Drone photo shows the lovely anchorage along the 60 km long Platypus Bay along the northern coast of K'Gari.

We are anchored in our old haunts in the lower reaches of the Burnett River waiting for a clear weather window to sail north along the Queensland coast and out to the southernmost of the Great Barrier reefs, the 50 nautical mile stretch of the Capricornia / Bunker Group of reefs and associated coral cays.

We left Moreton Bay a couple of weeks ago, the arrival of Alison's old school friend, Clodagh, from Albany in WA, fortuitously coinciding with very favourable conditions for the passage north across the sometimes impassable Wide Bay Bar and the tricky onwards sail through the Great Sandy Strait inside K'Gari (Fraser island).

The main objective this tropical sailing season is to explore the outer reefs along the Great Barrier Reef, but this depends of course on calm enough weather to find safe and comfortable places to anchor.

When we first started sailing back in the late 1980s, we had little access to weather forecasting beyond a rather uncertain 3 day coastal forecast. We remember leaving the lovely anchorage behind Urupukapuka Island in the Bay of Islands in New Zealand in July 1987 for a trans Tasman ocean crossing with a favourable forecast, only to turn back a day later as a storm was forecast. A few hours later we had 2 anchors down with 60 knots of wind bearing down on us.

Of course, the forecasting of weather has improved immensely since then, but one wonders whether it really is so much better. Weather forecasts are made by supercomputers that crunch the data they obtain from thousands of weather stations around the world, satellite data and other information. There are several computer models available to the ordinary sailor, and conventional wisdom is that when the models align, i.e. say the same thing, the forecast is likely to be accurate.

The problem at the moment is that the models are not showing the same thing at all. There is a trough developing off the east coast of Australia and the possibility of a low pressure system. These conditions are common at this time of the year in the subtropics as the water remains warm after the summer. One model shows northerlies; another, westerlies, one more southerlies and a fourth south easterlies! If this was a forecast for a week or more away, then the discrepancies might be understandable, but they are not. They are for tomorrow! With such a battle of the models, we will just elect to stay at anchor here in the safety of the Burnett and wait for more certainty.



The anchorage off Kingfisher Resort on the west side of K'Gari in ideal conditions on the way north a week ago.



Sundari, anchored off Kingfisher Resort, K'Gari.



Lovely misty morning in the Burnett River after the forecast low clears off to seaward faster than predicted...shallow sub-tropical lows and troughs are notoriously hard to forecast. Note the covered dive compressor on top of the deck in the foreground - still unused!



One of the Capricornia Cays to the north of Bundaberg - the southernmost of the Great Barrier Reefs - not our photo though!