Cruising Log—23...Thomas Is to Pancake Creek

We ended up spending three nights at Thomas, waiting for suitable winds to proceed. The time was not wasted. Leanne baked a lovely loaf of bread.

Then we went fishing in the dinghy, trolling around Young Tom’s Island at close to low tide. Over the reef on the south side of the island was the hot spot. Every time we crossed from west to east, Leanne caught a good-sized Striped Sea Pike. When she had three she graciously let me have a go. I caught two more, one of which we threw back because it was too small. It was exciting stuff. Then I caught a Broad-barred Spanish Mackerel, so we called it quits.

We had the four Sea Pike for lunch and the Mackerel for dinner. Yum. But after that, we didn’t feel like catching any more fish for a while.

On Tuesday 3 October the rambunctious SE wind finally eased, so we set sail for Brampton Island. Another beat to windward for 24nm, but good sailing.  We spent three nights at Brampton waiting for the SE wind which had come up again, to ease. The northerly winds should have been well and truly present by now, but it just wasn’t happening this season.

On Friday 6 October we left Brampton in light winds and sailed to Mackay Marina. We managed to cover about 14nm before the wind died, so had to do the remaining 7nm under motor. We were stuck in the marina at Mackay for eight nights due to the screaming SE wind that came in.

By now the Commodore was champing at the bit to get back to Brisbane so she could go home. The Captain procrastinated over the crummy weather windows available for going south. The Commodore bounced off the walls. A compromise was reached – we would set out beating into 15-20 knots and 1.5-2m seas from the south-east, but with a forecast for easing conditions.

Things did not start off well. A strong wind on the beam made it very difficult to get out of our pen and back down the arm we were on. We lost it completely a couple of times but recovered before hitting anything, and eventually managed it, but it was pretty ugly. Lots of heads like gophers popped out all around to see if their boats were in danger. Possibly! Why wasn’t anyone else leaving?

Going to windward yet again meant that we could not make the intermediate islands such as Curlew, Digby or the Percys in the daylight, so we opted to sail overnight straight through to Pearl Bay. Tacking turned the 116nm trip into 147nm. It was hard to generate much speed into the nasty chop. The trip took 38hrs and we arrived at the anchorage at Pearl Bay at 11pm on the second night out, our first arrival in the dark and our first passage with more than one night at sea. Neither of us had been able to sleep for the whole trip, so we were totally whacked. We don’t know why we couldn’t sleep, perhaps because it was our first windward overnight passage (all others we’ve done have been downwind) and it just seemed more stressful?

Next day we moved the 10nm to Port Clinton to shelter from yet another coming SE blow, this one lasting three days.

When the wind had eased a bit, Leanne winched me up the mast in our brand new bosun’s chair, deluxe model. Jolly good chair, but I was not happy as I don’t like heights. The mast was waving around quite a lot and the higher you go the worse it gets. Still, it was necessary as the radar reflector had come adrift and needed to be cable-tied back on.

As a reward, I got to fish when we went trolling. This resulted in another Spanish Mackerel.

On Friday 20 October at 5:30 a.m. we departed Port Clinton for the 120nm overnight sail to Pancake Creek. We arrived the next day at 11:00 a.m. after having a reasonable sail, but again all hard on the wind. The forecast north-easterly sea breezes were a myth – they just never happened. The wind died in the morning so we had to motor the last two hours.

An extract from the log sums up the next three days. It is rather terse. “30-40kt SE change came through and blew for days. Horrible but a great anchorage.”

On Wednesday 25 October we finally got the right conditions to get out of Pancake Creek, and a good four day window to follow, so we decided to sail straight through to Brisbane around the outside of Fraser Island. This would involve a 90nm beat offshore in the first 24 hours, to clear Breaksea Spit, a vast area of dangerous shoal water off the northern end of the island. We were looking at 300nm and 72 hours for the full trip to Brisbane.

We had to wait until 10:00 a.m. for the right tide and enough breeze, but finally we were underway. We successfully sailed out of Pancake Creek with the engine idling in case of emergencies, much to the surprise of the other yachts still there.