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.