Off the Dock and Southbound

We finally got off the dock at Bundaberg. It wasn’t a great start. We headed out of the river in the early hours and pointed toward the Great Sandy Straits. Rolled out our staysail and had a bit of a rolly run south. All day the winds kept picking up. By the time we started to enter the top of the straits the winds were blowing 40kts gusting to 45. Chris and I were looking at each other with that look that says Why are we doing this?
By late afternoon with made it into the SW anchorage on the unfortunately named Big Woodie Island (25*19.93S, 152*59.23E). It was at least flat waters and some protection from the north winds. Bed time came early. The sun comes up around 4:40am here, so we woke early. The winds were now 6kts from the west, the sun was out and there were turtles in the bay. Life was not near as depressing as yesterday. A days run timed so we hit the high tide while going through the narrows of the Sandy Strait saw use make it to the Inskip anchorage near Wide Bay Bar before dinner. Since we’d done this whole area last year we weren’t in our tourist mode, just wanting to get south.

We spent the night in the Inskip Anchorage, outside Tin Can Bay, which is just around the corner from the Wide Bay Bar exit (25*48.85S,153*02.47). This night image was of the Tinnanbar fire. There has been a brutal heat wave in Queensland and hundreds of bush fires to go along with it.

2017

2018

Before exiting the Wide Bay Bar the prudent seaman (or seawoman) calls the Tin Can Bay VMR (Voluntary Marine Rescue) group to get the latest ‘recommended’ bar crossing coordinates. You can see the significant difference between the route in 2017 and the route in 2018. In 2017 when we went across and the shallowest we saw was about 10 feet. This year it was 21 feet.

Our crossing was benign. But……

they can be exciting (photo from the blog of S/V DreamTime).

After our bar crossing we did an overnight passage to Moreton Bay (aka Brisbane area). We arrived at the main ship channel at about 1:30am, just in time to hit large traffic rush hour. At this point of the inbound and outbound transits the big ships have pilots onboard. We ended up in radio conversations 4 times with the pilots on various big ships working out safe passing scenarios. We didn’t want to get run over and the pilots didn’t want to limit their careers. All very friendly and handled over the VTS (Vessel Transit Service) channel 12. The picture above is the cruise ship Pacific Dawn passing close by our port side after contacting us on the radio.

Paul