Coffs to Yamba

Thursday 25th May 2017

The southerly change howled through the marina at 3.30 am, and we were hopeful that we may have a 15-20knot southerly to sail to Yamba in the morning.

Awake at 6am, I wandered down the marina walkway to Mutton Bird Island to see how things looked out at sea. Sadly it was now only blowing about 6 knots in the marina, but surely it will be stronger out to sea.

We left the marina at around 7.15am, and put the mainsail up in the outer harbour, with one reef expecting some strong sailing winds North. For the first hour we motor sailed out towards the Solitary Islands to get into the offshore breeze and were rewarded with almost 3 hours of sailing, making good speed despite the pesky East Coast Current  (up to 1 knot against us).

All good things come to an end, and the southerly slowly dissipated  into a  10-12 knot breeze, barely enough to push us along at our desired speed of 6 knots. Meeting the right tide at the Clarence River Bar in daylight is our total focus, with an arrival window of 4.30pm to 5.30pm.

We motor sailed about one third of the way, sailed one third, and when the wind totally dropped out, pulled down the sail and motored the rest of the way. The seas abated as the wind dropped and we were pretty confident that we could cross the bar at 4.30pm, half way through the incoming tide. It turned out to be very uneventful.

Next challenge was to get anchored at Iluka whilst we still had light. We have our previous marks on the chart from 2 years ago, but this anchorage is very shallow and is prone to change . Luckily we had a version of Navionics Charts on the iPad which seemed to be very different from the charts on the plotter. We edged our way in slowly, retreating from shallow spots a few times, until we totally trusted the iPad version which turned out to very accurate.

We eventually anchored in a deep hole with 2 metres under our keel, or 1m at low tide. The red arrow is us and we are in one of the deepest spots in the bay.

We were so excited to finally get a sail up that the photographer spent more time sailing than taking photos, hence the lack of photos in today's blog.