Manatee goes to Lake Macquarie

After setting the alarm for an early start we left our mooring at 'The Basin' just before 7am. The weather forecast was for wind N/NW at 10-15knots with a 1-2m swell. We had estimated the trip to take 7 hours and were hoping to get extra speed by combining motoring with sailing.

Unusually the forecast was accurate with Manatee travelling directly into the wind which would have required constant tacking to make headway. Nah, motoring looks good!

At the entrance to Broken Bay (Pittwater) we saw a whale about 300m away on the starboard bow. AK was skippering so slowed down to let the whale pass in front of us....the whale slowed down. Manatee was turned to port as it looked like we were on a collision course and the whale disappeared only to surface about 50m from Manatee on the port side after having dived under us. Gave AK a good fright, Marg grabbed the camera to get a photo but the whale obviously didn't want her photo taken. We heard on the radio later that she hung around this spot for a few hours....waiting for another boat to play with????

spot the whale, not.

It was a fairly bumpy trip with Jacki and Ruby getting seasick. We had decided that the girls would travel downstairs for safety but they decided they needed to sit upstairs, to look at the horizon perhaps? After about 4 hours we decided that sitting upstairs was going to save a lot of dog puke. Container ships lined the horizon for the entire journey and we dodged fishing nets some of the way. These are visible because of the tiny floats that keep the nets close to the surface, the chance of fouling your prop seems pretty high if you miss one. We passed one yacht heading south.

We made pretty good time, arriving at Moon Islet off Swansea Heads at 1330. We were a little worried about crossing the bar (our first) and negotiating the narrow bridge opening and shallow channel but the local coastguard were a great help with fantastic advice. Cousin Mark, a seasoned sailor had told us he always gets stuck in the channel and Pete from the chandellery told us some boats have to heel to negotiate the shallow depths....causing a litle worry.

We picked up a courtesy mooring east of the bridge after safely crossing the bar and negotiating the channel entrance. Marg took the girls for a much needed dinghy ride and walk in the sand dunes while AK started cleaning up the boat. After booking a 1500 bridge opening we passed through the narrow looking opening safely thanks to Marg's good skippering and made our way into the lake. The channel is very narrow and shallow, it is a little disconcerting to see the bottom. This is off Pelican, with the runway piano keys very close.

As it was close to dusk we picked up a mooring outside Lake Macquarie Yacht Club, fed the girls and ventured ashore to have a champagne in the club and toast our first big journey.