Mooloolaba to Fraser Island - A stop at Double Island Point

Anchor area in Mooloolaba

Mooloolaba was a perfect first stop to relax and rest, at least for a couple of days. The anchorage is busy this time of the year with people stopping by on their way to the north. No wonder we met several friends that were around.

The big surprise was to find Andrea and Andreas from Akka just materializing in their dinghy one morning. We met the Andreas in San Blass, Panama just before crossing the Pacific, found them again last year in Noumea and why not, this year we met again while they are on their way to the north to continue their voyage around the world, eventually back to Germany, their home port. On Sunday we had friends on board, Eduardo and his lovely family came to visit. 

Another sunset in settled weather

Monday was back to work for Oscar that had to fix the engines blues. Tuesday was engine stress test day and after leaving each engine running for 4 hours he verified impellers are ok. The question of why the failure happened is still on guessing grounds. With a feeling of 'hope it won't happen again' and several spare impellers on board we decide we should keep going. 

In the meantime the weather looks perfect for the next leg and we decide to leave beautiful Mooloolaba towards Wide Bay and the Great Sandy Strait in Fraser Island. 

The entrance in Wide Bay Bar needs to be timed with the incoming tide, ideally one should enter in the last 2 hours before high tide. With the settled weather our best option was to stop at Double Island Point, 10 miles before Fraser Island and spend the night there so that we could be at the entrance of the bar around 11:00 AM.

We left Mooloolaba just after lunch and had a good run in calm seas and around 10 knots SE winds with Zenitude happily doing about 7 knots. It was 11.00 PM and the only squall that got to us had of course to appear at the time we decide to get sails down to enter Double Island Point bay. But it was short lived and soon the warm night was quiet and we entered this wide anchorage. It is easy in settled weather even in the dark night and on the approach there was fluorescence everywhere around us, sometimes the seas looking brighter than the starry skies. All my apprehension of doing this in the middle of the night was gone.

Double Island Point

We woke up early with VMR from Tin Can Bay calling to check if we had arrived safely to the anchorage. As always when cruising the Australia coast we log our trips with them. They do a fantastic coverage and gave us all the info we needed to cross the bar which included the 3 waypoints and the right timing. No wind this morning so we motored the 10 miles and crossed the bar uneventfully. Even with these very calm conditions there were a couple of scary wave surfing in the shallowest part as the depth goes very quickly down to 4 meters. Not the best of feelings.

Having crossed the bar we headed north in the Sandy Strait towards Gary's anchorage were we are spending the night before continuing our way north tomorrow.





Among mangroves in popular Gary's anchorage   

G.