Catch the tide and meet the Boeing

25th Sep 2010

We left Urangan at 05:45 so as to catch the tide down the great Sandy Straight. You may recall from the trip up, that the tides can run at 2.5 kts in the straight and as such, can have a huge impact on passage times. As it turned out, we picked it perfectly. In fact, it was one of the reasons we had sat in Urangan for 4 days and in this case, our good timing meant getting a 2 kt ride down on the incoming tide to Broonlye Pt and then continued our ride on the outgoing tide from that point south. You see Broonlye is the centre of the tide flow with the water coming into this point from both side on the flood and out of this point on both sides on the ebb. We must have hit he mid point right on tide change!

For the trip; the weather was overcast and drizzly and but for a few turtles and more impotantly, an attempted rendezvous with a south bound ‘red tailed’ 737 crewed by a mate, the trip was without much to report. (The rendezvous by the way, didn’t come off because of cloud and I suspect somewhere between 25 and 35 thousand feet, but it was fun trying)

Here Wide bay, just inside the bar we will sit tomorrow and wait for some NE winds for the trip to Moolooaba.