23 | Sailing Australia's East Coast

After making landfall in Australia, we headed up the Brisbane River. Brisbane turned out to be an ideal city for cruisers. Anchoring is free and there are public dinghy docks right next to the fast catamaran ferries that can take you all over the city. The boat had received relatively little maintenance in the tropics, so we spent some time taking care of things on deck while we waited for a chance to do a proper haul out. We are on the way to find tools and all the things for our haul out. This place has what we need. It sure does. Most of Moreton Bay is very shallow and we picked our way south through the sandbars towards the slipways at Redland Bay. Oh man, I love the sound when we turn off the motor. Been motoring for hours. We're on the home stretch now, but we got a wind. It's just down below preparing our Thanksgiving dinner. Roast chicken because we couldn't find a turkey. Better for two people anyways. It's all coming together. Potatoes, chicken, salad, pumpkin pie. The next morning we were up early to catch the high tide at the slipway. Yeah, bring it up a little bit. This will get it to ground. Our last haul out was in Mexico, so we were anxious to check on everything below the water line after all those miles through tropical waters. Pelican Slipways was recommended to us as being friendly to wooden boats. The old school railway is very gentle on the hull compared to modern travel lifts, but it does have to be timed to the tide. So every year we have a few fasteners that start bleeding through the paint job, leaving rust streaks. So we dig them out, dig out the old bungs that are failing. We hit them with a little bit of phosphoric acid, which stops the rust and kind of neutralizes the surface. And then when that's dry, we paint them with some zinc, just basically a pure zinc called galvanizing compound. When that's dry, we just epoxy putty over them. And the vast majority of the time that takes care of them forever. They never reappear, but it seems like every year new ones reappear. So we just kind of do a few every haul out. I think this haul out's worse than normal because we just spent the last year in the tropics, but that's to be expected. So you hand scrubbed it today? Yeah, wet scouring it to make the bottom paint stick. We're not allowed to sand here. We have to use this wet scouring. Which has actually been quite nice. It's fine. To me it seems worse from an environmental perspective. I have a vacuum sander with a HEPA filter, but this is the preferred method. And all the water is collected into these cisterns that then get pumped up to holding tanks and treated. Seems to be cleaning up pretty nicely though. Basically just giving a tooth for the next coat. The problem with it is very happy to find that after the thousands of miles of ocean sailing and a year in tropical waters, Julia was still as strong and healthy as when we started. Thank you. There is a series of barrier islands along this stretch of the coast and we continued south in the protected inland waters. It is important here to identify every mark and stick to the channel as one wrong turn came into view. We had been warned that this is not a very peaceful spot, but if you can tolerate the jet skis and the helicopters, it is perfectly positioned to watch for a weather window to continue down the coast. Well, it's a beautiful morning here on the Gold Coast, but we've decided this is the weather window to keep making miles south. So we're going to head out, cross the bar, and it'll be about 100 nautical miles to Yamba. Yamba has a bar as well, so we need to time it a little bit to get in there. The wind is supposed to be pretty good, but a little light at the end, so we might have to motor a little bit at the end to make sure we make our bar crossing. But it should be relatively calm. Nothing over two meter seas is expected, which is... I don't want to jinx it, but we haven't seen a forecast that didn't have over two meter seas in like 8,000 miles or something. So we're going to jump down to Yamba. Well, we're just heading into darkness. The Coast Guard has called in a high wind warning for this area we're going to be in tonight. We're not really seeing that on our forecast, but hopefully they don't know something we don't. We've reduced sail going into darkness just because the wind is supposed to pick up, but we're going to stick in kind of close to shore River bars can be very dangerous when a strong outflowing current interacts with the ocean swell. Trying to find a path through them, but I don't know. That was an eight foot right breaker. Yeah, really scary. We didn't know it at the time, but friends on another boat saw that we were heading in and got some great footage of us underway from the headland. Coffs Harbor is protected by Mutton Bird Island, which is covered in the nesting burrows of shearwaters, or mutton birds. We met some very nice locals who let us borrow their car so we could see some of the hinterlands. While the coast was rocky and windblown, just a few miles inland we have learned. So this tree, the sign says, is a thousand years old, which is crazy. It's a black butt, which is a type of eucalyptus, and it is absolutely huge. Bad weather was forecast, so we moved to the shelter of the inner harbor to ride out the blow for a few days. When the wind calmed and the fishing fleet started to head out, we decided it was time the underbrush was too dense and spiky to make it very far. I think I wore the wrong suit and shoes for this. Yeah you did. Let's go for a swim. While still really nice, the water is getting significantly colder the farther south we go. This is the area where the warm waters of the tropics to the north of Australia collide with the cold waters coming up from the southern ocean, a confluence which brings a huge variety of marine life. Shoes, water bottles, ping pong ball. I'm sure that it's going to be many months before we get this video out, but today is Christmas Eve, so we're starting our celebrations with a little cheese plate. We're all alone in this anchorage. We're the only boat here, which is lovely, but it's going to be a quiet Christmas for us. Next, we will continue cruising down the coast, taking in the iconic sights of Sydney Harbor, and preparing to cross the notorious Bass Strait to Tasmania.