After getting a few of our jobs done at Bundy we departed early on the morning of the 18^th October heading down to Kingfisher Bay Resort (North Whitecliff’s) in the Great Sandy Straits.  The morning started well with a nice breeze blowing but faded out after a couple of hours so we ended up motoring into current yet again.  We think Mustang Sally must mean “wind from behind with current against”.  Anyhow we made it down to Kingfisher late in the day and anchored up for the night.  Next morning we caught up with Jim and Clem from the Mixed Nutz, which are also part of the RPAYC rally and ended up having a spot of lunch with them and a few of their group.  When we got back to the dinghy we found it high and dry and we are not so used to dealing with the 3mt tides that they can get in these parts so went up to the Jetty Hut to wait for a while until the dinghy was floating again.  Normally we would have a go at dragging it to the water but the mud here is rather unpleasant and deep so we were more than happy to wait it out.

The next morning we headed ashore early and did the walk up to McKenzies Jetty and the old Commando Training Centre which was built here in WWII.  It is a nice walk with lots of lookouts over the water which is very pretty.  We were also much better this time at working out the tides and found the dinghy pretty much as we left it!

On the 21^st we left Kingfisher to take on the shallows of the Great Sandy Straits – mind you having the big tides at the moment made it a whole lot easier and don’t think we got to see any less that about 1mt under the keel.  We anchored for the night at Elbow Point which is a good staging point for the Wide Bay Bar.  On the 22^nd we are up at 4.30am to meet the start of the flood for the crossing of the Wide Bay Bar which was pretty tame on the day which we like a lot as it can get very nasty at times.  We motored sailed till late in the morning when the NNE wind built up to around 20knots and had a pretty quick trip for the rest of the trip down to Mooloolaba under head sail only.   We even did a reasonable job of parking Sally in a pen which we haven’t really attempted on our own for well over 12months.  Let’s hope we can keep up the good work in Manly!  Mooloolaba is always one of our favourite spots to stop so sure we will enjoy our stay here for a few days. 

During our stay we finally got to meet up with Kim and Kim from Captain Silver, a yacht that we seemed to have been stalking since we left Bundy.  Anyhow it was nice to be able to catch up and have a bit of a chat to them and they have even talked us into stopping at Tangalooma which is off the top of North Stradbroke Island so we are planning on heading off there tomorrow and hopefully get to spend a couple of nights there before heading into Manly on Tuesday. 

Our current position in Manly Marina is Pen E28 which is at ”26:41.2S 153:07.7E”