There Are Good Bars and There are Bad Bars

Good bars serve decent whiskey with large pours at reasonable prices. Bad bars water down the pour then charge even more. Above is a shot of the Wide Bay Bar at sunrise as we start our way out.

The bar is at the bottom of Fraser Island. It is known as one of the worst bar crossings on the east coast of Australia. One reason is that one leg that takes you very close to beam-on to the swells. That’s the middle blue line on the chart above. The locals call it the Mad Mile, even though it’s closer to 2.2 nautical miles. We left at about 4:30am to start heading out. This gave us plenty of time just before high tide. You really need to do the bar with an incoming tidal current so the wave faces don’t get too steep.
Our crossing was a little stressful being our first one on this coast, but in practice pretty mellow with nothing shallower than about 11 feet and maybe a 1 meter swell.

After a decent days sail south we arrived at the bar entrance to Maloolooba. This one faces north, so the swells go across its entrance The weather was light winds and small swells. The bar was being dredged at the time. Like most of the other boats, I called the dredge master on the VHF and asked him if it was clear for us to come in. He said no problem, just come close by my side on the eastern side of the channel, as he had his piping on the western side. I told him we drew 2 meters (6.5 feet) and asked him to confirm that there would be enough water on that side to carry us safely over. No problem, he says, I just got done dredging that portion.
So we proceeded in and promptly clipped our rudder on the bottom. An official Holy Shit moment. I looked behind us and the bottom portion the rudder was floating off away from the boat. A quick check and we still had steerage.
Called up the dredge master on the VHF radio to let him know of our situation and told him to get his work boat to go out and retrieve the floating portion of the rudder.
Just after we went in a large, commercial, aluminum catamaran came in. The dredgemaster called him on the radio and asked him what was the shallowest he saw coming in. His response was 1.8m... too shallow for us! Argh!

Ours is a carbon fibre rudder with a carbon fibre shaft. The lower portion of the rudder is designed to break away on impact to protect the shaft and the remaining portion. The sacrificial break away did its job. Above is the recovered lower portion of our rudder.

There are a lot of sharks in the water here in Australia, we figure this is what a rudder looks like when a Great White takes a nibble.

We continued south for a few days (with overnight stops) down to Moreton Bay, in the Brisbane area, through the shallow, winding straights in South Moreton Bay to the Gold Coast, up the Coomera River and, finally, to the haulout at The Boat Works boat yard.

We were really lucky to hook up with Ryan from 143 Boat Builders onsite at The Boat Works yard. He went out of his way to get everything lined up for the repair and keep it all at as reasonable a cost as possible. This during the Christmas season, when things really close down.

Ryan matching the original layup schedule with layers of double bias fiberglass and carbon fibre unidirectional cloth (the black cloth is the carbon fibre). The CF cloth is amazingly strong and light.

It took a bit of effort and wiggling to get the rudder back up through the bearing, but we got it in.

All ready to drop back in, as close to good as new as you can get.

Notice the steps in the pic. All the boats that haul here get to use steps instead of yard ladders. This makes living aboard in the yard so much more comfortable. The daily yard rate includes free loaner cars, super clean heads and showers and an air conditioned room with TV for cruisers. It really makes for a whole lot more pleasant yard experience.
There are lots of contractors onsite here. If you need some work done, give Ryan at 143 Boat Builders a call and let him offer some suggestions. He’ll bend over backwards to work with you and does excellent work.

https://143boatbuilding.com.au/

We’re off to an anchorage so we can spend Xmas day with our friends from Fair Winds, Judy and Sherman,  and Chris and Chris from Scintilla.

Paul

Fraser Island

We finally got off the dock at Bundaberg. Chris got back from her Kathmandu work trip (with no pictures, so not sure it happened). Paid off our bills with the chandlery and the marina office, filled up with diesel and stocked up with food.

I had finished up most of the boat projects list. The first pic is our Spade anchor looking a little sad after some hard years of work. The second one looking more like jewelry is after getting re-galvanized at Kenco Galvanizing in Bundaberg. They had to melt the lead out, sand blast the paint off, dip to get a thick coat of galvanizing and then melt the lead back in. All for about $100. Pretty good deal.
It’s about 40 miles down Hervey Bay to the start of the Great Sandy Strait, then another 40 miles inside of Fraser Island and through the narrow navigable route. There’s lots of anchorages to stop at on the way and since the weather for heading south from here is not cooperating we are taking our time going through the Strait.

Fraser Island is the world’s largest sand island. We signed up for a not cheap 4-wheel drive purpose built bus tour so we could get from the west side anchorages across the island and along the east side beaches. Short of having, or renting, your own tricked out 4-wheel drive SUV, this is the way to go to see the island.

After crossing the island on sand tracks you arrive to the east side beach highway. This is actually a legal highway. There were too many accidents and deaths during the days when every punter could go screaming up and down the beach in their dune buggies. So the government made it a highway that requires a licensed vehicle and driving rules like staying more or less to the left hand side of the beach. There’s even a police station just behind the dunes to enforce the traffic laws.

They do use the highway a little unconventionally by landing these small planes on the beach to pickup tourists for sightseeing flights over the island.

Even on a scheduled tour there’s time to stop and look at rusty stuff. This is the SS Maheno, she was a high speed ocean liner built in Scotland and operating between Sydney and Auckland starting in 1905.

In World War I she was converted to a hospital ship. The Maheno ended her life when she was being towed to Japan for scrap steel and her 900 foot, 6 3/4inch wire rope tow line broke after being caught in a July cyclone in 1935.

The tour was not all fascinating activities like viewing rusty stuff. You could also float down some amazingly clear, sand filtered water, creeks in a slow Disney World Lazy River sort of way. There are a lot of campers along the beach and they all seem to congregate here, rather than at the ocean where a lot of sharks hang out.

Fraser Island is home to one of the most genetically pure dingo populations in Australia. This one is a 5 month old male that apparently has been booted out of the pack to head out on its own. He’s a little on the skinny side, as he learns to forage/hunt on his own to survive.

The dingoes used to be fed by the tourists and tourist hotels here. After too many unfriendly interactions between the species there are now strict prohibitions against feeding or leaving any food out that the dingoes can get at. Also a lot of electric fences around the hotel area. There have been a number of attacks and unfriendly interactions on Fraser Island.

The most famous dingo attack occurred out at Ayers Rock (in central Australia) and was made famous by the Meryl Streep movie ‘A Cry in the Dark’, aka ‘Evil Angels’ as it was released in Australia and New Zealand. A young child was taken by the dingoes, her mother was charged with murder and spent 4 years in jail before it was shown to actually have been dingoes – I know I forgot to say spoiler alert, but any Streep movie is worth a watch.


A few days after the tour, we anchored further down the island at Garry’s Anchorage and saw a pair of healthy looking dingoes cruising the beach as we went by in the dinghy.

Now just because the dingoes don’t get you, doesn’t mean the saltwater crocs won’t. Haven’t seen any of these guys yet.

We have however seen lots of turtles cruising the straits and the mangrove tidal flats. This is a big turtle breeding area.

To leave the Great Sandy Straits we need to cross the Wide Bay Bar to get back out to the open ocean so we can make our way to Moreton Bay (Brisbane area), our next stop on the way south to Sydney. The river bars along this coast are notorious for being dangerous – even the Aussies take them seriously. Unfortunately, you need to cross them to get to many of the anchorages. We need to wait for some north or easterly winds (rather than south winds) and then attempt to cross the bar near high tide with an in-coming current and a swell of less than 5 or 6 feet. All these conditions may align early Friday morning.
Paul