Gypsy Cruising

9 June

[As I write this it's 9.30 on Tuesday 11th June. We're 2-sail reaching across Harvey Bay from last night's anchorage at Platypus Bay, on Fraser Island. Our destination, some time early to mid afternoon, is Bundaberg for the first Rendevous and change of crew. Conditions are stunning and have been for a couple of days. We're finally in cruising mode - wearing t-shirt and shorts, the boat happily steering herself, Billy Joel singing Piano Man from the cockpit speakers and I'm sitting in the cockpit, tapping away on the computer and watching the spectacle of the horizon on a perfectly smooth sea. Just thought I'd say.]

Today dawned perfectly. Garry's anchorage provided it's usual calm night's sleep and the bad weather of yesterday has disappeared. There are around 10 boats here, I assume most are on their own trips either north or southwards. We've seen our first turtles here. They seem quite relaxed, often sticking their heads out of the water for multiple breaths of air before disappearing again.

Garry's anchorage, looking back to the southwest

We intend to keep heading north today. This will involve crossing the Sheridan Flats at Boonlye Point, an area of shifting sands that should be crossed at high tide. Since we draw only 1.6 meters we should have no problem. However, high tide isn't until 2.30 and it's a bit over an hour's motoring away, so we have a spare morning.

My new mobile phone signal booster hasn't been working, and a conversation with the distributor's technical team last week suggested the external aerial was maybe installed in the wrong location. We have very low signal strength at Garry's, so it was a perfect opportunity to do a re-install and see if that fixed the problem. Two hours of work had the aerial installed in a new position, we fired up the booster and both our phones got an extra 2 bars of signal strength. Very happy! The booster is going to come in very handy in many of the places we're going, primarily for weather forecasts but also for updating this log.

Motoring up the Great Sandy Strait was just delightful. We have Fraser Island to our right and the mainland to our left. The Strait itself is extremely broad, two to three miles across for much of its length. However it's very shallow with shoals and small islands throughout. The navigable channel is narrow and we follow the pink line on the chart plotter with particular care. I've realised that this entire coast, from Southport as far up as here is one massive range of sand dunes. Of course, Fraser is also the largest sand island in the world, with a length of about 70 miles (that's nautical miles, or 125 km). After the last week and a half of delivery up the coast and over the Bar, I've finally made the transition to full blown cruising.

Finding the movable port channel mark S24 at Sheridan Flats was easy on the flat water and in full sun, and from there our destination at Kingfisher Bay was about three hours of very pleasant motor sailing.

Tomorrow we break out into Harvey Bay and the waters of the Barrier Reef.