Cursed!! (Wide Bay bar...)

I may have mentioned before - I think we may be cursed.

If I had to guess, I think it was done by a Romany lady from whom I’d refused to buy a ‘lucky sprig’ of lavender and rosemary, outside Covent Garden tube station in October 1997.

Following on from the snake incident, there was the GPS drop outs in the shallows, then we had the Elbow Point storm… I’m starting to wonder what fresh new hell will today bring?

We’re heading out from Fraser Island today - out through Wide Bay Bar. The prospect of which has had Chez appropriately concerned all week. It has the distinction of being the most dangerous bar crossing in Australia. The most perfect flat calm/no wind conditions at dawn saw some of our neighbours head out while (me at least) was still asleep. We’ve opted to head out on the next rising high tide at noonish.

The wind did of course pick up to concerning levels as we waited at the bar entrance..

New buddies on Eudora (Sue and Ron) were also heading out, so we opted to follow in their wake. This was a good decision, as the AIS targets supposedly to help us out weren’t showing up on any of our devices (..did I mention the curse?).

Going was tough, with both wind and considerable swell against us, we had to motor hard to make any headway at all.

Crashing waves on the shallows and reefs either side of us made for a hairy time, but we eventually made it through.

As we turned SE out of the choppy bar waters the sky above gave an indication of our next challenge: it was the colour of a ripe black eye!

I’m not going to detail the awful time we then endured - I will say that the storm we managed to live through 2 days ago at Elbow Point was the worst we’d experienced in 8 years.. well this one was easily it’s equal. A truly terrifying experience that had us thrown in all directions, on a Lee shore, with at least 3 other boats around us who couldn’t see us nor we see them, in the once again white out conditions. As well as a lot of incoherent gibberish, I did also sing ‘Lord hear us when we cry to thee, for those in peril on the sea’ as I struggled with the helm.

Although that storm lessened slightly within an hour, the ongoing massive sea and associated rolling of the ship had Chez intermittently retching throughout the night.

After the storm, she was absolutely soaked to the skin, so headed below to get some dry clothes on. While doing so, she trod on broken glass. A pepper pot that had been thrown across the cabin had smashed and its contents, little black balls and shards of glass went flying everywhere.

Checking on the bilges a little later, there is once again a concerning amount of water in there.. like a well trained sailor, the first thing I did was to taste it to see if it’s salty… it was: salty and peppery!

So… any lessons learned?

Well, if a lady offers you a sprig of lavender and rosemary, think twice before declining.

I’m writing this at 3am, conditions have calmed somewhat. We’ve got another 4 hours to go, before we reach Briby Island - our next stop. The lasagna that we’d rather cleverly made for the journey, remains assembled, but uncooked. It’s spent the entire journey tipping back and forth all night on our little gimbled hob - it’s far too rolly to go in the oven, and for now at least, Chez won’t be able to keep anything down.

We’ve been at Briby Island now for 3 days.. the howling wind is driving us insane, the upcoming ass probing and the real possibility that there is no end in sight to the stormy conditions.. has brought us to the conclusion that trying to get down to Sydney is a step too far for us at the moment, and we should get off the boat for a bit - get some land time in Sydney, find out my results and recover. We’re both honestly bruised and mentally damaged from the two near death shitty storms we’ve just suffered - found out today from Eudora (Ron and Sue) that the second storm we both endured had wind speeds of 60knots.. (That’s a ‘Violent Storm’, thats two up from a Gale, and just 4 knots off of ‘Hurricane Force’ on the Beaufort scale).

We had coffee over on their boat this morning - glad we went, wasn’t looking forward to it, after yet another marina had told us there was no room in the inn. They suggested hauling out instead of looking for a berth - and to our ears, this was a great idea.

Chez hunted down the marina they’d mentioned, more like just a boat yard up a mangrove river - but it’ll definitely do!

Hoping that in a few days things will improve, and we can start to look back without wincing, and look forward to adventures anew - but for now at least, we’re done: I’m drawing this entry and this diary to a close (for now).

Bye xx