Let’s Get Things Strait – Zoonie heads for The Great Sandy Strait
25:13.93S 152:59.64E
The shags on the fairway Navigation Marker were still either asleep or yawning as we passed by and shortly afterwards Zoonie was under full sail and heading directly for the northern entrance to the Great Sandy Strait at 5.1 knots in sunshine and under a clearing sky. We had an easy 23 miles to go to the fairway buoy, a nice little hop to regain confidence in the steering system.
(As a little aside, the pretty little river fish we saw in New Caledonia I think is a type of Hardyhead; Jack Pollard’s book The Complete Guide to ((Australasian Sea and River)) Fish was very helpful. His photo shows a similar size and shape of fish with slightly different spots but the most telling clue was his saying it is sometimes referred to as the pretty fish.)
On Sunday the 20th May 1770 Captain to be, James Cook and his loyal crew in the good ship Endeavour were heading north and passing the tip of Breaksea Spit as he named it, which runs NNW from the top end of Fraser Island, then known by the aborigines as K’gari and only named Fraser Island long after Cook’s passing by. He had just named Sandy Cape at the top of Fraser and shortly before that, Indian Head, “a black bluff head or point of land, on which a number of Natives were Assembled, (James’ capitals) which occasioned my naming it Indian Head.”
By the afternoon of the next day they were near to clearing the east side of Breaksea Shoal when Cook sent a boat ahead to sound the bottom and thus chart the northern extent of the spit. When we were planning our route to Bundy with the help of Cook’s work, the pilot book and available advice we determined that a safe passage in would be between Lady Elliot and Lady Musgrave Islands to keep us well away from this dangerous patch of water.
By the evening on Cook’s voyage they were well in to Hervey Bay that we were crossing on our trip, Cook heading NW while we pointed SSE. “We discover’d from the Mast head land to the Westward, and soon after saw smooke (smoke) upon it.”
We were seeing Booby birds socialising with the shags, and hoping they would not want to land upon Zoonie for reasons you will well understand but Cook came up with the surprising comment, “For these few days past we have seen at times a sort of Sea fowl we have no where seen before that I remember; they are of the sort called Boobies. Before this day we seldom saw more than 2 or 3 at a time, and only when we were near the land. Last night a small flock of these birds passed the Ship and went away to the North-West, and this morning from half an hour before sunrise to half an hour before, flights of them were continually coming from the North-North-West, and flying to the South-South-East, and not one was seen to fly in any other direction. From this we did suppose that there was a Lagoon, River, or Inlet of Shallow Water to the Southward of us, where these birds resorted to in the day to feed, and that not very far to the Northward lay some Island, where they retired to in the night.”
He was right about the river, inlet or lagoon and that is to where we were heading. Cook’s next landing was 46 miles north of Bundaberg, at 5.00pm the next day they were “abreast of the South point of a Large open Bay where I intended to Anchor.” I like his professional use of capitals for nautical terms.
Endeavour anchored in Bustard Bay named as such by Cook because of the numerous birds of that type in the area, in particular the 17.5lb bird that graced their table that night.
So Zoonie was effectively off on the first day of her semi-circumnavigation of Australia which will take about a year before we leave next October from Dampier to cross the Indian Ocean. Not before we spend three months or so back home of course.
Flocks of shearwater and terns fished together as we crawled up the shallow channel to anchor off Sandy Point with some very threatening cloud banks gathering in the distance. The wind was fresh but a sand bar protected us from swell and waves and Zoonie sat happily while we watched an intermittent mixture of sheet lightning over the mainland while listening to the England v Wallabies Rugby match in the Oweta Stadium, Japan on our little black tranny. We beat them 40-16.
In the morning three little birds, either Tree Martins or Welcome Swallows were sitting on our handrail as I emerged to inspect the day. We made our way southwards towards Kingfisher anchorage where there is a resort and more protection from the fresh SE winds.
The scenery around us was so similar to The Solent between the Isle of Wight and Southampton Water that I wondered if Cook had explored into the waterway he accurately guessed was there, would he have agreed. The tides behave exactly the same as in the Solent which was a comfortable familiarity. The rise and ebb happens at both ends meeting at Boonlye Point here and Cowes in the Solent. The Great Sandy Strait is longer than the Solent providing around 40 miles of enclosed waterway while the Solent has just over 30 miles but the same brisk transit can be enjoyed by entering one end at the start of the rise and exiting the far end during the ebb, favourable tide all the way!
The channels were easy to follow on the tablet that acts as a copy of the chartplotter in the cockpit and we gave ourselves the advantage of deep water by travelling two hours before high and anchored north of the little jetty in 6.6 metres knowing the tides were approaching the Spring Tides and the water would drop around 2 metres. We were expecting strong winds the next day, up to 50 knots, so Rob let out 35 metres of chain giving her a longer take up time on the chain curve, catenary, which might exceed the duration of gusts and to put more weight overboard. We also had to factor in the direction in which the wind would push her and make sure we were sufficiently far from the sandy beach to not bottom on an ebbing tide. Ooooh no thanks.
We went quickly to the resort to book our planned guided day excursion the next day and then took a leisurely stroll up through the wooded hill beside the resort for a fine look down on Zoons in her anchorage; always a pleasure. The photo you see of the shrub with the curious bottlebrush-like fruits is the Banksia named by Cook after his friend, patron and botanist Joseph Banks who was 27 when they passed up the coast. The ‘intrepid’ canoists on holiday at the resort reminded us of our mangrove kayak tour back in Guadeloupe.
We knew the tide would be high giving us little or no beach to walk back along, but we didn’t care, clambering over the fallen tree trunks up to our knees in cool water was an unexpected pleasure. A perfect round off was a cool beer in the shady little bar where the jetty comes ashore.
Fraser Island named after Eliza Fraser but soon to be renamed K’gari (Paradise)
by the Butchulla People
25:23.15S 152:58.003E
In 1836 the Stirling Castle brig was under sail and bound from Singapore to Sydney with 18 crew and passengers on board and under the command of Captain James Fraser when she hit a reef in the Great Barrier Reef and was irreparably holed. The crew along with Eliza Fraser, the Captains pregnant wife in imminent likelihood of bearing her fourth child, took to the ship’s lifeboat and pinnace. The crew in the leading boat towed the Captain and his wife and their small group towards Brisbane but since their boat was taking in water the crew cast it off to beach on K’gari, possibly for their own best chance of survival.
They landed at Waddy Point just north of Cook’s Indian Head and started making their way south towards Hook Point, surviving on pandanus grass and berries. At some stage they were taken in by local aborigines. Captain James made himself unpopular by refusing to work alongside the natives and died in mysterious circumstances either by starvation or from ‘injuries’ or both, either way one crew member said it was ‘natural causes’. Eliza, who had given birth while in the small boat where the infant drowned in the scuppers, decided it was better to work with the ladies of the tribe and stayed with them for six weeks. Then either the tribe took her group to the mainland with them for their annual Jamboree where she was ‘rescued’ by a convict and taken to Sydney, or she was rescued on the island by a convict and taken across the water to Double Island Bay and on to Sydney.
It was Lieutenant Robert Dayman in 1847 who was the first European to sail between K’gari and the mainland so Eliza may well not have known she was on an island unless the natives told her so.
Eliza Fraser; Infamous Opportunist or Innocent Victim of Circumstance? You decide.
In Sydney Eliza set up a charity to raise money for her three children back home and then secretly married another sea captain, Alexander Greene, six months after James’ demise and together they returned to England, the £400 charity haul tucked safely inside her bodice.
She appealed to the Lord Mayor of London to be allowed to set up another charity for her ‘penniless’ children and their widow mother.
This conniving lady then embarked on talking tours of the UK and eventually Australia, telling various ‘stories’ about her capture and ill treatment at the hands of the ‘cannibalistic savages’ in order to raise money. She soon twigged that the more outlandish her stories the more money she made, the effect of which was fatal for many of the aborigines living on K’gari.
When colonists and settlers migrated to the area they would take hunting trips, often on religious holidays like Christmas and Easter to kill as many natives as they could based on their Eliza Fraser induced fears.
It is, then, hardly surprising that she is now part of Australian folklore, alongside Ned Kelly, and has been immortalised in various forms including through the art of Sidney Nolan, some of whose work Rob and I saw in the Art Gallery at Adelaide.
It could be said she got her comeuppance under the wheels of a carriage in Melbourne in 1858.
Some 88 years before Cook had made his way up the coast as I have said before, so I was perplexed when our tour guide, Peter said that Cook made three mistakes about the island. One, he thought it was part of the mainland, two, he said there was no fresh water there and three, there were no trees worthy of harvesting.
Cook never investigated whether there was a way through between the lagoon he saw to the south and the lagoon he correctly assumed was there in the north. Peter then said it was Matthew Flinders aboard his ship the Investigator who confirmed it was an island. Incorrect. A crew from the Investigator voyage companion ship, the Lady Nelson, went in to the lagoon at the north but Matthew did not confirm whether they managed to get right through the waterway. It is unlikely they would have been away from their mother ship long enough to cover the 36 miles south and the same back to the Lady Nelson. Seventy two miles under oars!
Cook saw many natives so he would have known there was fresh water there, Matthew Flinders made exactly this deduction in his book published in 1814 after his 1799 and 1802 visits.
Finally, regarding the trees Cook merely stated the trees near the shores were low and bushy, he was more used to the mighty kauris of New Zealand standing on the shores to greet them in those previously visited waters.
One thing Cook did note, the intelligence of which confirms his possible thoughts about water, was that the ‘sand blows’ were moving acres of sand through which he could see live and dead trees protruding. Obviously the sand must be on the move to bury and expose trees as the sand blows along. Matthew Flinders could not see why Cook should think the dunes were on the move!
Our 4 x 4 blue, high wheel-arched coach bounced and swayed along the deep rutted and very dry sand tracks. We needed to wear seat belts so we could not be shot upwards and bang our heads on the coach roof. Branches screeched along the windows and we rocked from side to side in true trade-wind sea rolling style.
Peter explained that there is a freshwater lake underneath the island the volume of which is 7 times that of Sydney Harbour, so all over the island this pure fresh spring water fills lakes and runs downstream to the sea all around the island shores.
From 1860 to 1992 the island was stripped of all its useful wood, Australian Kauris, Brush Box Trees, She Oaks, Hoop Pines, Paper Barks (Melaleucas) and Turpentine Trees (Syncarpia, Satinays). The latter with their open bark were so rot-proof they were used in marine projects like the Suez Canal and the rebuilding of Thames Docks after the Second World War. But if they were taller than the canopy they often twisted in the wind and when sawn their grain was found to be cross-grained and so they were not suitable for building. We saw lots of the spared and twisted beauties.
We were to think ourselves lucky we had a nice air-conditioned coach with strong windows and excellent uplifting suspension, as Peter said the first tours were done in open-sided army trucks with canvas roofs, where folk sat on wooden seats.
Despite our good fortune we were all quite relieved to stretch our legs at the Stonetool Sandblow, so named because of the aboriginal tools found nearby, and as may well have been viewed by our fine navigators from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Seventy Five Mile Beach is an ambitious name because the total length of the island is only about 65 miles and the beach does not extend the full length. I guess it might have felt as long when the Fraser’s were struggling along it! But it was fun driving along it and discovering some of the victims it has claimed in the past and recently.
The solitary blue coach broke down the day before and the chap kneeling beside his 4wd is no doubt wishing he had avoided the soft sand. I didn’t see the roof of the car that had gradually been buried in the sand after trying to take a swim, but I was prepared to believe Peter on this one.
The most iconic victim of the sands is the once magnificent luxury liner, the Maheno and I will let the photos tell her story except for the fact that she was still pretty much intact before she was used as target practice in preparation for WW2 action.
We had a delicious buffet lunch at the McKenzie Resort at Eulong before continuing on to Central Station, once a terminus for the logging trains and now a peaceful wander through the wet sclerophyll forest alongside one of the typical sandy bottomed freshwater streams, the Wanggoolba Creek.
Our last stop was Lake McKenzie for a swim in the pristine water. We had to be careful not to wander out beyond where we could see the sandy bottom as the lake shelves steeply to 90 feet in the centre. We didn’t stay in long anyway as the wind was chilly.
Back on board Zoonie one of the most inspirational parts of the day was watching two whistling kits buzzing a beautiful White Bellied Sea Eagle above us. The contrast in size and colouring confirmed it was an eagle and the grace with which is soared and swung without moving its wings to avoid the kites was memorable.
There are numerous private homes on the island but it is in no way spoiled or overcrowded. In 2014 certain Native Rights were given back to the indigenous Burchilla people to permit hunting, fishing and taking fresh water. These will hopefully be extended so the aborigines can enjoy the benefits of ecotourism. Already much of the running of tours and maintenance of the island is down to members of the Burchilla clan.
Navigating the Southern Half of Queensland’s own Solent – The Great Sandy Strait
25:38.20S 158:58.002E
It was only going to take four or so hours to get from our Kingfisher Bay anchorage southwards to Garry’s anchorage where we planned to spend the night where ever we could find enough water for Zoonie to go through Low Water safely. Since we were passing the mid-tide point at Boonlye we set off two hours before High Water with the novel theory we would benefit from the last two hours of flood and the first two hours of ebb for the last stage of the route.
After that, all thoughts about tide times were put on the back shelf since my concentration rested on following the dashed pink line on the chartplotter from the top of the screen downwards and similarly on the photos, along the sometimes uncomfortably narrow channel. Vast areas of water were all around us, as in the Solent, but wearing my Polaroid sun glasses revealed the paler greenish water showing where the sank banks lay and were usually well marked with green and red channel markers.
The GPS heading, the green line on the plotter, has a delayed reaction to course changes so as soon as I can follow a heading from the chartplotter by lining up Zoonie’s green line heading over the pink dashed line or the next waypoint Rob has previously set, then I take a compass reading, which has a more immediate response to a course change and is a backup in case the chartplotter freezes, as it did once on this journey, fortunately where there was plenty of water and a clear course for the next mile, so Rob had time to turn it off and on again.
The intense fun came as we passed under Turkey Island where you can see first a red pillar buoy and within a few metres a red can buoy. You can see from the enlargement that the pink line goes to the right of the first red correctly leaving it to the left but then it deviates to the left of the red can. Problem is the sand banks are constantly changing so the pink line might well be the deepest route. Disobeying the rules was not an issue, just making sure Zoonie stays off the ground was the important issue. The water either side of the reds looked the same so in the end we thought it probably didn’t matter. As you can see we left it to port, obeyed the rules, watched the depths drop to an alarming 0.4 metres under the keel and held our breaths. The depth of 2.2 metres you see at the bottom left of the photo is the depth here in Mooloolaba when I took these photos 5 days after the event.
When we set off there was no wind but as we turned after the two reds it was around 17 knots on the nose and the sun was well down in the sky. We turned to port in to the channel leading to Garry’s Anchorage and dropped the hook, as you can see, about half way up where the water was 3.4 metres and the time 17.35. We rewarded ourselves with a nice G&T and it was dark within 30 minutes.
The next day was to be a long one. It was just a short distance to the main channel and we headed south to Inskip Point in Wide Bay Harbour to wait out the fall in the tide and then its late rise when we would set off to motor along towards the Wide Bay Bar.
This sand bar outside the passage between Fraser Island and the mainland to the south shifts on a ten year cycle. To obtain the best waypoints to use for our crossing we phoned the nearby VMR. (Voluntary Marine Rescue has branches all around the coast and they organise marine safety. Some Australians register with them every time they go to sea.)
VMR texted back the co-ordinates and they are the ones you see on the plotter photo, the highest on the right being the start point of the crossing across the bar.
While we relaxed on board we chatted with Nick and Susie on Water Music and Susie commented that they and the other thirty odd boats would be dealing with the crossing in the morning, but we had four good reason to do it this evening.
First we had already decided to and were comfortable with our decision. Second, the depth of water for us would be half a metre deeper on our evening as the tides were moving towards neeps, where the height of tide, the difference between High and Low water is at its least. Third the sun in the morning would be low in the sky ahead of us, whereas with our evening choice it would be tucked out of the way behind Zoonie. Finally, the thought of negotiating a confined passage in the company of many other yachts did not appeal!
At half past three in the afternoon we recovered the anchor and set off, feeling that the trickiest part of our passage down the GSS was over. The car ferry was just leaving the island side so we had time to get past it and then we had around us some unusual dolphins. A youngster was charcoal coloured but the adults were pinkish. Our reference source, Hadoram Shirihai and Brett Jarrett’s book ‘Whales, Dolphins and Seals’ identified them as Indo Pacific Humpback Dolphins and our latitude was near their most southerly range, so we were indeed fortunate. Our heading was 080’ nearly due East compass.
It felt good to be approaching open water again, but we still had this hurdle to cross. The depths were comfortable as we motored on down the Inskip Point Leads otherwise known as The Mad Mile, where we turned to a heading of 050’, but in a westerly wind and with an opposing rising tide there are sometimes standing waves here, hence the name.
“Ready?” I asked Rob as I turned Zoonie right through almost 90 degrees onto the required course for the next mile or so. It was a good course we had been given and we had over 5 metres all the way across the mid blue on the plotter and were soon clearing onto the white part with Double Island Point anchorage 9 miles distant and reassuringly visible.
Two hours later we were anchored in the bay named by Cook and described by Matthew Flinders in his Journal written in 1814. (Works of Matthew Flinders. The Perfect Library.)
“Tuesday 27 July 1802. At half past nine (am) we hauled close around Double- island Point, within a rock lying between one and two miles to the NNE. (Wolf Rock you can see in the photo of the chartplotter). The point answered Captain Cook’s description: it is a steep head, at the extremity of a neck of land which runs out two miles from the main.”
Flinders then goes on to describe Wide Bay, that we had just transited, and the entrance to the GSS, “and a small opening was seen in it, leading to a piece of water like a lagoon; but the shoals which lie off the entrance render it difficult for access, if indeed there be a passage for anything larger than boats.”
Flinders goes on to explain why he declined the challenge of exploring the hidden waterway, “Had the Lady Nelson been with me, (the companion ship) I should have attempted to get her into the lagoon, having previously entered a conjecture that the head of Hervey’s Bay (at the north) might communicate with Wide Bay; but the apprehension that lieutenant Murray would arrive at the first rendezvous, and proceed to the next before we could join him, deterred me from attempting it with the Investigator or with boats.” How frustrated he must have been that he could have not explored the waterway and thus extended the discovery of his illustrious predecessor.
The anchorage was beautiful and since the wind was still in the SE the roll was minimal, but we weren’t sure of the bottom. Rob didn’t feel that anchor bite the sea bed in the darkness, so we set the anchor alarm to tell us if Zoonie was moving beyond the length of chain plus her own 40 feet. As you can see from the picture she jiggled about on the circumference of her range and had not moved far by the morning.
Not surprisingly, by the time I looked out of Zoonie’s big side window just after 6.00am there was an armada of white sails heading towards the Point, some passing inside of the rock described by Flinders and others taking a much further offshore route. We crossed his track and merged in with the fleet, a little like turning right at a busy junction and headed south on a smooth snakeskin sea with just enough wind to fill the sails. Sadly Zoonie could not keep up the average to get us to the Mooloolaba bar entrance just before High Water, so Rupert the engine was called in to assist.
Twice on the way down the autopilot froze, so along with replacing the control unit (£600), which we have since discovered is still under warranty until January and replacement of the three short stays, we will also get the auto pilot looked at.
Pan tropical dolphins came to see how we were getting on and just before entering the harbour an adult humpback whale rolled over revealing the white under its fins and belly. Again Rob and I were looking at the same spot of water at the same time to see this beauty. Their migration back to the Antarctic is nearly finished now, so we were lucky to see this one.
As I write this Zoonie is happily sitting alongside her own pontoon at a luxury residential address opposite Minyama Island in Mooloolaba Harbour courtesy of Lynne and Geoff; I don’t think she has ever been so sophisticated.