The Little Engine that Could... Couldn't

I haven’t blogged since my little breakdown when we broke down because I was just a little too depressed.

We sat at Fraser Island for 4 days in dangerous weather conditions.  It was rough and there were quite a few bouts of vomiting and just generally feeling sorry for ourselves.  One day the wind was so strong it unfurled our front sail and tore it.  Thankfully it was only the sun-tough on the edge but we were in strong winds trying to untangle the ropes from around the sail and refurl.  Michael was nearly swept into the water by the flapping sail… things were really pretty shitty.  We couldn’t get to land because the tide was too strong for our little dinghy so we just had to sit on the boat and wait it out.

Finally on the Friday the weather forecast predicted favourable weather conditions for the following day.  I called the Boat Club Marina at Urangan and booked a berth for a week.   I called the VMR and told them we’d be sailing over but would need to be towed in.  All was organised and on Saturday morning we awoke and to our surprise the prediction had been correct (the prediction is never correct).  We tried to lift the anchor but it was stuck fast.  Normally you would drive over the top to release it from the sand but we had no motor.  It took nearly an hour of motorised winching and Michael’s muscle and determination to remove the anchor from its muddy resting place.  We raised the sails and started heading north.

 
You can see Urangan Harbour, it’s about 8.5nm from Fraser Island but you cannot sail straight there …it’s not called Great Sandy Straits for nothing.  Sandbars everywhere and drawing about 2 metres leaves no choice but to go around.  We had to head north for about 15 nm and then back south on the other side of the sandbar for another 6nm but as we had to tack, that ended up being about 12 nm.  The trip took us 8.5 hours.  The VMR then towed us in to our berth at Urangan and it was time to determine exactly how much trouble we were in.

Rescued again

A friend in Sydney has a mate up here who is a diesel mechanic, we contacted him and as he was on holidays he came straight over to look at the motor.  He advised the only thing the motor was now good for was as a reef.  We’d need a new motor. 

 

When we towed our friends up the Fitzroy River, we nicknamed our motor "The Little Engine that Could", now it appears that she can't anymore.

 

Online research and shopping, phone calls and wheeling and dealing, begging and borrowing saw us purchase a 2^nd hand motor that was much bigger and also more powerful than our previous motor.  It wasn’t going to fit so we’d have to raise the floor (despite my father’s suggestions to buy a bigger boat or go through the bottom).

Our new too big motor

The next problem was removing the old motor and getting the new motor into the boat.  We pulled the old motor apart and it was pretty light by the time all the bits were taken off.  The new motor is about 300kgs.   The motor sits under the floor inside… so we couldn’t use any sort of crane to lower the motor onto the boat and besides, we were at a marina and therefore couldn’t get a truck with a Hiab down to the boat anyway.  The mechanic has a truck with Hiab and got the motor to the marina.  A pallet jack got the motor to our boat and a block and tackle set up on the boom both removed the old motor and got the new motor into the helm.  We then had to set up an A-frame type structure with the block and tackle and lift the motor and manoeuvre it into place.  It took 3 of us a couple of hours but we all came out uninjured and feeling pretty proud of ourselves.

Now, I want to give the mechanic a huge wrap.  He invited us to stay (we thought it was just for the night) but he insisted that it was too dangerous on the boat with the mechanical work and that we stay at his place.  He and his wife opened their home to us and made us very welcome.  4 people and 1 dog moving into your place is pretty tough to handle.  After a couple of days we all really wanted to come home but didn’t want to seem ungrateful so just tried to be as unobtrusive as possible.  Each day Michael was driven to the boat to resume work on the motor.  Again, I cannot say how grateful I am to both of them but last night it all went pear-shaped.

Michael was still at the boat and the mechanic’s wife was at work.  The mechanic had spent the day in his shed working on his fishing boat and at about 6.30pm came into the house pissed and told me I’d fucked up his holiday and it was time to leave… now!

I grabbed the kids, the dog, all of our belongings and headed out onto the street.  I didn’t have any cash on me and Michael had the keycard and he doesn’t have a mobile phone.  I didn’t know where I was but had google maps on my phone.  I asked the maps for walking directions from where I was to the boat… 8.8kms.  Three of us (one with weak little spaghetti arms) were loaded up with about 45kgs worth of stuff started following the route on the map… it took us bush.  It was dark and I was trying to see by the light of my phone.  The kids were scared and I assured them there was nothing to be scared of except sore feet and that the whole experience was character building.  About 30mins into our walk home, Jed told me “I don’t like building my characteristics”… at least my son was giving me something to smile about.  We were walking along the path in the bush, stopping every couple of hundred metres because the load we were carrying was heavy.  I could hear animals scurrying about and I wished I believed my own story that there was nothing to be scared of…. then it happened… I fell in a fucking hole and twisted my ankle.  I sat in the hole and I cried… then the kids cried… then the dog licked us.  I picked myself up, dusted myself off, reassured the kids, gave the dog and hug and continued along the path until there was a path leading off to the side that would take us back to a road.  We would take the long route along the road rather than continue along the bush path.  It took us just over an hour to walk 1.5kms.  At this rate we might be home by morning.  On one of our many rest stops a car pulled up alongside us… it was the mechanic’s wife.  She’d got home from work, found out that he’d kicked us out and came looking for us.  She drove us the rest of the way back to the boat.

I really don’t want anyone to think badly of these people and I nearly wasn’t going to blog it… but this blog is essentially for me, a record of all of the good and bad we encounter on our adventure and I feel it would be remiss of me to leave this “character building” experience out of my story.  They have been generous to a fault and as I said, 4 people + 1 dog moving into your home is a lot to cope with.   We are grateful to both of them for everything they did for us.

We’ve got the motor in and wired up… it’s still not working.  More research and forum reading needs to be done and I’m sure it will be sorted out in no time.

Bundaberg to Fraser Island

It started well.  A beautiful sunrise but a lot less wind than predicted so even though our sails were hoisted, we needed to motor also.

 

Hervey Bay is really the only stretch of water we have sailed where you cannot see land anywhere.  On our trip north, we lost gears at the Fairway Marker and it took us 19 hours to sail (with no wind) to Bundaberg.  We hoped today would be better.  It wasn’t!

 

 

I don’t know what it is about the Fairway Marker, but when we got there this time, our motor coughed and stopped.  At least this time we’d done the bigger part of the trip.  Michael opened up the motor hatch to investigate.  I tried starting the motor and just got this awful knocking sound.  Bad fuel? Cracked injector?  Broken piston?  Who knows… but at least we had some wind and the sails were moving us along nicely.  We’ll worry about the motor when we anchor.

 

A couple of hours later, still sailing along beautifully and worrying about how we’re going to fix the motor at Fraser Island, there was a tinny, echo-y sound coming from under the helm.  I ran (yes, ran) inside and opened the hatch.  Looking for anything unusual (I’m actually getting good at that now… once it would have had to have flames shooting out of it for me to notice) I noticed our shiny new gearbox’s rear coupling was sheared completely off.  The noise was the propeller hitting the rudder under the boat.  Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck!  Our 3 week old gearbox was broken… so was my heart.

 

Broken gearbox coupling

 

We didn’t have far to go and I was needed to navigate Michael through the sandbars so the gearbox would have to wait.

 

We made it to Kingfisher Bay Resort at Fraser Island and anchored.  Don’t take this lightly.  Anchoring whilst under sail is not an easy task.  Normally you would lower your sails, put your motor on, lower the anchor via the winch and reverse to pull the anchor tight in the sand.  When you anchor under sail, you have to turn into the wind so the sail holds no wind, drop the anchor straight down without the aid of the winch and hope your momentum stops before the bow hits the anchor chain.  We managed it after a couple of u-turns.

 

I’ve got to say, at this point I burst into tears.  I’ve tried to be positive.  I’ve tried to face every adversity that’s been thrown at us with good humour, but this just takes the cake.  I’m out of money, patience and the intestinal fortitude to keep going.

 

 I don’t need “I told you so’s” and they will be plentiful forthcoming, I don’t regret embarking on this adventure.  Our family has enjoyed excitement, faced terror, learned lessons, spent quality time together and also wanted to kill each other.  We’ve had experiences money just can’t buy.

 

This will not be the end of our adventure… but right now… I wish it was.

Rockhampton to Bundaberg

We managed to navigate safely out of the Fitzroy River and anchored the night at the start of The Narrows.  The Narrows are a sandy stretch of water between the mainland and Curtis Island just north of Gladstone.  At low tide it is impassable… I think you’d even have problems in a hovercraft, but at high tide is the quick way to Gladstone. 

 

When travelling north we went around the outside of Curtis Island, adding approximately 20 nm to the trip, as we didn’t think we could possibly make it through The Narrows.  Keith and Pauline assured us we could make it though so we took the short cut down to Gladstone.  It was easily navigated at high tide and was a quick and pleasant trip… until we reached Gladstone.  As far as I’m concerned Gladstone is the scariest place in the world.  All those huge container and cargo ships, I feel sort of like I’m riding a tricycle amongst B-Doubles on a Sydney Highway.  It really is quite terrifying.

 

As we were approaching Gladstone Harbour we came to a “fork in the road”.  Looking at the charts, both sides are passable but the right is a little deeper and a lot wider so we decided to take that channel.  I radioed in to Gladstone Harbour Control and let them know of my intentions.  They did not mention dogs, tutus or jellybeans and just told me to keep an ear on the radio for cargo ship movement.

 

 About 1 nm in, we were being pushed right up against the sandbar we were trying to avoid as a great deal of the channel we were travelling in was cordoned off for the laying of gas pipes.  A boat within the cordoned off area came over to us and yelled to us that this channel was closed, we would have to turn around and go down the left channel. Shit, fuck and damn!  Why didn’t the Harbour Control tell me this when I told them where I was going?  I guess I’m not their concern, the container ships are.

 

 

Our track is the yellow line

 

We turned and retraced our path back and just as we hit the point where we needed to turn around, Michael said “we’re heating up… look at the motor”.  I opened the hatch to the motor and was hit with the forceful spray of water.  Our raw water intake pipe had snapped clean off.  Michael stopped the motor and running repairs were required.  The pipe snapped right near the end where it joins to the pump.  As the pipe is copper, not rubber, the pipe was now too short to reach the pump.  Thankfully we had connectors on board so Michael cut a piece of pipe off about two inches long and reattached it with connectors. This bought us about 1 inch and lengthened the pipe enough for it to reach the water pump again.  All of this took about an hour and we were back on our way down the correct channel. 

 

Besides the markers all over Gladstone Harbour being confusing and seemingly making no sense, we managed to get through the Harbour without further incident and made it down to Rodd’s Harbour.  It was getting dark and a storm was approaching so we didn’t push our chances to try to make it to Pancake Creek. 

 

We awoke after the first night to find our anchor had slipped and we’d drifted about 300 metres closer to shore.  We had to move the boat. We didn’t have enough water under us and in a low tide we would’ve been beached.  We decided that despite the weather we would try to make it to Pancake Creek.  We started the motor and hauled the anchor.  I was motoring towards the heads when I noticed we were overheating.   We were in deeper water, Michael dropped the anchor, I turned off the motor and we went to investigate.  Thankfully it was only an airlock in the raw water from the previous day’s repair but the storm had increased in intensity so we decided to stay put for the moment.

 

We got stuck at Rodd’s Harbour for 3 nights. 

 

Rodd’s Harbour to Pancake Creek was a quick, uneventful trip where nothing needed to be patched, fixed or replaced.  We stayed at Pancake Creek for one night and then headed further south to Bundaberg.

 

Pancake Creek to Bundaberg is 66nm but again, they were reasonably uneventful miles.  We saw a whale and had a duck hitch a ride but that was about it. 

 

We spent 3 nights in Bundy, caught up with family and friends and had a carefree time.