The first leg of this section of our trip up the coast involved crossing the infamous Wide Bay Bar, which leads into Wide Bay Harbour and the Great Sandy Straits between Fraser Island and the mainland. During my childhood on the Gold Coast I had heard many times about this bar which can be notoriously difficult to cross and on which many boats had come to grief, so there was a certain amount of trepidation about it. We spoke to a number of our friends and my new Women who Sail Australia facebook friends who had made this crossing and received some very good advice. Several of the key factors for a successful crossing is a small swell, an incoming tide (preferably the last hour or so), and a morning crossing so you can see the leads.  After much consideration, we decided to go as far as Double Island Point and anchor for the night, ready to go in on the morning tide. Although we had to motor at each end, we had a gorgeous sail to Double Island Point.

It was a beautiful sunny day and the sailing was easy. That night we had a sensational full moon shining over the anchorage which we were sharing with about 10 other boats.

The next morning required an early start to make the tide. Previously, we had called Tin Can Bay marine rescue who were very helpful providing the positions of the two important way points and the bearings for the leads. We had put these into both the chart plotter and the ipad, as we had heard stories of people losing their GPS position at the point of starting the crossing, possibly due to only having an internal aerial on the chart plotter.

As it turned out, we had an uneventful crossing with everything going according to plan. This is often the case – if you wait for the right conditions and get the local knowledge, bar crossings can be quite manageable. We were very pleased with ourselves when we finally dropped anchor in Gary’s Anchorage inside the sandy straits.

Apart from Gary’s Anchorage, which was a very pretty spot, we were fairly unimpressed by the “sandy” straits – it should really be called the muddy straits as we discovered when we went ashore for a walk. The straits is a fairly wide expanse of water with flat islands mostly covered with mangrove trees- very boring. And of course with the mangroves come mozzies and sandflies which attacked Phil, giving him grief for a few days. There may be other nicer parts that we did not explore eg., Tin Can Bay itself. We spent our second night in the straits anchored off Big Woody Island, after motoring for most of the day to get there.

The next morning saw another early start to catch the tide out of the rest of the Sandy Straits and into Hervey Bay from where we made our way to Port Bundaberg. Another sunny day with good strength wind on a favourable angle meant a very comfortable and pleasant sail. We refuelled and filled up with water once just inside the river and then motored up river for a way to find a spot to anchor after which we had an afternoon nap and then off to dinner with a friend from our yacht club in Melbourne.

Apart from the usual washing and provisioning, we have not done much while here. We felt we needed a bit of a break before starting on the next part of the trip which will see us spending the next 3 weeks or so visiting a number of islands without any stops at major towns. During this period, reception is likely to be patchy so there may be a gap before the next blog update.