Leaving Recherche Bay after a salad lunch, eaten contemplatively in the security of those calm waters, we rather tensely secured all we thought could shift and nosed out beyond South East Cape to meet the southern Ocean of which I had read so much. Albatrosses and yellow headed gannets wheeled overhead as we rose and fell on a great ground swell rising from the South West. On the swell, waves broke and we crashed through their tops as we sighted the Eddystone slowly rising ahead like a great block tower. At the Eddystone, discovered by Captain Cook in 1777 we checked the log, turned left and steered for Preservation Inlet. For three days we made slow progress with the light winds at east and north as we moved in the eye of the high for which we had waited in Recherche Bay. Preffering to depart a port with a rising glass is, I feel, good practice, so one can hardly complain about the slow progress. Unknown to us the advancing low was to provide us with an embarrassing abundance of wind and sea.
Mindful of unthinkable disasters in those now unfrequented waters I was reluctant to sever ties with my usual habitat, the shore, and attempted to maintain contact with Hobart Radio, an institution which while much more casual and matey than N.Z. shore stations is equally efficient. Our new set, the latest 60 watt model from a western Sydney firm proved to be a lemon. And while they shut everyone else up in no uncertain manner, they could only guess from our faint signal we were calling them and soon afterwards did not hear us at roll call time.
Sailing by dead reckoning without sight of the sun, with only occasional inspection by albatrosses we sailed over those dreary wastes as a general worsening in the weather reduced visibility to about two miles. The APE (auto pilot extraordinary) did the steering. We maintained a watch of four hours on and off. Progressively we had shortened sail from all the 900 square feet in the lower fore and afters and one day with the squaresail, until we were reduced to the boomed out 70 sq ft inner staysail. All the 8th day we ran before a gale at northwest, the alarm on the ape occasionally blaring out as if in protest at its inability to cope with such an uncouth sea. Attached by lifeline I furled the staysail before dark and stowed it well. During that night the wind and sea rose, and lying on a plastic sheet on the saloon sole, I observed quite dispassionately quite extraordinary things happening to books and other impedimenta about us. Over the background roaring, I began to detect a deeper sound and observed by spreader lights that the sea had, as the mid Victorian novelists would say "assumed most alarming aspect".