Wings Cruising Log

Today we took the dingy all the way around Karragarra Island, a sandy pine and mangrove outpost of suburbia in Brisbane's Bay Islands area. The water was flat, the sun bright, and the sky a cloudless deep blue which made it a great day to be on a boat, especially our little dingy which allowed us to speed past empty beaches over the green shallows which typify the Bay Islands waters. We couldn't have brought Wings there, most of the Bay Islands waters are less than our eight foot draft, including those around Karragarra. We really don't want to get Wings stuck in the mud!

Karragarra Island isn't big, and the trip wasn't long, but it was a nice little tour and a fitting close to the day's outing, which included a walk on Macleay, shopping at an island store, and lunch at the local pub. Tonight we are back on board Wings anchored between these two islands on part of our cruise through Moreton Bay, part of Australia's sunny Queensland. Brisbane is the big city around here, and the islands are crisscrossed with roads and subdivisions (although there really aren't that many houses out here) and many people commute by ferry to jobs in the city. Like elsewhere in Australia, most of the ferries here in the Bay Islands are high speed Catamarans and we make sure we stay out of their way.

We've been here, anchored between these two islands, since yesterday, and based on the weather forecast of 30-40 knots of wind for Sunday, we'll stay here for a few more days. The strong breeze will be caused in part by Cyclone Beni, the third cyclone in the Coral Sea this year. Once again, we're glad we left the cyclone area. This is the best anchorage we could find in the Bay Islands area, and we're hoping we can ride out the windy weather right where we are. Most of the Bay Islands area, and Moreton Bay in general, where the Bay Islands are located, is short of good anchorages, in our view. There are few bays or inlets, and what ones there are have little or no water in them at low tide. This is a crummy cruising ground for a deep draft sailboat, however the multi-hull boats, with no keels to speak of, appear to like it, and there are scads of them.

The Bay Islands is just the latest stop on our cruise of the Moreton Bay area. We started in Scarborough, sailed to Redcliff for a look-see, then up the river to Brisbane, where we spent New Year's Eve watching fireworks, and then on to Manly, (not the same as Manly in Sidney) which has a big marina, good marine stores, and a great boating community. Sailing to Manly was an experience. It was blowing 25 out of the south, and of course we were headed south, so we were beating, and the water was shallow, the air hazy with salt spray and smoke from the bush fires down south, we couldn't see where we were going or where we'd been, and when we turned down wind toward the marina, and were sailing at 10 knots in 11 feet of water, and no marina in sight, or even any bouys. It really gave us a set of nerves. Finally the marks for the channel appeared out of the haze, and we knew we were on track. We sailed into the marina without a problem, dropped the sails and quickly found a dock to tie to. After that we could have stayed in Manly for a long time, who wanted to go back into Moteton Bay, but the Bay Islands did call to us, just the mystery of someplace new I guess and here we are.

While in Manly we entered a Wednesday night race, just because we couldn't stand staying tied to the dock when all the other boats went out. The bay near Manly, while shallow, is a pretty good sailing area and the Royal Queensland Yacht Squadron has a lot of races there. On most nights there were dingys or keel boats headed out to some regatta or the other, plus there are sailing schools and a Juniors program going on every day as well. Our berth right on the fairway gave us a front row seat to a boat parade every day as the 14' and 16' skiffs, 420's Lasers 505's and other boats sailed back and forth. Our race was a low key event, no flying sails and a small crew, and we only managed to come in to the middle of the fleet, but we can blame that on the handicap we got, which was based on the closest other old IOR boats on their books, Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome, and Blue Max. What? Do we look like a fractionally rigged Davidson or something?

Speaking of interesting boats, we've been checking out the local cruising boats. Besides multihulls, the other trend hereabouts seems to be towards 35-45ft steel home made jobs with a 12 foot Aluminum skiff (a "tinny") hanging 6 feet off the water on davits on the back. Ugly Ducklings in our view but the sailors we met have been nice, love their boats, and they use them a lot, which counts a bunch in our book and we'd take them any day over a sleek new fiberglass dream boat which never gets out of the slip, owned by someone who doesn't even really like the sea. We've seen some of those, too, but not many here in Queensland. Besides, a lot of people would think our boat is strange, and it isn't very new either, so, we can't talk, can we?

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Fred & Judy