Thursday 9th
Our stay at CYCA was up today. A few boat jobs in the morning before Kristie and I snuck off to the clubhouse by ourselves to get a Bacon and Egg roll and a coffee.
It was raining when we left so didn’t bother fueling up there.
We were aiming for Bantry Bay up in Middle Harbour. We’d have to time our passage to coincide with the opening times of Spit Bridge, which for us was either 1:15pm, or 2:15pm.
Given it was 10am, we decided to head over and grab a mooring at Rose Bay and wait out the rain there; I was also keen to have as much high tide as possible before going over the shallow area before we got to the bridge.
We took the opportunity to fine-tune the side walls for the rain. The poles didn’t have a great way of being fixed at one end, so out came the drill.
We had an early lunch and aimed to get there for the 2:15pm opening. The B14 (sailing dingy) were now having their World Titles and their start line was in the bay just north of our mooring.
I tried sneaking around the eastern side, but they were all sailing close to the headland, so we took the long detour around to the west to avoid the fleet.
(sadly we don’t have a flashing orange light so can’t just steam through the middle of them like the massive ferry did!)
Some good entertainment - fast sailing with their kites up, also lots of capsizes!
We picked up one of the two courtesy waiting moorings (2hr limit) just to the east of the bridge and waited 15min for it to open.
You could just about spit onto land from the back of the boat, but we still had 10m underneath us!
They let the boats on the western side come through first, then us.
We were the last of four boats going through from ourside, and the bridge started lowering more or less as we went through!
It’s only a short trip around the corner to Bantry Bay, but we enjoyed checking out the amazing houses/units built into the steep hills of Middle Harbour.
(Quite a few had chair-lift style access to the jetty at the bottom of their land/cliff).
There are eight public moorings up there, and it was quiet so we had no trouble getting one (we won’t talk about the botched job I did of getting us onto it!)
Bantry Bay feels like a million miles from anywhere as you can’t see any houses/civilisation, however it’s smack in the middle of Sydney and only about 5nm north from Taronga Zoo.
I tried fishing, but still I’m only good at catching small silver fish.
Friday 10th
We took our time to get ready in the morning and then set out to do the walk to the lookout on the Bay Track.
Quick tender ride to the landing, toilet stop, then off we went.
We’d only gone about 20m when the first leech struck.
Then they continued smashing us until we got to higher/drier ground.
The path isn’t that well-used, and lots of wet/overgrown spiky trees. I ended up carrying Emma on my shoulders for most of the walk up, and quite a bit of they way down.
Great view at the top, but just as we got there we could start to hear the thunder getting closer. A quick check of BOM indicted the rain was just about on us!
Emma had declined to do the last 200m to the top lookout, so we got back to her quickly and got ready for the rain
The Exped Typhoon backpacks we have are fully waterproof (I got them intended for our boat life!) so phones went in there, and down we went in the rain.
More leeches came out to greet us and wriggle all over our shoes and socks.
By the time we got back to the tender I found two that had drawn blood, but otherwise no physical damage was done (maybe a bit of mental scaring for future walks - “is this going to be a leech walk?”).
We tried our best to de-leech on the pontoon before getting in the tender, but still one or two made it back to the boat :(
Shower on the back of the boat to clean off from the walk: all the boats behind us had left so we could have a proper shower!
We spent a bit of time making plans for the next week.
After working out we’d leave early tomorrow, we jumped in the tender to go checkout the waterfall that was just around the corner.
Apparently you could walk up to it, but after this morning’s walk nobody was super keen to step foot on leech-land again.
The waterfall wasn’t that spectacular, and as we could see it from the tender we didn’t even have to stop :)
On the way back we noticed the couple from Woy Woy (that had taken our mooring at Taronga Zoo last week) were also on a mooring near us. We stopped for another chat with them on the way back to Lazuli.
Tomorrow we head off to Broken Bay to explore that area for a week or so as it has more options for avoiding the strong winds that are coming.