Much Happens

The mighty rocks of Rosslyn Bay

Rosslyn Bay at Yeppoon was initially a planned three night stop to re-encupboardise, refill water and attend to a headsail tear which we had sustained in the less than tranquil conditions out of Fitzroy Reef. Trying to get work done at short notice and in a short turn around period in the marine industry is not easy. The Captain used his skills at begging to book the sail in for surgery and also managed to track down a separate upholsterer to put a new zip on our boom bag. As expected, neither of these jobs fitted into our booked time and we extended at the marina for several more days.

One of these days, we hired the marina car and landlubbed into the Capricornia Caves- the stunning imagery having already been posted by the First Mate. We saw the public caves and beautiful candles being lit for someone's precious day to be spent deep underground standing thigh deep in bat guano. That is slightly incorrect - the bat guano in cathedral cave has long since been compounded into a solid floor by brides and grooms of the last century past. It was with great disappointment that most of the crew found themselves in a wedding cave rather than cave diving several catacombs deeper. On our return, we took a Cook's Tour to Byfield and all passengers were riveted at the various sites on the way and back - pine tree after pine tree, the odd dead snake. After a tiring day of cavelubbing and pointless side tripping a communal agreement was made to dine in style at the Keppel Bay Yacht Club. Being now true yachties, at least in the sense that we owned a yacht and were vaguely aware of the normal proportions that constitute a yacht - we were somewhat surprised at the fact that there was a vast sand/ mud flat outside the yacht club limiting access to vessels with a draft more than, say, 0 metres. It turned out this was more of a dingy sailing club. Not a problem, the food was good.

The extra time in Rosslyn Bay enabled us to tick a few more maintenance items off the list. This list never actually gets any smaller - when one fixes, say the forward bunk light, it is likely that returning to the main saloon, the door handle will come off in your hand and the First Mate will report that the oven has packed it in. Nevertheless, the Captain (and by virtue of our small crew size, Chief Engineer) undertook several repair tasks. On Mother's Day, the First Mate spent a delightful half a day belaying the Captain while he swung from the mast top trying to reinsert our spinnaker halyard. This wasn't so much a maintenance task as recovering from one of those hilarious three stooges type situations: at Great Keppel, we had been hauling our 4G modem up the mast when the situation got confused and the modem returned to the deck followed by the remainder of the rope. In slow motion we noticed that the rope end had no knot in it and thus the end disappeared into the mast and then reappeared at our feet.

On the way back down the mast, the mast track was liberally lubricated with enough lithium

Arjuna from 60ft up

grease to poison a village in an attempt to make the mainsail easier to haul up.

Another day, the Captain spent another happy afternoon in the main toilet / head while the remaining crew walked to the fish co-op for some frozen imported sea food. We had been suffering for some time from the effects of a small leak in the waste hose that exits the toilet and heads to the holding tank. Standing ankle deep in potent liquids and solids while joining pipes is undoubtedly something everyone would enjoy given half the chance. Fortunately, because the pipe started leaking again the next day, the Captain enjoyed another few hours repeating the exercise. In the process, the Captain discovered the true source of the leak which was that the inside of the hose had become completely encrusted in 8 years of unspeakable things - a lot of which could be loosened and sprayed around the room by scraping and digging.

Unfortunately, good access to shore power for the clippers finally meant the end of the Captain's truly fantastic sea captain beard which he had cultivated since February. The beard had definitely gained entre' into many a discussion leaning on seawall while chewing tobacco and a conspiratorial wave from other passing salts. The Captain had learnt to keep his mouth shut at these meetings and just stare to leuward while stroking his beard thoughtfully - opening his mouth to offer opinion invariably lead to embarrassing exposure. The beard finally came off because the crew were revolting. The beard itself was the revolting issue - but working a turn of phrase like that into a blog is priceless.

After extending our stay at that marina for a few days, we came to develop what is

Testing whether the kayaks are tied down

commonly known as Marina Lassitude or Floating Concrete Fever. In some countries, it is also known as marina fee aversion. Unfortunately, in this time, the wind had risen again into strong wind warning territory with gusts from the southeast to 30 knots. Almost a week in the marina had dulled our senses to what this possibly meant and also our sea legs, so it was with some surprise that we exited the marina finally into a mighty surf pounding across the shallows of Keppel Bay and understood why Yeppoon has a surf lifesaving club. With cries of "furl the mizzen" and "batten the hatches" and "secure me bimini", we proceeded across the bay.

Our destination was the north side of Great Keppel from where we had intended to spend the night before making another great passage north to Port Clinton. The calm shelter of Lecke's Beach from a week before had dissipated and was now replaced with an ugly rolling swell.Even though the wind was south east, the swell was east south east and somehow was finding its way around the top of Great Keppel and rolling in from the north east. We tucked in closer to Svendsens Beach instead where seven or eight other vessels were sheltering. After a few hours of incessant rolling at anchor, we had had enough and pulled up anchor to try and relocate into a better position. We tried once more the next day but there was no respite from the rolling. All the monohulls in the bay were penduluming to crazy angles. Being the furthest out, we did the most rolling. Annoyingly, within 50 metres of us, several boats in the know were just out of reach of the swell and sat almost motionless. As did the catamarans. Although, all the catamaran owners we met claimed that their boats were moving around as well.

There are worse places in the world to be trapped than Great Keppel and we made the most

A timely warning.

of another six consecutive days at Svendsens Beach by spending the daylight hours on the island itself returning only after dark to spend some blissful hours being smashed from one side of the boat to the other. On the second day, we discovered the very fine yacht camp on the beach which is where the crew did school while the Captain got some non-boating work done. To the great delight of the crew, we finally had a fire on the beach and cooked dinner on the yacht camp fire. We met some of the locals - who live on their boats and basically spend their time circumnavigating Great Keppel. One cat had been doing it for 11 years.

Now that we had travelled a bit and even without a sea captain beard, we sat round the fire

View from the yacht camp, Svendsen's Beach

exchanging sea stories with these old salts for several hours; talking about sandbars and halyards and how to make yoghurt; discussing the intricacies of anchoring, storms and working into the breeze. We were accepted as fellow sailors on that fine beach and around that fine fire. Meanwhile, our tender gently drifted off the beach and quickly disappeared and with it all of our credibility. One noble soul took the Captain out in his tender and searched the bay for the wayward Zodiac which was found bobbing away on the tide. We returned to Arjuna to hang our heads and bounce around the boat for the night.

Great Keppel has some fine walking. In fact, in terms of nice walking, the Captain places this on his top ten - not because of extreme conditions but for the sheer pleasantness of trotting along well marked ridge tracks with a variety of trees not seen readily on the

Just one of the things you find on GKI

mainland and the lure of the periodic seats and "magic stones" placed around by the Svendsens. The crew covered most of the eastern side of the island during the week we were there. No doubt, the 700 bed eco resort planned for the island where most of the central forest is being ripped up for an eco-golf course will preserve these fine tracks.

The rolling of the boat was obviously less than desirable so we used our considerable sea knowledge and decided to drop out the stern anchor to try and hold the stern into the oncoming swell. This is a simple seventeen step process that generally involves lifting at least 30 kg of anchor, chain and rope then dropping it delicately into the waiting tender between sets. Having managed to wedge

Some goats. Apparently not eradicated in the '70's after all

the stern anchor quite firmly at Fraser Island, we were wise to the need to pull the anchor back up at some point so we attached our triple purpose crab pot float / stern anchor float / beer keg to the anchor and dropped it a good distance off the boat. Other boats looked on with interest as Arjuna settled down to a gentle rocking motion. We left the yacht and went walking. From the ridge top, Arjuna seemed to be careering around with much more wild abandon than one would expect with two anchors out. Sure enough, our return to the vessel revealed that the 20mm stern anchor rope had

Pining for the fjords. And less swell from the East

snapped - leaving us back where we started.

After six days of 30 knot winds and significant (rope snapping) swell, the wind began to abate on Monday 19th and we took this opportunity to up anchor and escape the clutches of Great Keppel. We turned the mighty prow of Arjuna towards the northish, set sail and then floundered in the swell for 20 nautical miles or so to Port Clinton. The wind had dropped but not the swell - an ugly situation that almost guarantees a Visit from Voldemort - a euphemism coined by the Captain's brother. On the way, we passed Pumpkin Island, a favoured holiday destination until leased by XXXX brewery. The crew looked on it fondly. The Captain wiped away a tear but felt comforted by the fact that he had imported the last decent case of beer onto the island before it was laid siege to.

We entered Port Clinton on an ebb tide and big swell not long after high water - which as

The harsh, unforgiving, croc and insect infested hell hole of Port Clinton

long term readers or salty dogs will know is not often the best time to enter an estuarine or riverine type environment. Salty Dog Jim at Great Keppel had suggested that the swell tended to pack up at the entrance and as it came to pass this was the most "barry" entrance we had encountered since Sydney due to the conditions. At one point, a small sandbar that couldn't be more than one or two metres wide rises up and at this point Arjuna surfed a breaking wave into the inlet. The bottom dropped away again and soon we were sidling through the amazingly large Port Clinton area with almost 40 metres under the keel at one point.

We liked Port Clinton and stayed for three nights. After a week of ridiculous rocking at anchor we pulled in under Mount Flinders and the water was virtually still. There was barely a boat around. It is a completely massive area with no settlement at all - being within the army training area of Shoalwater Bay. This area has a reputation for insects, but the Captain, a well known insectoidal attractant, can attest that there was limited insect intrusion at all. In fact, the only real insect problem occurred when the Captain took the tender out fishing and threw a line around a mangrove trunk disturbing the homeland for all sandflies who all proceeded to attack the tender as the Captain took it out at high speed, waving oars and making zig zag evasive maneuvers to try and side step and confuse the enemy.

The First Mate, a great reader of the croc-watch website, advised the boat that these were possible saltwater crocodile waters and to avoid swimming. As a result, we were plagued by several days of false sightings as innocent branches drifted past the boat. There were several after dark visits to the cockpit after suspicious sounds were heard - potentially of crocodiles climbing up on our swim deck and putting muddy paw prints on the fibreglass.

On the fourth day, having earned incredible respect as the longest moored vessel in Port Clinton, we departed that fair waterway for a very brief sail up to Pearl Bay. Alan Lucas rates this as one of the prettiest anchorages on the coast. Our view was slightly sullied by the rolling swell coming through the channel - the easterly swell built up from the past ten days was still running - but we were buoyed by the capture of a fish on the trolling line not far off the anchorage. We are not sure what type of fish this was - studying our Fish of Queensland turned up no results but using some basic biology we were able to ascertain this was probably a Frequent Bone Fish. Despite the swell, we do agree that Pearl Bay has a certain charm with its pine clad islands and beach but unromantically departed at first light to get the hell out of there.

We departed Pearl Bay and passed Island Head Creek. The ominous advice from Alan Lucas - or as the Ship's Monkey calls him: the man who tells us what to do - was that north

Pearl Bay. Picturesque ? You be the judge

of Island Head there is no sheltered anchorage from the south east trade wind for 100 miles. We dropped out of internet and phone coverage. The Ship's Monkey, exasperated, said he couldn't believe that The Man Who Tells Us What to Do had not put up a phone tower in this area. So we continued north, low on phone coverage but well stocked with coffee.