Sailing Around Australia; Fabulous Fraser

Platypus Bay, Fraser Island, Queensland

18/8/2015 - Fabulous Fraser

After leaving Mooloolaba, the next leg of our sailing adventures took us across the Wide Bay bar and to the north western side of the biggest sand island in Australia called Fraser island.

If you look at a map, Fraser Island is like a finger pointing north, jutting out from the Queensland coast. It is the most easterly point of the coast.

The waters between southern end of Fraser Island and the main land are called the Great Sandy Strait, and with good reason. The area is a maze of narrow channels, shallow water and sand bars. As we have found out recently, we don’t mix well with sand bars, so navigation through the Great Sandy Strait was a 2 person job.

Leanne was the chief navigator. She stood watch on our course by calling the shots from the Navionics program on her Ipad. I stood on the helm and kept an eye out for channel markers, signs and other boats.

Straight after crossing the Wide Bay Bar, we ventured into Pelican Bay. Picking our way gingerly through the markers and channels took some time but eventually we managed to find a suitable spot to anchor.

Next morning we lowered the dinghy and set off to find a landing so that we could walk the beaches of Fraser Island. Alas, we couldn’t get within a hundred metres of shore due to the shallow water. A couple of spots looked Ok to get fairly close to shore, but the mud made that a bad idea as well.

As we rode around the corner, we saw a small catamaran looking very unusual. All other boats in the vicinity were facing one way, but this catamaran was 180degrees out of whack. That could only mean on of two things. They had a stern anchor out as well as one off the bow, or, which turned out to be correct, they were stuck on a sand bar.

Leanne’s eyes lit up with the possibility of a captive audience for a chat so we made a beeline for them. Turns out that they had become owners of the boat only two days before. That brought back a lot of memories of our first few days of owning Easy Tiger.

High tide came at 9.00am and we set off to travel up to Garry’s Anchorage. This is basically another channel branching off the Great Sandy Strait. Arriving two hours after high tide, we dropped anchor in what we thought would be plenty of water and headed to shore.

After a lovely walk along a sand track among the trees we found that the tide had gone out significantly. Luckily for us we had anchored in the right spot ans ten meters the closer to shore would have seen Easy Tiger sitting on mud, high and dry.

As we were discussing re-anchoring at low tide, the wind came up and removed any thoughts of pulling the anchor up. We would just have to hope that we didn’t drift back at all, as we could probably have jumped for Easy Tiger on to dry land.

The most endearing thing about Garry’s anchorage is perhaps the crocodile and dangerous dingo warning signs that great you the moment you get on to the beach.

Our next journey along the Fraser Island coast took us to the Kingfisher Bay resort. Leanne rang the resort to see if we could go in and have a look around. Again the muddy shores looked a problem, but there was a jetty.

As we approached the jetty in our dinghy, we soon realised that being low tide, it would be a climb to get on to the jetty. When we got close enough we saw the jetty was in fact covered in barnacles. Barnacles have razor sharp edges so to avoid cuts and abrasions, we headed for the beach.

The beach sand, however, was some fifty metres ashore over mud. So there we were dressed in our nice white resort visiting attire staggering knee deep in grey mud towards the five start resort, watched by various onlookers.

The next day we cruised further north along Fraser Island’s western coast. Now we entered Hervey Bay. We had been told that Hervey Bay has hundreds of visiting humpback Whales at this time of year, so our trip that day was full of expectation.

We turned off the motors and ambled along under one sail. We saw many other boats of all shapes and sizes out looking for whales as well. About four hours in, we still hadn’t seen one whale.

By mid afternoon we had glimpsed the odd breaching whale, but far off in the distance.

We arrived at the north end of Platypus bay a little dejected as we dropped our anchor.

No sooner had we settled in for the evening, lamenting the fact that there weren’t that many whales, when a great gush of air no more than fifty metres away told us the show was about to begin.

All in all, as we sat on the foredeck for drinks o’clock, a dozen or so whales passed by within a hundred metres of us. The one that came closest was a smallish whale (about the size of a minibus). It came on a straight line towards us. We were thinking the worst, remembering some picture long ago of a whale breaching on to a small boat. We clenched our teeth, held our breath an saw the big dark shape swim past, missing our boat by a couple of metres at best. No breach until it was well clear, fortunately.

We also had turtles and dolphins included in our show.

Later that evening and as darkness fell, we went down below into the hulls. There we are almost below water line. It took us a while to realize that the strange sound we heard were whale noises.

Next day we were looking forward to just staying put on the anchor and watching a repeat of the show form the previous day. But the wind came in from the south making it a very uncomfortable place to be. Reluctantly, we set off to Bundaberg.