We were glad to be in our pen at the Southport Yacht Club given the strong Northerly winds. We enjoy this Club - it is a good marina, good facilities with waterfront restaurant, bar and handy to Southport beach. Well the wind stopped at nights over the weekend, howling during the day. Adding to the cacophony of sound were the Gold Coast helicopters which incessantly take off and land in daylight hours from the nearby heli pads (a good decision to knock this idea on the head in Sydney Harbour!) So the days were noisy - the evenings surprisingly calm and pleasant. We had a nice meal at the Club with Leanne's nieces Chris (and boyfriend Jed) and Steph - terrific to catch up with them, get all the news and share some stories of our travels.
It was Sunday, the winds were forecast to drop a bit Monday so after a quick morning swim at Southport (with every 'nipper' on the Coast) we headed up to Bum's Bay near the Gold Coast Seaway to have an early night before our planned departure at 1am for Yamba. Well what a racket! Still the cacophony of helicopters - now add the raucous buzz of dozens of lads revving the life out of their jet skis - like a plague of hornets -and they don't stick to channels - they go in every direction and criss-cross across channels all over the place to create as much mayhem and noise as they can -they love it! One unfortunate rider was killed the previous day apparently slamming into a powerboat at Broadwater! The situation here seems out of control (and again good on Sydney for banning them on Sydney Harbour!). And yes we still had the 'stinkboats' and dozens of 'tinnies' roaring past creating wash. Fortunately again this plague of noise, wash and general mayhem vanished as the skies darkened with thunderstorm clouds around 4pm - all went quiet - all gone home for work on Monday - and we got our planned sleep until our alarm went near 1am.
The air was now very still as we weighed anchor in the dark and steamed up the channel to the Seaway. The next test is always the state of the ocean - it too was quite calm and the exit was easy into the night and down past the night lights of the Gold Coast high rise - it was good to be on our way again.
The seas remained calm and we had to motor - unfortunately we were faced with a head on current of around 1.5 knots which was enough to blow out our ETA into Yamba by a couple of hours into the early evening of Monday night. 2 issues here - Yamba not a good place to go into at night and the tide would be falling after about 4 pm. We had been hoping for favourable winds and arriving an hour or two before 4! Anyway we had to tough it out and keep going. Then the wind started to build around midday and it strengthened and strengthened - with all both sails up and the jib poled we started to really clip along and regain some lost progress - and it strengthened the closer we got to Yamba - the Marine Rescue lady at Iluka Yamba assured us however that the 'bar' was still OK and we were now on track to arrive bang on 4pm which we did thankfully as we could see huge thunderstorm clouds building in the skies West.
We crossed the 'bar' surfing some fairly big waves and getting 'Echo Beach' into some new personal best speed records - she handled it well. We lowered the mainsail in the channel once inside the entry- we then started to weave through the narrow winding shallow channel around the islands to the Yamba marina. The wind was now 30 knots and we were going sideways through the channels - if we hit the bottom it would be where we would stay! We made it feeling our way through, and had a tough job to berth in a cross wind that was blowing us away from the pen finger - anyway Leanne did a superb job and we tied up and settled in for the night pretty well exhausted after 15 hours! About an hour later we were hit by a major thunderstorm - lightning, thunder and torrential pouring rain - the only good thing is that it saved me washing all the salt off 'Echo Beach'.