Harmonie - Confused Seas and Lots of Gray - Pelican Bay, Great Sandy Strait, Queensland, Australia

Confused Seas and Lots of Gray - Pelican Bay, Great Sandy Strait, Queensland, Australia

Harmonie

Don and Anne Myers

Mon 26 Apr 2010 20:16

25:48.820S 153:02.523E

On April 19th, we left Mooloolaba bright and early - well really gray and early because the clouds were still with us - and sailed 64 miles north to Fraser Island and the Great Sandy Strait. Sixty-four miles in eight hours. It was a fast sail. A good thing too because it was none too comfortable. This, from someone who took two sea-sickness pills starting the night before. With only a reefed headsail and mizzen out, we sped along at eight knots in confused seas. The term "confused seas" is used by weather forecasters as a euphemism for sloppy, rough waves that bat a boat around and cause the crew to feel sick - but only the weaker half of the crew. Over the course of eight hours, I took three naps and Don looked after the boat. Looking back at our log, I can always tell when it was a rough sail because Don's handwriting fills the page (usually we take turns filling in the logbook every hour with boring stuff like course, position, speed through the water, speed over the ground, wind conditions, etc.). When it's rough, sea-sick people have no desire to go below deck to fill in logbooks. If they do, it's usually the thing that puts them right over the edge, or right over the rail, as the case may be. If it were the end of a sailing season, 25 knots of wind and a bucking boat in confused seas with a ten foot swell wouldn't faze either one of us, but on sail #2 of the season, it was a bit uncomfortable and reasonably exhausting. But again, its the destination that justifies the journey, and usually the destination is so incredibly lovely, that it doesn't feel deserved unless some pain was inflicted along the way. It can't be good all the time or else we would all die of a lethal mix of boredom brought on by constant euphoria - or at least that's what we tell ourselves when experiencing a less than pleasant sail.

Part of the problem with our sail that day was that there was a constant feeling of impending doom hanging over our heads. Impending doom because to get into the sheltered waters of the Great Sandy Strait, which lies between big Fraser Island and the mainland, one must sail over the Wide Bay Bar. Wide Bay Bar is a vast sand bank famous for violent and dangerous seas, especially when the outgoing tide runs against strong southeasterly winds in its shallow waters. We were sailing in strong southeasterly winds, and our arrival time at the entrance to the Wide Bay Bar coincided with the outgoing tide. This was not a surprise. We knew when we left Mooloolaba that it was possible we would arrive at the Wide Bay Bar and not be able to enter due to the wind/current situation. If that happened, we knew we could turn around and sail back to Double Island Point, about a ten-mile backtrack, and anchor in its sometimes untenable, slightly unsheltered bay - not an attractive option at the end of a long sailing day.

When we were in Mooloolaba, we stopped by the Coast Guard tower and received information about the best way to approach and navigate through Wide Bay Bar. Just meeting with the Coast Guard was an experience. The Australian Coast Guard is composed of volunteers. These volunteers are usually older folks with a keen interest in sailing and boating in general, as you would expect. What we didn't expect was the overwhelming desire these folks have to help people like us and their willingness to spend a good bit of time doing it. The two men we met in the Mooloolaba tower looked like they were character actors taken straight out of a folksy sea story movie set in New England (minus the Australian accents, of course). They offered to track us during our Mooloolaba to Fraser Island trip, and we took them up on it. When we left Mooloolaba, we radioed the Coast Guard station to let them know we were on our way. Then, when we passed Double Island Point, we radioed the Tin Can Bay Coast Guard to let them know we were approaching Wide Bay Bar and to ask them about conditions there. All of this went very smoothly and we felt like we were being tracked by air traffic controllers, each Coast Guard station handing us off to the next. What didn't go smoothly was the response we got from the Coast Guard about the condition of Wide Bay Bar. "Oh, a couple of boats went up and had a look at the bar today, then turned around and headed back into the bay. They said it looked rough." Oh, excellent, the bar looks rough and even a fishing trawler wouldn't cross it. Faced with visions of an extremely uncomfortable rolling anchorage at Double Island Point, we decided to go for the bar anyway. "How bad can it be?" we asked each other as we donned our life jackets and tidied up the cockpit of our rocking boat, getting ready for any eventuality. We informed the Coast Guard that we were going to go for the bar, and then we went for it. As we approached, we could see the heavy seas breaking on the sand banks ahead of us, and we could also see what looked like a wind surfer bobbing and hobby-horsing its way through the bar. After a closer look, we realized it wasn't a wind surfer at all, it was a good-sized sailboat heading out over the bar toward us. The sailboat was tossed about so much by the incoming waves that it really looked like a tiny wind surfer out there. It wasn't much longer before the sailboat emerged from the worst of it and passed us as we headed in. They came close enough for us to see the man waving heartily to us from the wheel and a woman sitting calmly in the cockpit. Well. If they could exit the bar motoring against a 25 knot wind and into 10 foot seas and still wave heartily at a passing boat, we figured we could easily continue on and ride those 10 foot waves into and through the bar. Which we did. It wasn't that bad. It's possible that it was the easiest part of our day. We couldn't see the approach light, but we did have the waypoints the Coast Guard gave us loaded into our GPS, so using those, we surfed down the waves against the outgoing current, with breakers on either side of us as we transited what's called the 'mad mile". No problem.

We then spent two rainy, cloudy days and nights anchored in Pelican Bay, which is a wide, shallow, sheltered, featureless bay at the foot of the Great Sandy Strait and just around the corner from Wide Bay Bar. We spent the two days recovering from the rough sail (wimps!), tidying up the boat and various other boat-related jobs. After that we started up the 40-mile long expanse of sand banks and shallow channels that make up the Great Sandy Strait. More on our Strait transit in a day or two.

Picture 1 - Our boat-bound stay in Pelican Bay was decidedly gray, except for the rare bit of color.

Anne