The first trip in Saltheart. We have purchased Saltheart from a broker at Southport, on the Gold Coast, Australia with the idea to have a holiday for a few months or so. The plan is to get the boat to Ballina in NSW, which in closer to our home so that we can work on her and generally get ready for the trip. To start with we were going to take her up the Broadwater, which is a narrow body of water between the Gold Coast and Stradbroke Island, so that we could give the motor a bit of a run to see if there was going to be any problems. After trying to leave the mooring at full throttle and going nowhere we figured that the boat was either severely under powered or there was a problem. A bit of investigation revealed that the coupling that connects the gearbox to the prop shaft had sheared the bolts. With that fixed we were off the next day. Wendy's dad, Grumps, was visiting from the UK so there was a crew of 7 and 1 dog. Our destination was Tipplers Resort and after a few hours we had dropped the anchor a bit south of the resort. Its a low key family resort where wallabies hop around and there is a pool and pub that is open to the public.
Wendy, Michael & Daniel in the resort pool
For $5 you can go on a tractor ride to the surf side of the island and surf the huge sand dunes. Here is Kathleen about to come a Gusta and down .
There is speed boat rides that the kids enjoyed, but more so was the rope swing that they found hanging over the water.
After 3 nights of relaxation it was time to head south. The wind had shifted around to the north so we weighed anchor early to take advantage of the out going tide and headed for the seaway. On the way to the seaway we saw a helicopter chasing a power boat. We figured it must have been for a commercial, it certainly got everyone out of bed.Ian down
Shortly after going into the open ocean the wind picked up and we were able to kill the motor and raise the sails. The down side of this was that it got a little rolly as the sea was coming from behind. Daniel was the first to feed the fish with sea sickness, closely followed by me. Every one except for Grumps felt queasy, even Jess our dog. All you can do is lay down to make you feel better.
Kathleen a bit Queasy
Other than that it was a pretty uneventful passage except for crossing the bar at Ballina which we did at about 10pm that night. We were going pretty slow into the wind and I was a bit panicky as I usually am when crossing a bar, when just as we were on top of the shallowest part of the bar the motor started ticking like a bomb about to explode. There was not a lot we could do but pray that she got us inside, which she did. After tying along side the pontoon in town I was off to get some pizza in our now empty stomach's.
