Saturday 21st Dec '24


Well, everything calmed down overnight and we both had very relaxing watches.

During today we have had no wind, 25-30kts of wind, calm seas, choppy seas and everything in between.

We are finally on the downward slop to Darwin with only 250nm to go we “should” be in Darwin before midnight tomorrow, Sunday. Then the fun starts with the authorities. If we are lucky we will only have 2 or 3 ABF (Aussie Customs) come onboard, maybe 1 person from Health and 1 or 2 from Ag & Fisheries. Hopefully that should be it and it all goes smoothly…

I saw a strange sight this afternoon just before i was going to call Darwin ABF to confirm arrival timing and where they want us to go, I spotted something floating in the calm water ahead of us. As we got closer it looked a bit suspicious. As you can imagine that spending so much time out here you get used to the way most things look so you notice things that look out of place.
So I got the boats super effective stabilised binoculars out and had a look. It was 4 x 210lt blue drums (like the ones we have on deck with fuel in) wrapped up tight with what looked like very heavy rope bobbing about in the water.
Now it could have been a FAD (fish attracting device) but like I said we get used to seeing those and this didn’t look like one. So I took a photo of the Lat/Long and the floating drums plus a video for good measure.

It was after spotting the drums that I made my call to ABF and after discussing our arrival I asked if they had any interest in what I saw as it was 260nm north of Darwin and outside their waters but they were very keen. So they will be asking me questions about that at some stage.

Sorry about the quality of the picture but I didn’t want to get too close to it for several reasons.

Forecast for the next day is pretty good, only 0.9m sea from just aft of the starboard beam.  Lets just hope we don't get the worst of the Darwin tidal currents.  At least the tides there are only about a 6m range and not the 8m range it can get up to. 

Photo
Photo4032×3024 704 KB

Comments

  1. Gavin Terrill22 December 2024 at 03:55

    Wow, that's crazy. Good call on giving it a wide berth.

    ReplyDelete

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