one of the most treacherous bodies of water in the world. A combination of shallow seas, currents and weather systems has brought many a sea voyage to an untimely end.” How prophetic.
But our first experience was of light winds and a confused sea. We were traveling in company with another classic wooden yacht, a Rhodes 45 called Scimitar, but they were disappearing on us as their motor-sailing speed was more like seven knots, whilst ours was closer to six. We decided to try our light No.1, always a potent sail on Port Phillip Bay in under 10 knots of wind. And found that we simply could not get any way on – the sea state constantly shook the wind out of the sail and stopped any progress. Whilst Scimitar motored off into the distance we reverted back to motor sailing.
As the day progressed the wind slowly built. Soon under full main and a number2 head-sail we were making fair progress. Our destination was Deal Island, the largest island in the Kent Group, and a favoured first stop for many yachts crossing the strait to Tasmania. At about 150 nautical miles from the heads it necessitated an overnight sail, which turned out to be an enjoyable one, if somewhat tiring. Watches were instigated and sea legs were acquired.
The morning of Sunday, the 26th saw the Kent Group in sight, and we dropped anchor in East Cove around midday to find our friends on Scimitar had arrived some five hours earlier. Deal Island is such an attractive destination because it offers a number of good, safe anchorages suitable for a number of different wind directions. Initially we had winds from the North-East, but knew that a blow was coming the next day from the South-West, as such we would have to move to a more appropriate anchorage.
However, prior to that we had a couple of challenges to resolve. Firstly we found that we had several buckets of water in the bilge, and that water contained quite a lot of black oil. Boambillee is of cold-moulded construction and simply doesn’t leak. The bilge is usually a source of pride – it is normally clean and dry. Not so this time; where was all this grimy water coming from?
Another problem was a terrible noise coming from the mast. Whenever the boat rolled at anchor we heard a loud “clang” which over time became louder and incessant. Sleep was well nigh impossible. It sounded like a halyard slapping on the mast, except much louder – and all our halyards were tied off away from the mast. We experimented with loosening the halyards and then tightening them with winches all to no avail. Finally we worked out that it was the aluminium conduit inside the mast which is for the wiring to the masthead and steaming lights. It was still fastened to the top of the mast, but loose at the bottom, and fifty feet of aluminium mast provided and excellent “bell”. In effect it was like someone was banging a steel saucepan with a wooden mallet next to the poor crew trying to sleep in their bunks. Maddening. There was no access to the internals of the mast, so we just had to suffer the noise.
Worse was to come. The next day dawned with blue skies and light winds, we decided that afternoon to sail to Winter Cove, on the North shore of the Island which offered the best protection in a southerly blow. We set off in 10 knots of wind, again motor sailing with the full main. We saw a storm front on the horizon but it was in the North not our expected Southerly buster. It appeared some miles distant and initially did not give it too much thought – until suddenly we had thirty knots on the nose. To add to our consternation, we had an incredible rain storm unleash over us, with the wind coming from all directions. Apparently these strong and unpredictable winds are a feature of the Bass Strait islands. After a difficult and uncomfortable couple of hours we were finally able to turn into Winter Cove and prepared to anchor. The wind had by this time turned to the forecast southerly, so at least the wind was now offshore.
What we hadn’t counted on was the remnant swell coming into the cove from the North. Difficult to measure, we estimated a two meter swell coming into the cove with breaking waves at the entrance. We had no option but to attempt to anchor in this mess of water and wind, and fortunately our anchor (a Simpson Lawrence Delta) appeared to hold. Immediately behind us was a converted fishing trawler plus two fifty foot motor boats. Scimitar was to our port.
And so began one of the worst nights of my life. We pinned our position on our GPS chart plotter and anxiously checked every half hour to see if our anchor was dragging. The wind kept building and building. It was truly fearful. The banshee wail of the wind over the boat was terrifying. Scimitar recorded over fifty knots of wind during the night. This was our southerly change with a vengeance.
We survived the night and in hindsight was the worry unnecessary? Perhaps, but if we had of dragged the anchor in those conditions the consequences would have been terrible.
The morning came with a slightly abating wind. We had breakfast on deck, and placed our small solar panel on the cabin top to try and recharge our batteries. A forty knot gust took care of that, with the solar panel and its wooden mount flying through the air until it smashed onto a winch.
We return to Melbourne.
It was time to take stock of our situation. We had a troubling oil and water leak from the motor and all the crew were suffering from sleep deprivation due to the noise from the mast. We ended up spending a total of three nights at Deal Island exhausting our provisions.
I called the crew together, and summarised our situation. The motor issues were concerning and not immediately fixable, and the mast issue was also unable to be resolved at this time. We would have to spend another night at Deal Island whilst the storm front passed and would possibly run out of water and diesel before we got to Hobart. We felt that we could make it to Hobart but then the biggest and most pressing issue was once we were in Hobart how we would get the boat back to St.Kilda given its problems?
In the end, whilst it was the skipper’s call to return to Melbourne the decision was unanimous.
What followed was two days and one night of fantastic sailing, along with a visit to the stunningly beautiful and aptly named Refuge Cove which is located on Wilson’s Promontory at the southern end of the Australian mainland. It was as though the gods had decreed – we have tried you severely, you have done well, and here is your bonus – enjoy south-easterly winds and flat water for your return sail. Glorious, we averaged over seven knots from Refuge Cove back to the heads of Port Phillip Bay. Arrived at the peak of the flood tide with a following wind (at 2:00am in the morning) and rocketed through the Rip at 9 to 10 knots of boat speed. Up the bay and back into our pen in just over four and a half hours.
Lessons learnt.
It took a while to shake off the sense of failure; we hadn’t made it to Hobart.
The 72-year-old skipper (me) certainly discovered his limits. The boat too showed her limitations as a cruising boat. Fine ends, and an older design meant limited storage space, the motor was fine as an auxiliary to motor in and out of the pen but poorly suited to continuous hours of running. Top speed is effectively six knots in favourable conditions, but the motor lacked the grunt required when pushing into a head wind or adverse tide. The engine was positioned just aft of the mast, perfect for sailing, but poor for noise and vibration control.
In summary Boambillee is still a great sailing boat, but a poor cruising boat and an awful motorboat.
The issues will be sorted and with the exuberance of youth Joe and Hamish are keen to try again in two years time after taking on board the lessons learned this time. I will wish them all the best.
Postscript.
We did make it to the Australian Wooden Boat Festival, by plane. With accommodation in Hobart booked we were keen to go to the festival regardless. A bitter-sweet experience. We would have been berthed next to Love and War, a very famous S&S 46, multiple Sydney-Hobart overall race winner, and Vittoria, an S&S 42 – again famous and beautiful. Boambillee would have made a fine companion to both. – George Fisscher
