Wednesday 29th
So the weather turned out to be not so good, so we stayed the extra day in Botany Bay.
We motored back across to Dolls Point as the wind was going to come back up from the South and quite strong.
While it’s not a protected bay as such, there’s not much fetch so it’s reasonably calm in a southerly there.
It’s also to shops and laundry.
We did school and some work, then headed into the beach.
Kristie jumped in an Uber to go do washing, whilst the girls and I walked 1km up the beach to get to Coles.
Uneventful shop other than a local lady loosing her 4yr old. A Police car turned up as the girls and I were heading back to the park in an Uber with our shopping.
Spent the night at Dolls Point.
Thursday 30th
Weather/wind was good for us to sail to Pittwater. We’d only stay there to fill up with water/fuel (there is nowhere in Botany Bay for us to do that!) then move on the next day.
The wind was from the S/SE, so with the anchor up at about 8:45am we could sail all the way out the heads.
This is one of the many Octopus hanging around the Bare Island dive site:
We sailed out past Bare Island, taking more notice of it after the tour we’d done.
The sail up was ok, we had to gybe a few times as the wind swung around a bit.
We eventually dropped the sails behind Barrenjoey Head as that completely blocked any wind from the south.
From there it was a quickish motor all the way to the Royal Motor Yacht Club so we could top up fuel and water.
As per last time we were there it was an easy dock. Just as we were leaving one of the local 140ft mega boats was coming in to fuel up.
With that done we were back at The Basin to jump on a public mooring for the night. Didn’t get off the boat as we’d be leaving early tomorrow.
Friday 31st
Originally we’d thought about heading to Lake Macquarie, but the bar and then channel into the lake is a little shallow and needs (for us) good alignment with tides.
High tide that day was 10ish at the bar, and we were going to struggle to get there that early, and the thought of getting stuck with low tides wasn’t appealing.
With that decision made, it was going to be a long trip up to Port Stephens / Nelson Bay.
We had good (stronger than expected) SE winds.
We were off the mooring at 7:30am, and could sail out of the heads (well we needed a quick boost of the iron headsail to get through the lull behind the heads!).
We hadn’t yet reefed, so we were sailing (and sometimes surfing down the waves) averaging 9-10knts… it was a bit much so we went with #2 reef and that calmed things down and we were still doing 7kts.
We had a few patches of wind dropping off, and what looked to be a squall but was nothing much.
The wind disappeared completely about 12nm out from Port Stephens, complete glass-out.
We got in and went straight to Shoal Bay and had the anchor down by 7:15pm.
Average speed for the whole day was 7.5kts.
Quite a bit of roll through night!