Sail to Curlew Island

Monday 11^th September 2017

Having greatly enjoyed our short hops down through the islands on our way from Airlie to Mackay, unfortunately we are now back in the longer distances and sometimes hard slogs.

Yesterday afternoon Carole noticed the marina has its own reef, growing on the marina arms. The coral is every bit as good as anything we have seen elsewhere.

Today we are sailing from Mackay to Curlew Island, about 45 nm. The wind forecast is fr an easterly, which may allow us a very tight angle to sail on, but any shift to the south will put us straight into the wind. Fortunately it is forecast to be in the 10-15 knot range.

An early start, 6 am, is planned to maximize favourable tidal flow and get a head start in case the wind does strengthen from the SE. It was pretty bumpy coming out of Mackay, but it always is, as the water is full of shoals, and this continues for the first hour of motoring.

Next challenge is to navigate through the Hay Point Coal loader anchorage, where there is a bit of activity including an outgoing vessel potentially on a collision path with us, but my AIS system showed we had a comfortable margin to cross in front of him. We listen to the Port Operations channel on VHF as we pass through and see several helicopter  landings on vessels to crop off surveyors etc.

Not all of the ships in the anchorage are a pretty sight

We did see an easterly breeze for a while and rolled out the headsail, on a very tight angle motor sailing. The tide was pushing us west, so compensating for tidal flow made the angle worse. After having the sail in and out a few times, we opted to furl it in, and change course pushing further east towards Prudhoe Island, which had the other advantage of dodging most of the extensive shoals along the direct line. Our hope was that the wind direction would hold and when we changed course back towards Curlew we would have a sufficient angle to sail the last 3 hours.

Fortunately we are picking up 0.7 knot from the tide flow so all is not lost. Sadly the wind kept edging south, and when we changed course to head for Curlew, we could carry a headsail motor sailing, just ! It gave us about another 0.7 of a knot, for some time, but eventually we had to give up on the sails and just motor the rest.

All along the way we saw lots of whales, a couple quite close to us, but once again avoided the camera.

As we were approaching the narrow entrance to the Curlew anchorage, a whale swam across the entrance and has remained in the area for most of the afternoon.

We arrived at the anchorage at 2 pm, having used a lot more diesel than we had hoped. Two other boats from our marina leg (both from Geelong) followed us a bit later and also made hard work of it.

Freestyle 1, the boat we met at Keswick and on our marina leg at Mackay arrive a bit later

Tomorrow we hope for better luck, as we move on to the Percy  Islands, but it is looking like it will be on the nose again, and a bit lighter.