Bums bay through the Broadwater to Brisbane

We left Bums Bay (aka the Marine Stadium) on Wednesday 10th June after an enjoyable time with the local cruising folk and Terry's niece Catherine.  Terry will fill you in on the details at a later date I'm sure.

The Marine Stadium, Gold Coast (AKA Bums Bay) just south of the Gold Coast Seaway and right next to Sea World.

We wanted to dawdle up through the Broadwater to Morton Bay but things conspired against us, sort of..

We only did a short hop on Wednesday up to the Dux Anchorage in Tipplers Passage.  It's a great spot with good holding fairly close in to South Stradbroke Island.  It needed to be good holding as well as we had 30 knots of wind and some pretty strong currents at times.  We are pretty confident in our anchor (a 45lb genuine CQR) nowadays after we have gone through some pretty serious stuff on the way up the coast and it didn't let us down with no movement at all overnight.

We use a couple of different apps on our phones to perform our anchor watch.  They are both basically geo-fence type tools.  You "set" it when you drop the anchor and give it a safe radius from the anchor for the boat to be in.  If the boat (or really the phone) drifts out of that circle, then it sets off an alarm. 

On the whole, they've worked ok but they do use a lot of battery (running the GPS) so we make sure they are plugged in and on charge overnight.  I'm having some real problems with my phone though (still waiting for Kogan to deliver my new one..).  It tends to reboot at random times so I can't really trust it at the moment.

On Wednesday we decided to watch the weather for a while (Terry got to sleep in) before moving on as we were still getting 25 to 30 knots in the gusts and I wasn't keen on moving from a (proven) well-set anchor to an unknown anchorage.  On the other hand, we had found a reasonable deal ($220) for 3 nights in a marina right in the CBD as long as we could get there before 2:00pm on Friday and Brisbane was still nearly 60 miles away.

In the end, we figured the strong wind warning didn't really apply to us in the protected waters of the Broadwater and we left just after lunch heading up to the top of Russell Island, another 20 odd miles closer.  The wind picked up just as we left of course but it was behind us and didn't cause any real worries.

Anchoring was a bit of a challenge as it was raining and getting quite dark.  The first time we put the anchor down, we found we'd set it within range of a vacant mooring that was only marked by a tiny yellow buoy which we hadn't seen on the approach so we had to pull it up again and re-set it further away.  We had a bit of an uncomfortable night due to the wash from ferrys and other passing traffic and I wouldn't recommend it other than it's good shelter from southerlies.

On Friday, we left early (basically daybreak) for the last 40 odd miles to Brisbane.

The wind was still quite strong and we had an assist from the current so we made really good time in the end averaging over 7 knot's up to the river entrance but that slowed down to less than 4 knots as we went (a long way) up river against the ebb tide.

We eventually arrived just as the tide changed (by design of course) allowing us to dock without incident on the upstream side of F fingers at the Dockside Marina.

Venture at the Dockside Marina on the Brisbane river with the CBD in the background.

And we are here through to Monday when we'll either anchor in the river for a couple of days or move directly to another marina in Morton Bay.  Thiels and Robin are joining us on the 20th for a few days and we figure we'd take a berth in the Bay while they are here.  I also need a stable platform to re-build the KISS generator as the parts have arrived from the US so we might just get onto the berth a few days early :-)

Location: New Farm QLD, Australia
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