Tasmania Revisited – South to Coffs Harbour

Wednesday 16 to Sunday, 20 January 2019

We first cruised to Tasmania in 2015 to join the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania’s Van Dieman’s Land Circumnavigation. We had a great time and loved the rugged beauty of this island state. We were keen to go back for 4 reasons – we had missed some of the highlights such as Wineglass Bay; we had to keep moving on the circumnavigation so we were keen to spend more time in some of our favourite areas; we didn't have time to explore any of the interior of Tassie by car; and finally we had awful weather for much of our trip - rain and cold winds that were very unseasonal we were told. We had spent all our time in thermals and wet weather gear while friends who did the same trip 2 years later were in shorts and T-shirts.

Hot tea a necessity in 2015

So, on Wednesday 16 January, we left our home in Cleveland, waved goodbye to Mum and sailed to Currigee in the Southport Broadwater where we anchored and prepared for a crossing of the Gold Coast Seaway early the next morning.

At 0650 NSW daylight savings time, which we had switched to, we upped anchor and motored out the Seaway into a 10-15 Northerly. 

Gold Coast skyline

We set the spinnaker and sailed as high as possible to get out to deep water and into the East Australian Current (of Finding Nemo fame). 

Our instruments showed a water temperature of about 22 deg at the Seaway and as we headed further offshore we saw that temperature rise to 27 deg. The EAC is a bonus when sailing south – regularly giving an extra 2-3 knots of boatspeed. You can see the current on websites such as Windy.com and it is well worth finding it for the journey south and obviously avoiding when coming home.

At 1300 we were abeam of Cape Byron and 1700 Yamba. We dropped the spinnaker then as the wind had increased to over 20 knots.  We put a double reef in the main and were still seeing double digit speeds on occasions. Our high speeds attracted a small group of dolphins who delighted us for several hours – jumping out of the water, doing back flips and playing “chicken” with each other across the bows.

At 2300, the wind had eased and we headed towards Coffs Harbour, arriving at 0200 on Friday morning and tied up at the marina. We had covered 160 nm but had only 130 nm on the log, the EAC had given us the extra 30 miles. A trip time of 19 hours and an average of 8.4 knots.

We had 3 days in Coffs with very strong northerlies on Friday, and southerlies on Saturday and Sunday. We got a workout on the bikes every day. 

There was a nice cycle path along the creek into town and also one down to the trendy town of Sawtell to the south. We rode out to the Rock Pool but as it was looking a bit green I decided to have a dip in the ocean instead. The water was very refreshing!

On our last night we caught up for a BBQ with Adriana and Rob (Deeper Blue) who we had cruised with to the Louisiades, PNG in 2012. It was a great way to finish our time in Coffs. Northerlies were coming again on Monday so we were leaving to continue our journey south.

View from the lookout - had to push the bikes up that hill