South White Cliffs

We departed Tin Can Bay Marina as planned on Friday at 10:45. On our way out past the Coast Guard in Snapper Creek, we came across a couple of Sailability vessels out for a sail. One was sponsored by Rotary and the other by Lions.

Sailability Tin Can Bay

We sailed and motored up the Straits. We were followed by  a trimaran who sailed the whole way, gybing up the Straits as the wind was mainly directly from behind. Robyn had sail envy when he caught up to us.

Tri with Hi Tech sails

At 16:05 we dropped anchor at South White Cliffs. South White Cliffs is 28 nautical miles from Tin Can Bay and it took us just over 5 hours to get here. It is a beautiful anchorage with good depth of water outside the main northern channel.

South White Cliffs

Chris installed two Schottky bypass diodes on the solar panels to help with shading issues caused by the boom. The starboard solar panel appears to be seriously underperforming (0.5 amp) but now is not draining the energy from the port solar panel. The port panel now  sometimes gets up to 2.6 amps in bright sunlight with the bypass diodes installed.

Solar Panel

 Robyn baked a date loaf from a new recipe. Saturday night was pizza night with a Rogan Josh and broccoli pizza made by Chris from first principles ie the base was made from scratch with flour and yeast etc. It is great to have the time to do simple stuff.

Rogan Josh Pizza

On Sunday, we put the dinghy in the water and scrapped the barnacles off the hulls. Towards dusk, three houseboats arrived. We enjoyed dinner on the back deck.

Exclusive dining on the back deck

 Are you sick of the sunset photos yet?

Sunset at South White Cliffs

Sunset at South White Cliffs

Sunset at South White Cliffs

More sunset at South White Cliffs

Tomorrow, we move on the morning tide to Arch Cliffs. As we move up to the top end of Fraser Island we may possibly lose phone reception and may not have good reception until we get close to Gladstone. We intend to stay in Platypus Bay, off the northern part of Fraser, for about a week and then, if the weather is OK, move out to the reef at Lady Musgrave Island. From there we plan to go to Pancake Creek north of 1770. In about 3 weeks time we intend to be in Gladstone to reprovision.

Happy birthday Bruce.

A quick trip home and back to Tin Can Bay

We were back at home to Woody Point for a few days to go to brother in law Mike’s surprise 60^th birthday party.  We also caught up with our respective mothers for Mothers Day and Chris’ daughters and partners.

Lawrie, Kitty, Chris, Jenni and Mick

On Thursday we left the boat at 08:25 for the 7 minute walk to the Tin Can Bay Sleepy Lagoon Hotel to catch the Greyhound bus.  How wonderfully provincial to make the pub the local transit centre!  Tickets have to be pre-purchased, so the driver knows to come into Tin Can Bay to pick you up.  “Be there 20 minutes early” the Greyhound operator told Chris.   The bus was due at 09:05.  At 09:30, feeling a little concerned that we may have been forgotten, we called Greyhound.  “No problem, the bus is close; it was 1 hour late leaving Hervey Bay.”  

The Sleepy Lagoon Hotel - Tin Can Bay

Where is that bus?

Tin Can Bay Water Tower (opposite Sleepy Lagoon Hotel)

The bus arrived just before 10:00 and we departed the Sleepy Lagoon Hotel, Tin Can Bay at 10:02.  It became clear that we were on the backpacker express when the bus turned left to go to Rainbow Beach and not right to go to Gympie.  “Timely” and “direct” do not feature in this little story.  This is where we went.

Arrive	Place	Departure
	On Board Maripi	08:25
08:33	Sleepy Lagoon Hotel	10:02
10:30	Rainbow Beach	10:35
11:29	Bruce Highway southern Gympie
11:40	Matilda Centre at Kybong	12:14
13:00	Noosa Junction	13:10
13:48	Maroochydore	13:49
13:59	Mooloolaba	14:00
14:38	Deception Bay Road turn off
15:15	Roma Street Bus Station
15:45	Shorncliffe Train (also at Roma Street)	16:22
16:30	690 Bus at Sandgate
16:50	HOME

Almost 8.5 hours.  It just shows that you can get almost anywhere on public transport – so long as the time does not matter.   The hot spots for Backpackers were Rainbow Beach and Noosa and then Byron Bay.  The bus emptied, then refilled, with a fresh load of young adventurers at both Rainbow and Noosa. 

Our Greyhound bus at Matildas at Kybong

 The 60^th birthday party was fabulous.  The three great nieces (Robyn’s sister Julie’s three grandchildren) ran around and danced to the music played by the versatile muso Richard. 

Kiera, Travis, Grace, Mike (the birthday boy), Gareth, Julie, Elisha and Mackenzie

  On Tuesday, our neighbour Gordon drove us back to Tin Can Bay.  The 2.5 hour trip, including a lunch break at Matilda at Kybong was a luxury.  On Wednesday we had a visit from Ursula and her long time friends Lyn and Wendy.

Tin Can Bay is a quiet little village on Tin Can Inlet.  It offers the first marina facilities north of the Wide Bay Bar.  We enjoyed Barnacles café at the northern end of the village.  Here you can feed dolphins at 08:00 any morning for only $5.00.  There looks to be plenty of good accommodation available as well.  Both commercial and recreational fishing seem to be the main past time.   

Dolphin feeding

 Our repairs to the port motor have been completed. 

Port motor all fixed

 We are ready to begin our next journey on Friday. Robyn is delighted to be getting going again.

Robyn says "Let's go"

 Friday looks like a trip to the marina laundromat for washing our last dirty clothes; take out the garbage and have a luxuriously long shower;  refill the port water tank and Maripi  will be out of Tin Can Bay Marina with the ebb tide around 11:00 am.

Technical Post - Communications on Board

The communications centre (also doubles as our saloon table)

In the not so good old days, (25 years ago) communications were quite different from today. Most coast boats carried a HF radio, 27MHz radio and if you could afford it, a VHF radio. 

The VHF radio enabled you to keep in touch with the OTC Seaphone service. This service enabled you to make operator assisted calls through to the phone network. It cost around $2.00 per minute and worked well if you were in range of the Telecom towers.

Outside of these areas, you relied on the HF radio. The reception was subject to changes in atmospheric conditions and reception could be perfect one day and abysmal the next day.

Boat to boat communications was on 27MHz. This is a similar band to CB radios. Range was around 5-20 miles if you were lucky.

VHF radios started to come down in price and a number of talk through repeaters were established by community groups like Coast Guard, to boost range. With repeaters, you could get up to 50 miles range. In Moreton Bay, Redcliffe Coast Guard have a repeater channel (ch 21) at the top of Moreton Island which provides reliable communication from Maroochydore south to Amity. In the Great Sandy Straits, there is a repeater (ch 80) which gives coverage from Maroochydore to the southern tip of Fraser Island, and Ch 82 which gives coverage from Tin Can Bay to Moon Point. For boat to boat and boat to shore communication, VHF radios are now the norm. 

Newer VHF radios have a Select Call feature for “buddy” communication. Our VHF also is connected to the GPS. In the event of an emergency, we have a distress button, which digitally transmits our GPS coordinates and unique MMSI (Maritime Mobile Service Identity) number. This feature is not fully implemented in VMR and Coast Guard but will progressively be introduced over the coming years.

Navman 7200 VHF radio

We also have a 5w handheld VHF radio as a backup if we have any problems with our main radio. 

The big jump in communications has been the mobile phone. Both Telstra and Optus on their 850MHz and 900Mhz networks, now provide mobile coverage along most of the Queensland Coast. Even at Cape Capricorn in the Broadsound area, Chris had mobile reception when he brought Maripi back from Airlie Beach in December 2010.

To improve mobile reception, we have two phone cradles. One is for our Optus phone and the other for our Telstra phone.

Smooth Talker universal phone cradles

Most modern mobile phones no longer have provision for an external aerial. The phone cradles we use have an inductive aerial pickup which then connects to an external aerial. Maripi has two by 6dba aerials mounted on top of the radar dome to boost the range of the mobile signal.

2 x 6dba mobile phone aerials (plus TV aerial and radar below)

The other major jump in communication is the availability, through the mobile phone network, of email and internet connections. Our Android phones have the WiFi Hotspot feature. When made operational on the phone sitting in its cradle, we can connect the laptop and the tablet by WiFi to the internet. This makes communication so easy. The best feature is access immediately to BOM site weather forecasts which are critical in trip planning and keeping safe. Previously, HF and VHF weather broadcasts were available only at certain times and it was easy to miss the forecast.

The ASUS laptop is our main Internet and email connection point. 

Asus Laptop

We use the Acer Iconia  tablet for quick weather forecast updates and BOM radar (as well as an E-book reader, Sudoku and Angry Birds!). The tablet also runs the Navionics navigation program which we use for trip planning and a backup to the main GPS plotter on board.

Acer Iconia A500 tablet

With the phones in their cradles for better reception, we have a small Jabra Freeway Bluetooth speaker which can connect simultaneously to both phones. This works well for phone calls.

Jabra Freeway Bluetooth device

Even with all these high tech options we find actually talking to each other works best!!!

Norman Point and Tin Can Bay Marina

On Monday morning the Manta Ray, Fraser Island barge passed us by at around 6:00am, but this time we saw it coming and it was not as close. On the incoming tide, we moved from Pelican Bay to Norman Point, just off the Tin Can Bay peninsula. 

We put Mini Maripi in the water and came ashore near the Coast Guard. Robyn took a photo of their boat a Noosa Cat like Redcliffe Leagues II but 11 metres long instead of 12 and 2 x 260hp Volvo diesels. She met the deputy Flotilla commander in the Marina and found out that Tin Can Bay Coast Guard are also having lots of expensive problems with the Volvo stern drive legs. 

Robyn called in on Coast Guard on Wednesday afternoon for a chat at the invitation of the Deputy Flotilla commander. They had a call out that afternoon to Wolf Rock near Double Island Point to tow a flybridge cruiser whose motors were not working. 

Tin Can Bay Coast Guard is responsible the Wide Bay Bar area and cross it in substantially less than ideal conditions when a member of the public's boat and its crew are in danger. All crew for these jobs must have the rating of "competent crew" as a minimum. These call outs are all done by volunteers using resources that are substantially paid for by the fundraising activities of Flotilla members. This saves Emergency Services QLD a heap of money. Like Redcliffe, Coast Guard Tin Can Bay has limited resources to save money to replace their existing ageing vessels. Coast Guard Tin Can Bay has an impressive Deputy Flotilla Commander in Colleen Johnstone.

Cooloola Rescue II

Coast Guard Tin Can Bay

We had fish and chips for lunch; a real treat.

Next morning, Robyn was up early to see the sunrise over Carlo and Rainbow Beach. The weather is beautiful.

 Sunrise over Carlo

The obligatory photo of breakfast.

 Breakfast

At 10:00am we up anchored and motored around to Tin Can Bay Marina.

 Norman Point (1) to Tin Can Bay Marina (10)

Both of us get very nervous going into Marina’s as there are lots of very solid objects, very close. Chris, however, safely got us into the allocated berth without any dramas. It is a real relief to turn off the motors when the mooring lines are attached.

 Maripi in Tin Can Bay Marina

We did some washing and Robyn found the local IGA for some fresh broccoli and ice cream (no not eaten at the same time). Tin Can Bay is famous for its Rainbow Lorikeets. At dawn and dust they just fill the sky and make one hell of a racket.

  Rainbow Lorikeets

We have a small exhaust leak at the heat exchanger on the port motor which needs attention. We contacted the Marina mechanic, Clive-the Bilge Rat, who had a look and removed the heat exchanger. He will fabricate some new gaskets and repair two studs that had pulled out of the heat exchanger manifold.

 Port engine with heat exchanger removed

On Wednesday morning before breakfast, Chris walked to the local BP servo to fill up our diesel and unleaded jerry cans. After breakfast we had a walk towards Norman Point. Robyn enjoyed a cup of tea and a read of the paper.

 Robyn enjoying a cup of tea and yesterdays paper

 Norman Point Rotunda

In the marina, moored close by, is a beautiful antique wooden ketch called St Jude. She is just magnificent. 

 St Jude