Day 7: Urangan – Burnett Heads (Bundaberg) - Flingtime

Today was approx. a 45NM run or 9 hours at the planning SOG of 5knots.As every new anchorage was unfamiliar, we were keen to arrive well before dark. We were up early at 05:50 and had just departed the mooring when we remembered that we hadn't dropped off the marina key in the box near the gate so it was a quick turnaround and we were finally away at 6am. We enjoyed our stay. Good restaurants and facilities. We logged on to VMR Hervey Bay and took note to log off 10NM out from the Fairway Light.

TWS was SW 10-13 knots so we set the spinnaker and were making a SOG of 6.2knots.
Below us was sea grass mentioned in a sea grass watch site.The sunrise over Fraser Island was beautiful with clear skys and somewhat choppy seas.

07:00 and we were moving along very well with SOG of 7.6 knots and were about 1 NM W of the middle bank North Cardinal light.
We took a fairly direct course across the various banks, the shallowest being 2.5m under the keel at 07:20.09:25 we had trouble with the VHF radio and logged off Hervey Bay VMR by phone.
As the morning progressed, we managed 5-6 knots until the breeze started to fade.More canvas ... more canvas... so at 11:20 we hoisted the main.
12:45 doused the spinnaker as the TWS was down to just 4.5 knots, about the lower limit for the spinnaker, and set the jib.SOG was down to 2 knots so the iron sail was fired up.
14:30 the main sail was flopping around annoyingly so it was dropped. We maintained a conservative SOG of 4.5 knots under motor.
15:00 passed south head of Burnett Heads and logged off VMR Bundaberg after discussing anchorage options. There were still some obstacles in the river after the devestating floods. VMR suggested anchoring between the jetty and the red mark in the boat harbour, a short distance from their base.
The tide was high when we dropped anchor. We felt we were a bit close to the jetty approach but needed to watch our swing radius relative to a couple of nearby boats. The occupant of the nearest boat, a mono about 32' long, appeared to scowl at us. Maybe he did not appreciate cats?15:30 as the tide was on the ebb the above mentioned yachtie very rudely indicated that he thought we had anchored too close. Our crew had a discussion about this little atercation and concluded that we would be safely separated at our mutual nearest points of swing.  The skipper yelled out that we had 20 metres of chain out and asked him what his was. We basically got told to f*** off as he decided to up anchor and move. He pulled in a huge amount of rope by hand and moved over to near the VMR base. We were advised that this area got very shallow at low tide so we guseed that with a bit of luck he bottomed out on the low.

Anyhow it was an unpleasant experience in an otherwise reasonable spot. We had the feeling that some long term stayers felt they had ownership rights.

A glass of good red and a nice BBQ lifted our spirits. The small BBQ gas bottle ran out so it was switched over. We thought it would have lasted longer but the BBQ was getting a lot of use.