Adventures on Venture: Mackay to Keppels or close encouter to moonstruck

Back in Mackay and we met up with Pierce and Janine before we left heading south. We'd become friends during the trip north in different anchorages and a more lovely couple you couldn't hope to meet!

But for some reason, they think they need two hulls for cruising instead of one. Go figure..

The footpath along the docks at Mackay Marina. A lovely spot.

We left Mackay end of October heading south to Bundaberg. Before we left, we decided not to fill the fuel tank at the fuel dock but to use the last of the diesel in the jerries we carry on deck instead. That turned out to be a bad decision and more on that later..

We chose Bundy this time to lay over for the cyclone season because we needed to get some work done on the boat while we went back to Adelaide for Christmas. We've met people along the way who recommend Bundaberg because the hard stand rates are quite reasonable and the trades are all there apart from a rigger.

First stop was the southern anchorage at Curlew. Protection from the north but the anchorage is a bit rolly so we only stayed one night before moving on to the Duke Islands.

We anchored next to Hunter island which is a lovely spot to hang around for a while. We spent three days in there in the end and took a couple of trips onto the beach. Lots of deer on the island and a lovely long sandy beach.

Hunter island is a lovely quiet anchorage but you wouldn't want to be there in a strong westerly.

This chap pulled in next to us and proceeded to drop his anchor almost on top of ours. As he pulled in, I thought he was a bit close and pointed out where our anchor was (about 30 meters north of us) but he ignored me.

I've no idea why he anchored there as there was heaps of room just a bit further north that is too shallow for us but ideal for a cat. We've found it a bit annoying that a lot of cats take the deeper anchorages making it difficult to find a spot sometimes in a full keeler.

Anchored just a bit close

About 4 hours later, the tide changed. Multi hulls tend to lie to the wind a lot more than our full keel mono which is affected by the current a lot more so we swung with the current (now heading north) and he basically sat still. He eventually noticed things were not right and moved further away. When he pulled up his anchor, he found it was actually under our boat and I had to fend him off our stern. Maybe he'll learn a lesson from it but there were no apologies, just angry looks.

We left Hunter island and headed further south down to Island head Creek. We motored all the way as there was very little wind and what was there was directly behind us. We dropped anchor in the northern anchorage at Island Head Creek to shelter from the northerlies.

When I checked our fuel level, I found we were low on diesel (about 40 litres in the tank). We carry 80 liters in jerry cans on the deck but I'd emptied the last two into the tanks (40 litres) only a few days ago so we had no reserve which was a real worry. No sign of diesel in the bilge and none coming out the exhaust. 40 litres is good for about 20 hours or more of motoring so it was a real mystery.

At the time, I was worried that I'd emptied the jerries into the aft water tank instead! The filler for the diesel is right next to the filler for the aft tank and it's always worried me that this could happen. I took the top off the aft tank to check and luckily, it was diesel free! But we still had a decent distance to go before we could get some fuel so I bought 20 litres off a friendly cruiser in the anchorage to ensure we had a reserve just in case.

The lesson I learned from this was that you need to dip the tank instead of trusting the fuel guage. The bottom of the tank is in the bilge so it's quite narrow meaning there's actually a lot less in there than you think when the levels get low and we'd never run the tank that low before. I sort of knew this.. Go figure.

We stayed there one night and moved down to Rosslyn Bay marina the following day to fill the tanks!

We did a bit of a walk on Great Keppel Island from Long Beach back to Monkey Beach. The paths are well defined and it's quite an easy walk.

I've no idea what this boat was doing there on Long Beach but it was locked up with nobody around.