So this is how I'm going to die?

The alarm went off at 2.00am, we were to head from Mooloolaba to Tin Can Bay... About 50 nautical miles (or 10 hours) with no anchorages in between.  We needed a relatively high tide to get out of Mooloolaba and a high tide to get over the Wide Bay Bar to get into Tin Can Bay.  High tide at Mooloolaba was 12.30am. We were hoping to be leaving our marina birth at about 2.30am and getting out of Mooloolaba Harbour by 3.00am.  We checked the weather, the winds, swells and it had all changed from last nights predictions... should we stay or should we go?  We decided to bite the bullet and go, finally leaving the marina at 4.00am.  We should've stayed!

There's a wave that hits you side on entering and leaving Mooloolaba Harbour and when it hit us everything that wasn't tide down (and quite a bit of stuff that was) flew around the cabin. Even a knob flew off the stove.  There were a few breakages and a couple of minor injuries.  The sea was rough so we couldn't get cleaned up, this made it almost impossible to move around the cabin.  We soldiered on.  We couldn't turn back because we had to get past that side hitting wave to get back in to the harbour.

Michael was motoring whilst Grace, Jed, the dog and I were tossing our cookies into various buckets, it was still pitch black (sunrise was at 6.30am) and Michael's sphincter must have been tightly puckered because I know mine was.  I was terrified but trying to keep it together so the kids wouldn't freak out but all I wanted to do was scream and pull out my hair! After about an hour Michael called out that he needed a hand to get the foresail out as our motor had overheated and he had to turn it off.  So now we're in 3 meter swells with no motor.  With just a touch of the front sail out we were moving along at 7 knots.

We couldn't continue for 10 hours in this fashion.  Reassessing the map showed a sheltered bay at Noosa Heads so we decided to head for that and relative calm.  We arrived a Noosa Heads about 5 hours after heading off from Mooloolaba.

Surveying the damage upon anchoring, we found we had lost 2 x 25 litre water bottles, had burst a heat exchanger pipe to the accumulator (this means the water was filling our boat instead of cooling of motor) and a blocked bilge that was not removing all of that water filling our boat.  If we'd kept heading to Tin Can Bay, we'd have surely sank. 

It's pretty rocky in our bay at Noosa Heads and we can't even manage to boil the kettle, but we're glad to be here.