“Golden Slumbers fill your eyes, smiles awake you when you rise “… if only that was true last night !

In a previous post, we declared never to anchor in an open ‘bay’ or anything similar to an open bay again. Well, guess what, we did. Kingfisher Bay, not really a bay as we know it, one of those Queensland bays where the coastline makes a kind of curved deviation as if you are driving around a bend in the road and you have to turn the wheel slightly to get through the bend.

Anyway, that aside, we were informed that Kingfisher Bay, now known as, Bay of Hell, shall now take the top gong for the worst anchorage. I hope we don’t award any further gongs as I don't see how it could become worse. It has heavily tainted our visit to Fraser Island.

Maybe there was a sign earlier in the day as we missed getting back to our tender on the beach by 10 minutes to find the low tide had stranded her about 20’ from water. Arhg, drag it into the water I hear you say. Well, when the tender was re-powered prior to our departure a replacement 50HP motor was installed. A 50HP motor is quite heavy and when that’s on the back of a fiberglass bottomed inflatable tender, I can tell you, it ain’t gonna be moved by two people when she’s beached in wet sand.

To cut a long story short, two young blokes watched us attempt to drag, push, sway and swerve the tender towards the water - it was sooo close, c’mon you miserable so-n-so … she was quite happy to ‘rest’ on the sand for the foreseeable future. The patterns we had created in the muddy sand looked more like the aftermath of a game of rugby on a wet cricket pitch (those of use who played rugby on ovals with cricket pitches in the middle know what I mean). Shortly after the First Mate and I had now formulated a plan to go to the beach bar and drink until 6:00 pm when the tide will be back to what we arrived on, these two blokes walked towards us, partially laughing and partially proud of themselves as they offered their assistance. As soon as our new best friends were in position and a few counts of “1,2,3… GO”, 'Albo’ (our tender’s name due to the rego numbers), slid into the water. As the first mate exclaimed .. ”there’s nothing quite like man power..”. Geez, good one Darl I thought to myself. The problem was, the man power put us in this situation to start with !

The tides in Queensland are higher than what we experience in Sydney waters, however, what makes it worse is the shallow shorelines, almost level in sections, large sandbanks, so when a low tide of 0.5 mtr hits, the sand exposed is sometimes huge, hence the beaching of ‘Albo’ as an example. The further north we go, the more variation in tides. Planning will be the key moving ahead.

So we retired to Charmer for an afternoon toddy as yet again, the sun set showed off her usual beauty.

Strangely the wind increased as the sun set, swell after swell banging on the side of Charmer, the water current and wind working together to not move us from the unfortunate position we were in. It continued on, often releasing anger in a series of larger swells that had the first mate and I exchanging glances without saying a word. We both knew what the other was thinking … “..this is misery..”(expletive substituted).

We retired about 10:00 pm, lying in bed it felt like we were taking a ride at Luna Park, the ‘Spider’ comes to mind, a ride where you were thrown all over the place wondering when the hell the ride was going to stop ! Well, this ride didn’t stop.

The first mate wobbled out of bed about 2:30 am and retired to the upstairs saloon thinking the noise would be less. It was as I experienced it at 4:15 am! Encouragingly, at that time the first mate was sound asleep - maybe I could get a few hours myself.

I experienced dappled sleep until 5:30 am, when suddenly, like Huey knew we had had enough, decided to turn off the conditions and flicked his switch.

How can that be, from misery to bliss in 5 mins?

Weather, go figure ??