Thanks for the comment. Yes the country up there is just magic. A place everyone should see at least once. Even Helen who is not a sailer said she would go back there in a heart beat which is high praise indeed. Cheers Mark
A stunning video, adventure & pictures! Thank you Marcus & Helen for sharing this. I especially liked all the sunset, sunrise & the waterfall parts! ❤️👏👍👌😊
Yes, the Kimberley is getting more visited and regulated sadly. Still a magic place to visit and a must for any bucket list in my view. Still love getting out my Malcom Douglas collection every so often, great unique films. Cheers Mark
Its so great following this adventure. I have seen yachts anchored at Crocodile Creek before, it is on my bucket list for sure, and to have another trailer sailer there with you. Thanks for sharing. One Life, One Search, Shane
Yes, crocodile creek is a magical place and like lots of places in the Kimberley you cant fully capture it in pictures, it is even better being there. Definitely one for the bucket list! Cheers Mark
Great video mate, you captured how beautiful yet how rugged the Kimberley is! I had to dive into croc creek at night to un snag our tender, bloody scary! I meet Phil and Marion and also enjoyed his home brew! Enjoy your travels. Cheers
Yes Phil is a great bloke, rough around the edges but a real Aussie. Sadly I never met Marion. Doing anything in Kimberley waters at night involving getting close to the water is bloody scary! Glad you lived to tell the tale. Cheers Mark
Thanks Tony, enjoy sharing the adventures and hope it inspires a few others to give it a go. Challenging but doable by anyone with a bit of planning and common sense. Wish I was back on the water up there again... the days are hitting 40 degrees with high humidity and thunderstorms....maybe next dry season. Cheers Mark
Another top video - a pleasure to watch. I'd like to ask - what did you find to be the most useful source of information on those spots you visited, and the detailed tidal anecdotes? Thanks for sharing.
The Fremantle YC West Australian Cruising Guide and the PDF's from the Kimberley Coast Cruising YC. The first is free on the web, the second cost $50 to join but it also allows you to use the forum on the KCCYC website to ask questions from a group that sails the area a lot. Having said all that its a bit like a jig saw, I assembled as much information on the tides etc from both these sources, tried filling in the gaps with forum posts and after that tried to visualize how water would flow in an area to predict local effects. Overall the tides move North and East on the ebb and South and West on the flood across the Kimberley coast. Local topography complicates this and can reverse this completely in some areas. If you get it wrong and if you can manage 6knots with your vessel you can push against the tide which in 80% of areas will amount to no more than 3 knots. Around headlands and small passes this can be between 5 and 10 knots and at its extreme the horizontal waterfalls. In most areas the tide closest to the area you are in low or high water will coincide with slack water depending on how far away the tide station is. These days there is a lot of tide information across the area. BOM publishes tide tables that you can download from the web. It takes a while to find their tide station map on the web but it show all the stations and allows downloads. Most chart plotters also have attached tide information as well that can be used. Unfortunately they don't always agree the time of high and low tide and which source is right is hard to predict. Having said all that, although it can be stressful at times, most with a bit of common sense will get through OK. At worst, if the tide is wrong, go back for a while and wait for it to change. On our trip to Darwin we didn't have to resort to that but there were a few occasions of using more fuel than l liked to motor into an unexpected tidal flow. Cheers Mark
@@TRAILERYACHTADVENTURES Wow Mark, thanks for the comprehensive response - really appreciated. We're following your channel very closely because there's so much to learn from you. We've had trailer sailors for decades, but certainly don't have your talent for doing things properly. We're down on the Bellarine Peninsula, so even more interested as you often feature places in our neck of the woods. Cheers, and thanks for the good work, Damo.
Another excellent video. Are you back in Victoria? It’s a shame that the private tour operators are aloud to move one on…. Shouldn’t be aloud. As of this Friday we are aloud to visit our boats….. marvellous
Hi Tony, Yes back in Victoria and back to work sadly. Most commercial operators in the Kimberley were friendly and helpful. Only the horizontal waterfalls mob that seemed to treat the area as belonging to them with little concern that it is public water that all have the right to explore. Great to hear you will be back on your boat soon. Hopefully it will be the last lockdown for quite some time. Working on the next video between going to work and getting our house ready to sell. Hopefully it will be finished on the weekend. Should be another 4 after that to cover the sailing to Darwin. Cheers Mark
I bought the RL mainly for cruising for which it is great, as you say feels like a small yacht. The NX25 is a great boat but built to have racing capability which it does well but makes it more dinghy like. Did consider Nolexes when I bought the RL but the full standing headroom in the cabin in the cabin won me over in the end. Cheers Mark
Nice video mate, I really enjoyed it. Bit disappointing about the one commercial business 'bluffing' to move you on. I would of asked them for some evidence and told them you would of moved on when you felt comfortable. Don't know what its like in the top end but in Victoria you have to be Authorised, have identity, and work for the government to move any one on. I know this because I am one. Sorry for the long winded post but its just In case someone reads it that gets put in the position themselves. Thanks for the video.
Yes in hindsight we should of told them we wouldn't move until the next tide cycle on safety grounds. At the time we had 2 hours of daylight left and the tide was already building so we reacted too quickly to try avoid too high a flow and give time to find an anchorage. We also had an audience of about 50 tourists in the operators boat listening to the whole conversation on VHF over the loudspeakers on their boat booming over the whole area which didn't help. The whole proposed ban is a bit tricky in that it seems that it is through the equivalent of Parks Victoria but is also involving the indigenous community of the area banning private boats anchoring whilst allowing large high powered inflatables of the tourist operation to scream through the area dozens of times a day or more along with dozens of seaplanes landing and taking of in the bay outside. The arrangement smacks of monopolization of the area in exchange for $$ resulting in private boats only being able to enter and exit the inner bays during the same slack water cycle. Don't get me wrong, I am all for supporting the local indigenous communities through the Kimberley and had paid for my marine access permits for the entire coast. The anchorages in the inner bays are below the low water mark and so should be accessible to all Australians, not just operators with big wallets. Thanks for your input and reply and sorry for my even longer winded reply!! Cheers Mark
It was only the new operators at the Horizontal waterfalls. We met quite a few of the small commercial cruise operators on the trip and most were really friendly, we had drinks and a meal of mud crab and baramundi after helping one out and another that showed us where to find a little known waterfall that we wouldn't have found otherwise. Sadly the bad trend seems truer as the operations get bigger!
Hi Daniel, the Katadyn is a reverse osmosis filter which filters salt out of seawater. We only used this when we couldn't collect water from streams ashore. The water in the Kimberley is very clear and doesn't need more filtering if you collect it carefully. The area is so remote the chances of polluted water is very small. We always tasted water before collecting. Over the trip we collected half our water and used the Katadyn to make the rest. The RL 28 is a very capable boat and some have done trips to the phillipines and half way around the Australian coast. The Tasman sea on the way to NZ is a nasty stretch of water and would take very good weather planning in a trailer sailer. Is it possible, absolutely. Would it involve some risk, absolutely, any crossing of the Tasman does. People have done it in smaller boats. The RL properly prepared could but the smaller the boat the greater the risk and the more uncomfortable it will be should the weather turn. Neringa handles swells and rough conditions well for her size. The last leg into Darwin was in 2-3m seas, strong wind against tide and very rough. She handled it well but the comfort level was low. I have added extra ballast in Neringa to ensure self righting and modified her companionway hatch to make it waterproof. The truth is many trailer sailers are very seaworthy, when things get rough its the skipper that gives up. Many accounts of people lost out in the open ocean are people who panic, abandon ship and drown only to have their boats found floating and intact. First rule of open ocean is don't leave your boat unless you are sure it is sinking. If I was a bit younger I might have considered this trip. Cheers Mark
Hi Mark and Helen, glad you are having a great time. I was looking forward to the video whee you told me in the last video about the crocodile attacking your dinky. Did you in the end buy the Lamb shanks I cooked fir you at the my club . How is your new anchor winch going ? Are you sailing or motoring more ? By the way don’t come back to Melbourne as we been in lockdown more then anyone on earth. So glad you are doing what you set out to do and having a wonderful time.
Hi Mark, Sadly I have arrived back in Melbourne again. Only the first video was put together on the water and uploaded when we got back to Darwin and affordable internet. Most of the trip was out of internet range and our basic sat phone apart from being hugely expensive had no ability to upload anything except sms. All the other videos are being put together as I have time back in Victoria. Helen looked for the lamb shanks but couldn't get any at the time and then got busy so didn't try again. Needless to say she catered for the trip very well with many similar products and we had enough in the end to go for another month at least. The anchor winch has been wonderful and saved a lot of stress and sore backs. The only thing I would say is the distance from the deck roller to the winch drum needed to be a bit greater so the rope would lay on the drum as retrieved more evenly. The chain seems to work better in that regard. With 2 on board it was great as I would go up front and make sure the rope laid evenly whilst Helen was on the helm. This was only needed when a lot of rope was out. Sadly back to work next week dodging the chance of covid at the school I work at! Yay! Cheers Mark
Forgot to say, the croc attack on the dinghy was not with us in the dinghy. We were so worried about the rear of the dinghy taking on water that we didn't film a lot of it, to busy trying to get outboards and batteries off whilst looking out for the return of the croc. Just after getting back out the croc did return, probably around the 4.5 to 5 m mark, a big boy but by the time I got my modified speargun and Helen her camera it had vanished again. We did meet another at Jar Island that took a bit too much interest in me wading in behind the dinghy. It stayed in the water by the dinghy for some time after I hurriedly got out of the water when we saw it coming. Got some pics of that one. Truth is when you feel at risk from a croc you don't always think of reaching for the camera! Cheers Mark
Awesome videos :) iv been trying to talk my better half into a trailer sailor instead of a caravan for a few years now with little luck :( but ill keep trying! As soon as the falls started flowing i wouldn't have moved anywhere, he knowingly put your lives in danger knowing full well it was just a proposal and not law! he wouldn't have been operating that business much longer if that was me,
Hi Andy, thanks for the comment. Yes trailer sailers make good caravans but a bit harder to manage off the beaten track. Mind you I have taken mine down a few dirt track over the years. Good luck with convincing your better half. Yes, I should have refused to move at the falls. The new operators there really are a bunch of cowboys and the recent accident there injuring many people came as no surprise at all watching their operation. We got out ok and the rules about not anchoring in the inner bays smells of big dollars to lock up the area for the commercial operation in my view. Great location, should be open to all not just those with fat wallets 😊 Cheers Mark
By the time I finish building my F22 and get up there the place will be highly regulated and not aloud to do anything unless I pay some company to take me there!
Sadly looking at all the planning documents out there a lot more will be regulated in the next few years. On the bright side its a vast coast and they can't regulate everything. The part I have real problem with is when regulations are put in that blatantly favour big commercial operations that effectively exclude private cruisers who create far less damage to an area than the commercial operators do. When you finish your F22 you will have to get out there and find new treasures on the Kimberley coast!! Great boats the F22, was temped to buy and F28 but the price tag was to rich for my finances.
Thanks for taking me to these gorgeous places.
Awesome and inspiring 👌
Thanks for the comment. Yes the country up there is just magic. A place everyone should see at least once. Even Helen who is not a sailer said she would go back there in a heart beat which is high praise indeed. Cheers Mark
A stunning video, adventure & pictures! Thank you Marcus & Helen for sharing this. I especially liked all the sunset, sunrise & the waterfall parts! ❤️👏👍👌😊
Bit different to the old Malcolm Douglas days then. Great video regardless
Yes, the Kimberley is getting more visited and regulated sadly. Still a magic place to visit and a must for any bucket list in my view. Still love getting out my Malcom Douglas collection every so often, great unique films. Cheers Mark
Mud crab and Baramundi , sounds terrific . Maybe better to stay around where you are for a few years ? Much to play out virus wise back here !
Its so great following this adventure. I have seen yachts anchored at Crocodile Creek before, it is on my bucket list for sure, and to have another trailer sailer there with you.
Thanks for sharing.
One Life, One Search,
Shane
Yes, crocodile creek is a magical place and like lots of places in the Kimberley you cant fully capture it in pictures, it is even better being there. Definitely one for the bucket list! Cheers Mark
What an adventure!
Nice video
Great video Mark, looking forward the the next episode, thanks for your efforts. Cheers
Hi Aaron,
Glad you enjoyed it. Next may be a few weeks, been editing this one for the last 2 days straight.
Cheers Mark
Great video mate, you captured how beautiful yet how rugged the Kimberley is! I had to dive into croc creek at night to un snag our tender, bloody scary! I meet Phil and Marion and also enjoyed his home brew! Enjoy your travels. Cheers
Yes Phil is a great bloke, rough around the edges but a real Aussie. Sadly I never met Marion.
Doing anything in Kimberley waters at night involving getting close to the water is bloody scary! Glad you lived to tell the tale. Cheers Mark
Thanks Mark and Helen! What a great adventure, and great video work. You're really opening our eyes to the last cruising frontier. Thanks again!
Thanks Tony, enjoy sharing the adventures and hope it inspires a few others to give it a go. Challenging but doable by anyone with a bit of planning and common sense. Wish I was back on the water up there again... the days are hitting 40 degrees with high humidity and thunderstorms....maybe next dry season. Cheers Mark
Looks absolutely beautiful I hope to one day sail there as well.. keep up the great channel and safe sailing.👍🍺⛵⚓
Thanks 👍 Just takes a bit of planning and time enough time off from the rest of life :)
Fantastic cruising area, and a great video well done.
Glad you enjoyed it
Another top video - a pleasure to watch. I'd like to ask - what did you find to be the most useful source of information on those spots you visited, and the detailed tidal anecdotes? Thanks for sharing.
The Fremantle YC West Australian Cruising Guide and the PDF's from the Kimberley Coast Cruising YC. The first is free on the web, the second cost $50 to join but it also allows you to use the forum on the KCCYC website to ask questions from a group that sails the area a lot. Having said all that its a bit like a jig saw, I assembled as much information on the tides etc from both these sources, tried filling in the gaps with forum posts and after that tried to visualize how water would flow in an area to predict local effects. Overall the tides move North and East on the ebb and South and West on the flood across the Kimberley coast. Local topography complicates this and can reverse this completely in some areas.
If you get it wrong and if you can manage 6knots with your vessel you can push against the tide which in 80% of areas will amount to no more than 3 knots. Around headlands and small passes this can be between 5 and 10 knots and at its extreme the horizontal waterfalls. In most areas the tide closest to the area you are in low or high water will coincide with slack water depending on how far away the tide station is. These days there is a lot of tide information across the area. BOM publishes tide tables that you can download from the web. It takes a while to find their tide station map on the web but it show all the stations and allows downloads. Most chart plotters also have attached tide information as well that can be used. Unfortunately they don't always agree the time of high and low tide and which source is right is hard to predict.
Having said all that, although it can be stressful at times, most with a bit of common sense will get through OK. At worst, if the tide is wrong, go back for a while and wait for it to change. On our trip to Darwin we didn't have to resort to that but there were a few occasions of using more fuel than l liked to motor into an unexpected tidal flow.
Cheers Mark
@@TRAILERYACHTADVENTURES Wow Mark, thanks for the comprehensive response - really appreciated. We're following your channel very closely because there's so much to learn from you. We've had trailer sailors for decades, but certainly don't have your talent for doing things properly. We're down on the Bellarine Peninsula, so even more interested as you often feature places in our neck of the woods. Cheers, and thanks for the good work, Damo.
Another excellent video. Are you back in Victoria? It’s a shame that the private tour operators are aloud to move one on…. Shouldn’t be aloud.
As of this Friday we are aloud to visit our boats….. marvellous
Hi Tony,
Yes back in Victoria and back to work sadly. Most commercial operators in the Kimberley were friendly and helpful. Only the horizontal waterfalls mob that seemed to treat the area as belonging to them with little concern that it is public water that all have the right to explore.
Great to hear you will be back on your boat soon. Hopefully it will be the last lockdown for quite some time.
Working on the next video between going to work and getting our house ready to sell. Hopefully it will be finished on the weekend. Should be another 4 after that to cover the sailing to Darwin.
Cheers Mark
I have a NX25 but I like your RL28, mine feels like a big dinghy, the RL a small yacht.
I bought the RL mainly for cruising for which it is great, as you say feels like a small yacht. The NX25 is a great boat but built to have racing capability which it does well but makes it more dinghy like. Did consider Nolexes when I bought the RL but the full standing headroom in the cabin in the cabin won me over in the end. Cheers Mark
epic
Nice video mate, I really enjoyed it. Bit disappointing about the one commercial business 'bluffing' to move you on. I would of asked them for some evidence and told them you would of moved on when you felt comfortable. Don't know what its like in the top end but in Victoria you have to be Authorised, have identity, and work for the government to move any one on. I know this because I am one. Sorry for the long winded post but its just In case someone reads it that gets put in the position themselves. Thanks for the video.
Yes in hindsight we should of told them we wouldn't move until the next tide cycle on safety grounds. At the time we had 2 hours of daylight left and the tide was already building so we reacted too quickly to try avoid too high a flow and give time to find an anchorage. We also had an audience of about 50 tourists in the operators boat listening to the whole conversation on VHF over the loudspeakers on their boat booming over the whole area which didn't help.
The whole proposed ban is a bit tricky in that it seems that it is through the equivalent of Parks Victoria but is also involving the indigenous community of the area banning private boats anchoring whilst allowing large high powered inflatables of the tourist operation to scream through the area dozens of times a day or more along with dozens of seaplanes landing and taking of in the bay outside. The arrangement smacks of monopolization of the area in exchange for $$ resulting in private boats only being able to enter and exit the inner bays during the same slack water cycle.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for supporting the local indigenous communities through the Kimberley and had paid for my marine access permits for the entire coast. The anchorages in the inner bays are below the low water mark and so should be accessible to all Australians, not just operators with big wallets.
Thanks for your input and reply and sorry for my even longer winded reply!!
Cheers Mark
Sad to hear you met the me me me , mine mine mine crew , the new Australia 🇦🇺 .
It was only the new operators at the Horizontal waterfalls. We met quite a few of the small commercial cruise operators on the trip and most were really friendly, we had drinks and a meal of mud crab and baramundi after helping one out and another that showed us where to find a little known waterfall that we wouldn't have found otherwise. Sadly the bad trend seems truer as the operations get bigger!
This is excellent! So do you have a freshwater filter or just the Katadyn? How does Naringa go in open seas? Could you do Australia to NZ?
Hi Daniel, the Katadyn is a reverse osmosis filter which filters salt out of seawater. We only used this when we couldn't collect water from streams ashore. The water in the Kimberley is very clear and doesn't need more filtering if you collect it carefully. The area is so remote the chances of polluted water is very small. We always tasted water before collecting. Over the trip we collected half our water and used the Katadyn to make the rest.
The RL 28 is a very capable boat and some have done trips to the phillipines and half way around the Australian coast. The Tasman sea on the way to NZ is a nasty stretch of water and would take very good weather planning in a trailer sailer. Is it possible, absolutely. Would it involve some risk, absolutely, any crossing of the Tasman does. People have done it in smaller boats. The RL properly prepared could but the smaller the boat the greater the risk and the more uncomfortable it will be should the weather turn.
Neringa handles swells and rough conditions well for her size. The last leg into Darwin was in 2-3m seas, strong wind against tide and very rough. She handled it well but the comfort level was low. I have added extra ballast in Neringa to ensure self righting and modified her companionway hatch to make it waterproof. The truth is many trailer sailers are very seaworthy, when things get rough its the skipper that gives up. Many accounts of people lost out in the open ocean are people who panic, abandon ship and drown only to have their boats found floating and intact. First rule of open ocean is don't leave your boat unless you are sure it is sinking. If I was a bit younger I might have considered this trip.
Cheers Mark
Hi Mark and Helen, glad you are having a great time. I was looking forward to the video whee you told me in the last video about the crocodile attacking your dinky.
Did you in the end buy the Lamb shanks I cooked fir you at the my club .
How is your new anchor winch going ?
Are you sailing or motoring more ?
By the way don’t come back to Melbourne as we been in lockdown more then anyone on earth.
So glad you are doing what you set out to do and having a wonderful time.
Hi Mark,
Sadly I have arrived back in Melbourne again. Only the first video was put together on the water and uploaded when we got back to Darwin and affordable internet. Most of the trip was out of internet range and our basic sat phone apart from being hugely expensive had no ability to upload anything except sms. All the other videos are being put together as I have time back in Victoria.
Helen looked for the lamb shanks but couldn't get any at the time and then got busy so didn't try again. Needless to say she catered for the trip very well with many similar products and we had enough in the end to go for another month at least.
The anchor winch has been wonderful and saved a lot of stress and sore backs. The only thing I would say is the distance from the deck roller to the winch drum needed to be a bit greater so the rope would lay on the drum as retrieved more evenly. The chain seems to work better in that regard. With 2 on board it was great as I would go up front and make sure the rope laid evenly whilst Helen was on the helm. This was only needed when a lot of rope was out.
Sadly back to work next week dodging the chance of covid at the school I work at! Yay!
Cheers Mark
Forgot to say, the croc attack on the dinghy was not with us in the dinghy. We were so worried about the rear of the dinghy taking on water that we didn't film a lot of it, to busy trying to get outboards and batteries off whilst looking out for the return of the croc. Just after getting back out the croc did return, probably around the 4.5 to 5 m mark, a big boy but by the time I got my modified speargun and Helen her camera it had vanished again.
We did meet another at Jar Island that took a bit too much interest in me wading in behind the dinghy. It stayed in the water by the dinghy for some time after I hurriedly got out of the water when we saw it coming. Got some pics of that one. Truth is when you feel at risk from a croc you don't always think of reaching for the camera! Cheers Mark
Awesome videos :) iv been trying to talk my better half into a trailer sailor instead of a caravan for a few years now with little luck :( but ill keep trying! As soon as the falls started flowing i wouldn't have moved anywhere, he knowingly put your lives in danger knowing full well it was just a proposal and not law! he wouldn't have been operating that business much longer if that was me,
Hi Andy, thanks for the comment. Yes trailer sailers make good caravans but a bit harder to manage off the beaten track. Mind you I have taken mine down a few dirt track over the years. Good luck with convincing your better half.
Yes, I should have refused to move at the falls. The new operators there really are a bunch of cowboys and the recent accident there injuring many people came as no surprise at all watching their operation.
We got out ok and the rules about not anchoring in the inner bays smells of big dollars to lock up the area for the commercial operation in my view. Great location, should be open to all not just those with fat wallets 😊 Cheers Mark
a solution to dealing with commercial f wits.... "here is my sat phone number, get marine parks to call me to explain the problem. Otherwise bye"
By the time I finish building my F22 and get up there the place will be highly regulated and not aloud to do anything unless I pay some company to take me there!
Sadly looking at all the planning documents out there a lot more will be regulated in the next few years. On the bright side its a vast coast and they can't regulate everything.
The part I have real problem with is when regulations are put in that blatantly favour big commercial operations that effectively exclude private cruisers who create far less damage to an area than the commercial operators do.
When you finish your F22 you will have to get out there and find new treasures on the Kimberley coast!! Great boats the F22, was temped to buy and F28 but the price tag was to rich for my finances.
@@TRAILERYACHTADVENTURES oh I thought you were talking about the F22 fighter jet . LOL