They call it an 'Ocean Race'.

Hi people.

It is Monday morning, and I'm off to work in a couple of hours to work the afternoon to close shift. I thought I'd let you know what I got up to this weekend.

It was the final race of the winter series, and they call it an ocean race. The forecast was not good, with S- SE 30knots and building seas, the exit through the heads of Port Philip Bay was one to be remembered! The race started at 8.30 on Saturday morning which means we left Williamstown (where the boat lives in Melbourne) at close to midnight Friday to ensure we got down in time. I managed to get a few hours sleep on the way down after handing the watch over at 4am. We had a tiny breakfast of cereal and fruit at about 7am while hanging off a mooring at Portsea. Now, I thought the plan was to be leaving the heads at slack water. I don't think it was slack water because of the 3m+ breaking waves! Amazingly everyone managed to get through while the crew on the coastguard boat seemed rather edgy!! Once out and around the corner the conditions seemed to worsen for the next mile or two as the tide was racing up the coast against the 25-30knot winds, right on the rhumb line! So we were beating into large messy seas, with no wind in the troughs and potential knockdowns on the tops! Fun fun on a wee 30 footer. A few boats pulled the pin at this point and headed back. We kept going, and were glad when conditions eased further up the coast. The sun actually popped out after a few rain squalls came through, and then it was just a matter of holding on and getting bucketed with cold water every few waves. It was a shame that the toggle cord for my hood broke at the heads, and I needed to hold my hood on with one very cold hand for the whole race!

We made it to Western Port's Stony Point at 3.35pm and immediately turned around and motorsailed back under main alone.

The race itself was only about 30Nm long but by the time you sail to the heads and sail back from W. Port it is closer to 100 miles. It didn't help that it got down to about 5 degrees overnight and you had cold Bass Strait sea washing over the boat.

We finally got back to Williamstown at 1am on Sunday morning, earlier than expected because of the fun surfing down the afforementioned seas at 12 knots! It was a shame that the full moon wasn't out when I was steering, so you couldn't really see the swell coming, only feel it...and mind the gybe!

Suffice to say I was totally buggered when I staggered into the house at 23o am Sunday. I slept till noon and then felt like a zombie all day.

It was fun, in retrospect. here is a link to a small map of the area, you may find a better one on the net somewhere.. http://mc.multimap.com/cl/geoscience_au//M64/Y-1/M64600Y-18300S1000W553H365.gif

Time to do some vacuuming and clean the toilet.
Hope you all had a happy warm weekend?!?

love joff