Thursday, August 22, 2019

Thursday 22nd August 2019 – King George River


We decided last night to leave the King George River today and head off east to the Berkeley River, so we hung the dinghy on davits and headed down to the river mouth just before high tide around 09:00 to cross the sand bar.

Just at the critical moment my chart plotter rebooted and defaulted back to factory defaults. I quickly set it up again and shortly after it did it again. I didn’t want to perform a factory reset just in case it erased all the waypoints I was following, so I used Navionics on my phone and followed my previous track on OpenCPN on my laptop until we were through.

Once through the sand bar (and breathing again) I performed a factory reset on my chart plotter and it started to function normally. I’m pretty sure the cause is the memory filling up with track points when I leave the track on while on anchor.

It was blowing twenty knots outside of the river, so we decided to spend the night anchored in Koolama Bay and reassess the weather tomorrow morning to decide if we will leave or not.

Bruce had already found a nice sheltered place just off a nice beach in the north east side of the bay and I headed over to anchor nearby.

As I approached, the depth was twenty meters so I kept moving closer into the beach until I got to around five meters to anchor in. I was getting really close and I thought it was a bit strange to still be in twenty meters of water until I realised my chart plotter had defaulted to feet instead of meters, so I did a crash u-turn and headed back out where I dropped the pick in about six meters.

I spent the day entering waypoints into my chart plotter for the Berkeley River sandbar crossing, down loading weather fax’s and weather forecasts.


I suggested to Bruce we have a camp fire and a few beers on the beach tonight and so around 17:00 Bruce picked us up in his dinghy and took us into the beach where we made a nice fire out of drift wood and watched the sun go down.



The camp fire was great and around 19:00 we all headed back to Sirocco where Putu made some nice pasta for everyone and we chatted and looked a photo’s for a couple of hours before going to bed.


Track Sirocco’s progress





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