Wild in every sense of the word........

Yes, today was a wild day. We were up at 0545hrs, and had weighed anchor by 0600hrs. For the first few hours we were running up the west coast of Fraser Island, which is certainly a wild and beautiful place.

Peaceful anchorage in a wild place - Image by Navman

After we cleared Moon Point we experienced a different kind of wild.......wild wind and seas. Initially we had wind of around 25-30 knots and fairly slight seas, but as the day wore on, the wind rose to 30-35 knots and the sea to around 3m.

Fortunately it was a following wind, so the problem was surfing the waves rather than banging into them.

Endless Summer handled it well on most occasions, though there were a couple of times when she took off down a rogue wave at more speed than we would have liked.

Wild seas ahead.....

These occasions were fairly rare however and Captain Bligh slowed our pace from our initial 20 knots to a more sedate 11 knots as the wind rose.

 After lunch we switched off the autopilot and hand steered so that we would not have to reduce speed further.

The swell continued to rise until we were looking across the tops of the swells from the flybridge.


As we came on our final approach to the Gladstone shipping channel the wind and waves were at their worst, and to compound the problem, we were now beam-on (sideways) to the swell.

And behind

Just before sunset we called Gladstone Harbour Control to let them know that we were in the harbour precinct. They replied that they were already watching us on AIS. The AIS was certainly very handy for us once we were inside the harbour, as we could "see" the speed and direction of the big ships which were coming head-on to us in Gladstone Harbour.

So we are now at a berth at the Gladstone Marina. Gladstone is itself a bit of a wild town,  and every second person you see is wearing hi-vis clothing. The marina harbour is crowded with ferries taking people backward and forward to the massive heavy industry within the city precincts and across at Curtis Island.

The plan is to do some phone research on our battery charger problem first thing in the morning, then head out through "The Narrows" and get to Yeppoon (Roslyn Bay) by tomorrow evening.

Approaching Gladstone harbour - Image by Navman

One more thing.....At about lunchtime today we passed the half way mark on our odyssey north. If the rest of the trip goes as well as the first half we shall be very happy.

Two other milestones are worthy of note....The first is that today we had our 700th hit on the blog. Many thanks to you readers for taking the time to share our adventure.

The second milestone is the celebration of 31 years of marriage to my First Mate, SasSea. Thank you for the time we have spent together my love.  You are my inspiration and I am looking forward to being together again when this adventure is over.

That's all for now,

Navman