It’s midday on Saturday and we are sitting here in Southport Yacht Club Marina waiting for the winds to go down and the tide to come up!! These two should occur quite conveniently around late afternoon. Today we intend making our way through the inland waterways, in the direction of Brisbane.
After many hours of pouring over tide and times tables and reading and re reading Alan Lucas’s Cruising The Coral Coast (yes we’ve moved on from Cruising The NSW Coast ….. that’s progress hey???) and numerous other articles written for our edification plus of course listening to and taking into consideration the advice given by local boat owners we think we are ready to DO IT!!
We will probably head off on the first leg and try to get as far as the first obstacle which is a stretch of the water that threatens to have less depth than the draught of or boat (hopefully only at low tide). In theory, if we get there on a rising tide and touch bottom as we try to make our way through, we can wait for the tide to rise further and lift us off. Sounds easy doesn’t it? Another option is we fill our dinghy with water then tie one of the ropes coming from the top of the mast to the dinghy: then when we (well, Mike) pulls on the rope, it makes us heel and gives us another couple of inches draught. Ummmmm sounds a bit dodgy to me (Mike sounds convinced though…).
Anyway I’ll let you know in or next blog which option we chose and how successful (or not) we were.
We’ve had a lovely time in Southport. Yesterday we walked into Surfers Paradise (took an hour!) to see the movie ‘10 Canoes’ at the Gold Coast Arts Centre (I suspect Jo was looking for more inspiration on how to get us through those shallow spots [Mike]). We got there 20 mins. late so we then walked across the whole of Chevron Island into Surfers proper and had some lunch, a walk around (as if we hadn’t already done enough of that!) then walked back to the Arts Centre and watched the movie. It was a beautiful film which we both enjoyed immensely. Then of course we had to walk all the way back into Surfers (our fourth crossing of the island) to catch a bus back to the Yacht Club.
You can bet that we both slept well after all that…
It’s almost time to commence our intrepid journey so wish us luck.
Till next time.
Jo
