By 08:30 our lines were eased and the morning sun began to peek out from behind Manly’s early morning dissipating clouds. The reason for such a civilized departure time was our goal just 25nm up the coast, still in Moreton Bay. Not without its hazards, the bay is huge but shallow with lots of things you can fetch up on if you’re not paying attention. The weather report looks good for sailing but we’ve heard that before.
First we thought we’d serpentine around Green Island and run the pass at St. Helena under power, where the water can get a little thin. As soon as we cleared St. Helena the breeze met us and we rounded up into the wind. With all standard sail flying I switched off Charlize, feeling that little tingle I always feel when the press of sail takes over.
This is just glorious in 9-15 kts of SE breeze doing 6-7kts. Soon we passed Mud Island and, in a first, we sailed right past the Brisbane ship channel where we usually turn and head up River to Brissie. Just a lazy sail past Bramble Bay in 25 feet of water now so no worries. Too soon, giving Castlereagh Point a wide berth, we entered Deception Bay where it gets seriously shallow very quickly.
Now Yours Truly doesn’t particularly care for creeping up closer and closer to a beach watching the depth sounder numbers get smaller and smaller and you’re never really sure about the state of the tides around here so at a certain point my courage ran out and we dropped the hook. With weather moving in we knew we hadn’t bought much protection from the expected 30kts of wind and the inevitable swell but I’d had enough. The problem is it’s said that waves will curve around a headland up to 30 degrees but my experience has been it’ll do more than that.
That night the squalls got well into the high twenties and we definitely weren’t in far enough to escape the worst of the swell so in the morning, after a rocky night, we decided to sneak in closer to Scarborough Marina, which friends in Manly told us was doable. Sometimes when they dredge out a channel they deposit the spoil right beside the channel, so if we approached the area in the channel, near where we wanted to anchor, we might not be able to cross over that suspected spoil area.
We came in beside the marked channel as far as we dared and dropped the hook, not as close as several catamarans had, but all that day we could hear it blowing but it hardly affected us. Like Bert Lahr used to say, “What have they got that I have not? Courage.”
