There are many aspects of professional sailing that Mark Macrae is involved in; Skippering, sail training, yacht delivery, global racing, escorting visitors like us, advice and brokerage and the more time we spent with this congenial man the more we realised his local knowledge of sailing locations and onshore facilities in Western Australia is also extensive.
He is the chap with the 8 ton Beneteau ‘Panacea’ next to us when we were in the marina in Albany. He came aboard for a coffee with one of the ladies who crew for him regularly, Katrina. They both joined the lady skipper/owner of the classic little yacht ‘Freya’ on the Sydney Hobart Race last year. We didn’t see them because they were bringing in the back of the fleet with other smaller vessels on New Year’s Eve while we were with Bron and Ken watching the Sydney Fireworks. There were also fireworks in Hobart that evening which Katrina and Mark thought were for them as they approached the finishing line, until they remembered the date.
Back at the end of January I started making enquiries about where we could layup Zoonie. For some reason, I gather political from local information, the yard at the Fremantle Sailing Club never came back to us with prices and a place for our trusty boat, despite the sailing club side sending us details of the wet pen where we were welcome to moor Zoons from our arrival to departure if we so wished by return of email. So Mark suggested Emu Point Slip Services who have a yard just around the corner from Albany and is privately owned.
We had noted the prices in the local government owned marinas, which have recently been increased by increments of 10 – 20% over three years, were around a third more expensive than on the east coast. One entire pontoon of fingers with around twenty berths is now entirely occupied by non-paying visitors of the feathered variety with the added expense of the daily wash off of their prolific guano.
We went with Mark for a tour of the local area and he introduced us to Darren who runs the boatyard at Emu Point, and once sailed in the Portsmouth – Poole area. We agreed a price which was happily two thirds of the wet pen cost at Fremantle, “Is that inclusive of GST?” I asked, legally prices quoted should include it, and Darren confirmed he could include the tax at that price.
So plans changed from taking her around the corner to Fremantle at this tail end of the summer to moving on from here when we return in August/September, the tail end of the winter. Apparently the winds then will be predominantly South Westerly, so we gather from Cameron on the paddleboard with his two year old daughter Lucky, it’s good to wait for an offshore Northerly to get to Augusta Marina which is lovely he said, and then go on around when the wind backs to SW, “but you don’t want to do it in August, it’s horrible then, lots of hail.”
That’s a long way away as yet and we were keen, having firmed up on Zoonie’s spot, to book our flights home to Poole and accommodation in Perth for a look see. In the process we also booked the 10 day camping/hostel tour from Perth Youth Hostel to Broome starting on March 21st. If you Google Perth YHA 10 Day camping to Broome or something like that you will see the itinerary. I asked Emily if she could see her Ma abseiling down a rock face, having said recently in a blog it’s not my thing and her reply was “100% Ma”. No pressure!
So once in Broome it seems a pity not to see a little of the Kimberleys so we are taking a long day tour, 6.30am start to 10.30pm finish while there and then flying back to Perth for a couple of days before we fly home, nonstop care of Quantas on the 7th /8th April. That should be an experience in itself, 17 hours 15 minutes of close human company and no ventilation! But then only an hour or so longer than the day trip to the Kims.
The clever consultant in the travel agent found flights that are only £60 total more return than those with stop overs and in view of the current global health panic the fewer encounters with human strangers the better we thought.
Back to Zoonie. While we were in American River on Kangaroo Island Rob did an engine oil change and service and found the impeller in the raw cooling water pump had shed one of its flanges. Also the inside of the pump had an unhealthy looking residue on one side, like solid emulsified oil which meant the impeller was spinning against a rough uneven surface. The little black foreign body had disappeared, we assumed into the heat exchanger and we just hope it had made its way out. Naturally Rob replaced the impeller.
Again acting on Mark’s advice, Rob took the pump apart to see if he could find the lost fragment and very carefully, with a torch, had a look into the exchanger. There followed a delicate surgical removal of the foreign object that could so easily have blocked the water flow, causing the engine to overheat, and with those unforgiving rocky shores so nearby, we may have been no better off than the ill-fated sailing ships of the past on a lee shore.
But something else he found that was even more disturbing was that four of the flanges on the new impeller were torn in only 81 hours of engine use. That little baby, (the Pump) will be coming back to the UK with us where we already have a new pump on order at Golden Arrow in Poole.
So two days ago we gathered in our lines and motored out of the marina into Princess Royal Harbour, past the three ships loading woodchips and grain and back into King George Sound where we had entered on the 24th February, and changed course for Oyster Harbour where Mark had told us there were three courtesy moorings. Fingers crossed the impeller would remain intact for this 7 mile passage! More about our time in Albany in the next blogs.
Two of the moorings were occupied by friendly folk we would meet the next morning. I have just checked to see where MP anchored while she was in here nineteen years ago to the day and found her anchorage latitude was the same as ours on the buoy and her longitude was different by just a few feet, and that was pure co-incidence.
Zoonie has been busy voyaging for seven and a half months and has covered 6386 miles since the 19th June 2019. She deserves a rest.
As you can see in the photos the location, opposite Emu Point where the boat yard is located, is delightful and we had the cackling of Kookaburras and the squawking of Australian Ravens and the sight of white chested cormorants roosting like candles in the trees, plus the languid movement of two dolphins gliding past us in the still of the evening to enjoy. Also there was no water movement so we could sleep in our own bed without fear the waves would start slapping Zoonie during the night.
Yesterday morning dawned with a clear sky and muted pastel colours and soon, Maurice was busy on his Olympic Class Australian Etchel racing yacht, at least the hull is. Maurice cut the deck off another boat and put it on this one to create his tiny, comfy home. After a row ashore he started to prepare for what is a regular daily excursion; a race against his friend Ian in his classic sloop across King George Sound, back the way we had come, towards Albany boat harbour. As he came by he said “Oyster isn’t it” and smiled when he found he was right. The first of the two of them in to the boat harbour was to buy the coffees, but as the astute Billie, mum of Lucky on the big yacht, commented across the water to Ian and in view of the lack of wind, “Could be lunch!”
Zoonies Layup position 34:59.66S 117:56.56E
Vancouver Mokare and Lockyer – The founders of Albany
In 1791 Commander George Vancouver sailed amongst the whales into the sheltered waters that he immediately named after King George the Third (Sound) and approached the inner harbour where the Southern Ocean swell and free winds are left behind, replaced with a vast area of shallow water and sandbanks, and teeming with seals and sea lions, which he named Princess Royal Harbour. He stayed a while anchored off a natural amphitheatre of hills enclosing a perfect place for future settlement with a plentiful supply of wood, game and water. He then sailed on to North America and broke the news and soon the sea-hunters of England, France and America were busy with their deadly business of supplying the Northern hemisphere’s insatiable need for furs, oil, meat and bone. Whale numbers have recovered but the same cannot be said for the seals and sea lions.
Ten years later our friend Matthew Flinders dropped the hook here, off Point Possession and carried out many observations of the magnetic variations in the area which were affected by the granite base of the surrounding rocks. He compared the observations on board to those taken by his men from their tents ashore and took the mean between the two, “I conceive it will not be far wrong if taken at 7 degrees west.”
He also made some useful discoveries about tides. There being little tide running in either of the two harbours but a swift current flowing between the two in the narrow entrance. Also he discovered there was only one HW in 24 hours, occurring sometime between 6pm and midnight in the 16 days of his observations.
He also compared his depth soundings to Captain Vancouver’s at the entrance to Oyster Bay where we traversed for that lovely night moored before Zoonie was lifted at Emu Point. Matthew found only thirteen feet where Vancouver had plumbed to seventeen. On approach our depth went down to around the same but the centre of the channel further in has obviously been dredged since as we had 24 feet. These depth variations compared to Vancouver’s were the greatest disparity between the two in their surveying of the area and stand as testimony to Matthew’s diligent pursuit of the high standards of accuracy.
Having taken on nature’s supplies he continued eastwards close to the shore so that no river or entrance would escape his detection.
I digress, so back to the early beginnings of Albany.
In 1826 the British Brig Amity was commissioned to transport 21 soldiers, 23 convicts (cheap labour), officers and seamen and Major Edmund Lockyer, his wife and eleven children to establish the new settlement. He became the first Commandant for five months.
On the way around from Sydney in November the brig was hit by storms and was forced to put into George Town on the north Tasmania coast where Bron and Ken live and where we spent Christmas, to take on supplies and carry out repairs to her sails.
She didn’t have the same agreeable sail we had across the Bight, instead arriving in King George Sound on Christmas Day after a rough six week crossing poor things.
As she sailed into Princess Royal Harbour she flew her colours and fired her gun and thus Major Lockyer made the first official claim on behalf of the British Crown to domination over the whole Australian continent. Heady stuff.
Soon Edmund Lockyer met Mokare of the Menang Boodja Noongar people who learned English, maybe from Edmund or his wife and acted as interpreter and guide teaching him the Dreamtime stories and acting as the perfect host, showing him literally the lay of the land and the walking tracks, many of which are the modern day roads.
Early relations between the aborigines and Foreigners were good not least because of Edmund’s fair-minded and even tempered nature but also because the whaling and sealing industries did not encroach upon the available land in the area, leaving the Menang people to continue their way of life. As soon as the population grew in response to the abundance of valuable land resources and the need to farm crops for food the conflict began. It must have been a major disappointment for Edmund to see the destructive decline in relations after such a promising start with their accommodating hosts.
In the picture of Mokare’s family you can see how they were displayed in mocking, demeaning caricature at the time to re-inforce the colonial concept of seeing them as ignorant savages in need of reform and civilising. Also in the recent picture of the Dog Rock(s), which is an essential part of their Dreamtime story, the description uses the loaded word ‘simply’ a large boulder, by which combined with giving this purely geological description, is the writer ignorant of or purely dismissing its cultural importance to the Menang people?
As for the original brig Amity she started life in New Brunswick, Canada and worked around Scottish and Irish waters before making her way to Hobart. This little oceanic workhorse not only transported live and deadstock all over the new colonies but also rescued survivors from the convict ship, the Royal Charlotte after she grounded herself on the Great Barrier Reef. Amity (friendship) was instrumental in the founding of the convict settlement now known as Brisbane and she took supplies to the new settlement at the Swan River, today’s Perth.
After she left King George Sound she became a supply ship for a while and later she was based back in Hobart as a whaling ship. She also transported sheep and cattle to new colonies but in June 1845 her long career came to an end in a storm when she rode up onto a reef off Flinders Island. Her crew were all rescued by a sealing party but she became a total wreck and her remains have never been located. Ken might have an idea where she is, he’s lived for forty years on the island!
One man, Stan Austin took on the task of building her replica between 1975/6 to the exact scale of the original but without the benefit of plans. She is based on a snow brig design with a small trysail immediately behind the main mast. Stan supplied most of the materials and did a lot of the work himself as part of his vision to remember the town’s small beginnings and in so doing allowing us to learn about them too. What a gift.
Climbing the Porongurups for a Skywalk – Brought out the monkey in us
Craig was our driver/guide for the day and as there was no cruise ship in town and the tourist season is on the wane we had him to ourselves. The Poronjurups (an ‘up’ ending means meeting place) is a short mountain range 34 km north east from Albany and south west of the Sterling Range that loomed above the horizon as we drove away from civilisation. The day was dry and the sky an interesting array of cloud formations that could be a prelude to stormy weather, we would find out.
We were looking forward to this excursion as we hadn’t been for a decent walk for a number of seabound days down from Woody Island and we weren’t disappointed. Our sturdy walking shoes gripped well over the uneven path and in places smooth wet surface of the granite. The walk reminded me of Parihaka in Whangarei but the Karri’s here are nothing like as grand, long lived and beautiful as the kauris of NZ, maybe a different species. Indeed they are; the WA Karri are from the species eucalyptus diversicolour, while the New Zealand Kauri is Agathis Australis, so the shared characteristics are in name and size only.
It took only 45 minutes to climb through the bush and emerge above the tree line to these impressive granite rocks. Since the building of the Skywalk visitor numbers to the area have rocketed which has helped the local vineyards, bringing thirsty hikers to their cellar doors for a much deserved lunch and glass or two of their excellent wines, as did the three of us later.
Craig chatted all the way about the walk and area, his family and travels and then explained a little about the demands of climbing the rock boulders to the walk on the summit, clinging on to the giant stainless steel staples in the rock as hand holds. I was a little worried about the baby in the dad’s back carrier because there is a near vertical caged ladder to climb for the last ascent. Hopefully the little one escaped without being scalped.
The view on the top was unsurprisingly vast, looking over the dead flat plain all around that was once the seabed. Now farmed mostly with vineyards, a luxury pig farm where the creatures get to roam free and out of doors, and blue gum plantations galore that are felled after fifteen years or so depending on how well they have grown, for use in making glossy paper for magazines for one thing. They could do with taking some of the foliage back east as this type of gum is loved by koalas. Masked lapwings soared around us and I hunted the airways to see if there were any eagles surfing the thermals, but no they were elsewhere.
Towards the ocean the sky was dense with that dark blue type of cloud that tells one there is trouble aloft and sure enough the familiar rumble bounced across the plains towards us and fork golden lightning crackled threateningly.
We soaked up the beauty of the surroundings and the wonder of the ancient rocks and the design skill and precarious construction of the walk was not lost on us either. The engineers had to like abseiling, back to that subject again, as they were suspended from the rock face to drill the holes for the rods that would support the floor and bannister structure. No good trying to build one of these in sandstone; it was the strength and solidity of this granite that made the whole engineering project possible.
A big clap and rumble of thunder combined with the first drops of rain made us decide it was time to descend the rocks by the same route and back into the trees where we saw the scarlet robin and the little pale yellow rumped thornbill and honeyeaters flitting around the tree blossoms.
Craig took us to the Ironwood Estate to try their nice wines grown on the ten acres they bought three decades ago. They had quite a good number in for lunch, us the only hikers amongst them, and we sat on the terrace overlooking the plains towards the Stirling Mountains. Then Craig took us up Mount Adelaide at the summit of the Albany Heritage Park to see the views over the sounds and the Anzac memorial. Our first excursion out of Albany was a memorable and enjoyable one and we felt a lot fitter once back on Zoonie.
Birth Pangs of Early Albany
The nineteenth century saw Albany burgeon as a major town due to its strategic position both on route from Europe to the east coast of Australia and back to Europe but also because of the natural resources it offered in the way of shelter, water and fresh meat.
The early, largely friendly relations between the indigenous people and the newcomers soon changed when the building fences to enclose land started and increased rapidly in what must have been an alarming sight to the aborigines. They were rapidly losing their hunting and fishing grounds and thus their food supply of the past 50,000 years. As the facilities of road and rail transport and communications with the telegraph by 1872 and then telephone in 1886 were set in place the appeal to the Europeans of settling in the area grew and between 1888 and 1891 the permanent population grew from 1200 to 2665.
The town prospered as can be seen in the architecture today reflecting various European styles from classical to colonial, carefully preserved to remind people of the commercially successful beginnings. The human cost to the aborigines is not forgotten fortunately, nor is the understanding at the time by a few of how morally wrong was much of their treatment.
Anthony Trollope (Chronicles of Barsetshire amongst his numerous novels) visited Australia more than once after 1871 and had plenty to write about much of which caused offence to the Australians for example his reference to them as ‘braggarts’. He stayed much of the time with his younger son who was a sheep farmer in Victoria and it could have been there or on a stopover in Albany that he met a young Aborigine lady called Bessy Flower. I will write more about her in a later blog. Bessy was an exceptionally intelligent person by the highest standards of intellect, politic and human compassion. Trollope, a man with a similar disposition, wrote about her ‘remarkable intelligence, talent and skill’, and reflecting on his visit to Albany he recalled the location of the town as,
“…. very pretty with a free outlook to a fine harbour, with bluff heads and picturesque islands. The climate is delightful. The place is healthy. I was assured that the beer brewed there was good. The grapes were certainly good.”
As time moved on the local Menang people were largely absorbed into the European way of life, this being one of the reasons so many died of the diseases brought aboard the visiting ships. They filled such jobs as road builders, domestic and farm servants, farm workers, guides and interpreters, whaling teams, (kanga) roo shooters (for hides and meat) police assistants and trackers, a role for which they still do not qualify for pensions even after a lifetime of service.
Also of course they were subject to the same harsh jurisdiction that brought so many criminals to Australia in the first place. They were convicted of various crimes ranging from theft of livestock (this after their hunting grounds were stolen from them) petty theft to murder and their punishment went through the full gamut of prison in Albany gaol, hard labour, imprisonment on Rottnest Island off Fremantle, work camps and execution.
One industry that prevailed for much the second half of Albany’s first century was coal bunkering. The new age of steamships as well as the railway engines on the rapidly growing land network had to be supplied with fuel and the pall of coal dust hung over the town as the lumpers worked 24/7 with their shovels in the holds of the ships and coal hulks, with as yet unknown damage going on in their lungs, to keep the fledgling town growing. What had been clear, sweet sea air over Albany was now filled with odorous minute particles of coal dust and the sulphurous smell from the smoke from idling steam engines for half a century. Lumps of coal from those days are still washed up along the high tide line of Middleton Beach.
But Albany’s supremacy in Western Australia came to an abrupt end in 1900 when the British Postmaster General decided that Fremantle would be the mailing port of the west and all that industry was taken away, the monthly visit of the mail and passenger carrying ‘Australia’ now taking place along the wharf in a young city 400 km away on the exposed west coast. Rail links with the east soon took over from the sailing routes to Sydney on account of their greater speed and safety and for a variety of reasons, mostly political and commercial, the town on the Swan River became the state capital known today as Perth, eclipsing the strategic importance of Albany as a centre for communications.
However, Albany has never lost its income from the changing nature of trade. Even when Perth was growing as the state capital Albany was pioneering the supply of foodstuff to the goldmine fields at Kalgoorlie, 480km distant and as a satellite industry from this the fish freezing industry grew. Entrepreneurs had rushed to the town from the start. In 1897 fisherman Henry Mouchemore shipped two fishing boats to Albany specifically but not exclusively to supply the Goldfield miners with a healthier diet and the building of the Albany Refrigeration Works meant fresh, frozen and dried fish could be transported inland.
A decade and a half on and the First World War made Albany the main port from which Australian and New Zealand soldiers were shipped to the battlefields of Europe, an estimated 40,000 left through the tiny gap between Princess Royal Harbour and King George Sound known as Ataturk Entrance after Kemal Ataturk, founder and first president of the new secular Turkey against whose brave soldiers the Australians and New Zealanders famously fought at Gallipoli.
The success of Albany as a secure harbour ensured the ongoing arrival of settlers and undoubtedly led to the expansion of arable and livestock farming and the growth of the towns of the south west. Today the wharves are home to ranks of silos and piles of woodchip and the number of cruise ships visiting the area throughout the year, because of the pleasant climate, is growing or rather has been until the arrival of Coronavirus Covid 19. The effect of that has been to provide an alternative location from their normal destinations north towards Asia for cruise ships, like the two we have seen, The Pacific Princess and the Arcadia. To balance their presence is the decline in the arrival of Chinese tourists.
How quickly do these human created activities and global connections crumble when nature takes over; look at the effect of the bushfires on the economy, the spread of disease on trade, travel and the global finance markets, to say nothing of the inexplicable run on loo paper here and abroad. Do the panickers and the shoppers fighting over the diminishing stocks in the shopping isles not realise it is probably made in China!