Tame Stingrays and Great Cape Leeuwin

Tame Stingrays This enormous stingray swam up to be hand-fed... The whole family comes right up to your feet and lets you stroke them. The children, standing knee-deep in the water, chirp like a flock of sparrows. En route to Cape Leeuwin. When we arrived at Hamelin Bay, at first we couldn’t understand what all the excitement was about. Then our young sailor started jumping and shouting for joy too: “Mum, Mum, touch them!” But for some reason Mum didn’t touch them; instead, hitching up her skirt, she merely tried to film them. The photos are in the camera; I hope to fish them out of there in time for the next posts. Young sailor on duty The stingrays here are fed by the fishermen. Hamelin Bay is generally a very fishy place: they haul the nets in here using... a car . Not everyone, of course, but specially licensed fishermen. We saw it ourselves yesterday. Some of the catch is cleaned on the spot, and the skins go to the stingrays. This draws people to the campsite and to this historic and beautiful place. The campsite is packed to the rafters; prices for a tiny patch to pitch a tent can reach AU$100 per day, depending on how many people there are in your group. ⠀ Once there was a wooden jetty here; these gates are all that remain of it A stingray right by the shore. Photo by Sveta Svetlichnaya In 1900, during a terrible storm, three ships were wrecked at the jetty at once. And this idyllic bay’s overall tally is 11 sunken vessels. Their remains still lie beneath a layer of sand and seaweed. ⠀ The famous Cape to Cape hiking trail passes through here: 123 km. Our friends recently walked it with their three children—their two older daughters, aged five and seven, walked the whole way themselves. ⠀ Hamelin Bay We want to come back to this bay, switch off the “old lady” and finally stroke a stingray’s rounded back. Dawn, 17 April We weighed anchor. Today we will round the third and final great cape of our voyage—Cape Leeuwin. Here the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean: winds, storms and reefs—everything we love. We have already rounded the previous two Great Capes on the itinerary— Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope —in January 2019 and February 2020. One great cape a year, as it turns out ))). The best-case plan is to anchor beyond the longitude of Cape Leeuwin and stay there until morning. The fallback plan is to discover that anchoring is impossible and continue straight on to Albany. In that case, we’ll have no communications for a couple of days. Watch for updates. Our Instagram has lots of stories from this section of the voyage and from Australia Cape Hamelin at sunset Evening, 17 April. Great Cape Leeuwin has technically been rounded It’s only about 15 miles from Hamelin Bay to Leeuwin. We get up at dawn and hoist the sails. For half the way, we sail close-hauled as usual off the west coast; for the other half, we’ll be tacking into the wind. We’re out of practice, so it makes us seasick. The captain counts down the metres to the cape’s longitude aloud: 200 metres... 150... 100...! Done! Lessons in seamanship Once we cross the long-awaited longitude, the great cape’s white-stone lighthouse remains off our port quarter, while Lady Mary picks her way carefully towards the anchorage. Young sailor, up the mast; Nastya, to the bow—we’re checking the depth. Sand! Rocks! the girls warn. Cape Leeuwin (how do you even spell it in Russian?!!) and a swim We skirt Geographe Reef and take what shelter we can from the southerly swell behind a small rocky islet and a line of reefs. The anchorage is completely exposed to the wind, and the rolling is just as bad as at Pitcairn or Easter Island . Nastya teaches Ladunya how to anchor. We choose a patch of sand, and the anchor digs in on the first try at a depth of 9 metres. 50 metres of chain, full astern. We’re set! There’s nowhere to go ashore; the swell crashes roaring against the islet. The children sit down to their lessons, and only at the height of the midday sun do the young sailor and the captain swim out to the anchor to check our chances of leaving without incident. How long will we stay here? As it turned out, only a few hours. The captain announced that we would set off into the night. Cape Leeuwin To be continued! It’s two days to Albany. There will be no communications. Follow Lady Mary’s movements under the Route tab. The track from Iridium-360 is plotted there, courtesy of MVS Telecom.