Monday, July 19, 2010

A day Off In Iluka

I'm spending the day in Iluka, my favourite NSW coastal village. I arrived here last night about 8 o'clock after a long 14 hours from Coffs Harbour. The first 5 hours were really good and I was sailing at between 5 and 6 knots, then the wind swung around to on the nose and increased to 15-20 knots. I started to use the engine, but the seas increased and I was doing a lot of tossing which made it very heavy going, and slowed me up to about 3 knots. I had been trying to make the Clarence River entrance around high tide, but this slipped dramatically and I arrived at about half ebb tide, luckily the bar was pretty good and the outbound current only about 1 knot. It can get up to 5 knots at times.
I dropped anchor as soon as I was inside the harbour, had a couple of glasses of wine and went straight to my bunk.
The previous day from trial bay to Coffs had been excellent with winds on the beam and 10-15 all the way, so that was done in record time and I spent a comfortable night at anchor in the outer harbour.
Tomorrow I'm heading for Byron Bay where I'll anchor for the night in the bay.

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