Dampier Arrival

Hi everyone,

We arrived at Hampton Harbour in Dampier at dawn this morning and secured the boat alongside the Hampton Harbour Boat & Sailing Club pontoon at 0630.  We had a date with customs and quarantine officials for 0800 so had time to hose down the boat and clean up a little.

Entering Hampton Harbour at dawn

Zen Again ready for inspection

Clearing in was very straight forward, taking only 30 minutes or so.  No sniffer dogs, just two guys who did all the paperwork and looked around the boat for anything suspect.  The customs guy enjoyed reading a copy of a news article describing the boat's previous $127M drug bust.

We are now at anchor off the club, near Kakadu which found an apparently free mooring.  We're having a lazy day apart from some cleaning up jobs around the boat.  I've started to look for companies which may be able to fix our boom bracket problem.

We had to motor the last 24 hours since winds were extremely light.  The motor is performing very well.  A couple of maintenance jobs to do before we move on but nothing major.

Here are some basic stats for our passage from Benoa to Dampier...

• Distance Logged = 777nm
• Distance by GPS = 735nm
• Duration = 5 days 22 hours (4 days 4 hours sailing, the rest motoring or motor-sailing)
• Engine Hours = 42 hours
• What worked well 1 = HF skeds with Kakadu on 4483
• What worked well 2 = PredictWind Satellite Communicator email system
• What broke = boom forward bracket bolts stripped themselves out of the bracket
• Noon to noon runs (approx) = 150nm; 140nm; 130nm; 140nm; & 120nm.

And here is our track.  The "kink" is where NE winds replaced E winds and we had to head up to maintain boat speed.  We gave that up when the wind died altogether and motored most of the rest of the way.

Zen Again track

Finally, here is our speed profile...

Zen Again speed profile

We plan to spend a few days here before moving on, probably to Exmouth initially.  Hopefully we can get the boom bracket reattached here, as well as do a few relatively simple maintenance tasks.

It's great to have the boat in WA.  Not quite home yet in her home state!