After a couple of lovely days anchored in Tin Can Bay, we weighed anchor and started moving North once again. This time we motor sailed up the inside passage called the Great Sandy Straits. Just a small bit of information for all the cruisers who have not been to this amazing part of the world, keep an eye on the tides, there are some serious tidal flows that happen around here and the depth of the water is extremely shallow in places. We found tide streams running at 4 to 5 knots in some places so be prepared to anchor and wait until the tide turns before proceeding. As far as the depth goes, about 99 percent is plenty deep enough, we found that about 1 percent is treacherously shallow and we found out the hard way that a deep draft and one part of the channel did not go well together. We had our first soft grounding, we were doing about 2 knots or less and we found an area that was just a little less than our 2.47 metre draft. We came to a mushy soft stop, we waited for about 5 to 10 minutes as the tide was on the rise, we floated off and we retraced our track on the chart plotter. making the correction to the deeper side if the channel and we were on our way again.
After all the drama of navigating through the shallow Great Sandy Straits we anchored for the night in an anchorage near Yankee Jacks. This turned out to be a good location for an overnight stop. The next morning, we motored about 10 nautical miles to Kingfisher Bay. It was early in the day when we arrived so I did a little fishing using soft plastic lures. It took a bit of work but I managed to land and release a nice Red Spot Estuary Cod and a very nice Flathead.
Late in the day we went ashore and had a game of Petanque, we were having a great time trying to outdo each other until a very cheeky Dingo showed up, I had just finished telling Annie that I had the over whelming feeling that we were being watched and sure enough we were. This Dingo was not going to take no for an answer, he kept stalking closer and closer waiting for an opportunity to present itself. We could not turn our backs on this one as he was only about 5 metres from us and would move very quickly each time we looked away. He did know the body language of each time I made out that I was bending down to pick something up to throw at him, he would retreat a few metres each time but would quickly return to the 5-metre mark when I did not throw anything at him. This little game of bluff kept up until we retreated to our dinghy and he took off running when we both yelled and made a move towards him. We were relieved that we got away without losing any skin.
The photo is the Dingo that was stalking us on Fraser Island.
In life, instead of wishing that you were someone else, be proud who you are. You will never know who has been looking at you, wishing that they were you.