Wind NE 5 – 10 knts sunny , slightly overcast –  South Stradbroke Island

Woke up to a lovely calm anchorage very quiet, Agile wallabies were feeding on the shoreline picking up the mangrove pod. They were very pretty looking with a dark stripe between their large ears and a pale cheek stripe on each side of their face. Morgan was fascinated as we were anchored quite close to the shore.

After toad in the hole for breakfast we lowered the dinghy and motored up to Marina Mirage at Southport to get a newspaper and a coffee. The new 5hp motor on the dinghy made the going slow and it took us about 40 mins to get there. We stopped at Bums Bay pontoon near Seaworld to let Morgan have a run, circled Back Friday ( Brian and Debbie’s boat- they left Yamba a day before us) . They weren’t home so we continued on.

We ended up having lunch at a cafe at Marina Mirage then headed back to Ovive. Lunch was very ordinary and overpriced.

Oh dear! As we approached O’vive we could see she was sitting on her hulls out of the water but on a crazy angle. The tide had gone out and the wind which had got a lot stronger had pushed her around onto the shore, not good. She looked to be sitting on her keels and rudder but at that stage the props wern’t touching which was good.

High tide was at 10:10 pm and it was only 2:00 pm so we had a long stressful wait for the tide to get to its lowest at 3:30 then start rising again. We sat on the deserted beach for a while and waited.

Morgan was very hot as she wasn’t allowed out of the dinghy because no dogs are allowed on Stradie so we finally put her on the tilted Ovive.

The tide rose slowly but the rudders had sunk into the sand so we needed some buoyancy to pull them out. To add to our problems stink boats kept roaring up the channel making a huge wash which would rock O’vive putting more strain on the rudders and keels.

Eventually we climbed aboard rather than bake in the sun and read for a few hours until the tide crept up. Eventually we leveled up and about 7:30 we were floating. Relief. We pulled the anchor and moved further into the channel to re anchor. It was strange that we ran aground as we had already been through a low tide the night before and didn’t touch bottom.

Dinner was a simple affair of very tasty venison and potato soup cooked fairly quickly in the pressure cooker  as we wern’t overly hungry, then off to bed.

The anchor alarm went off in the night but we hadn’t dragged so we re set it for 170 ft as we had 24 m of chain and bridle out. Will have to work out how to change the anchor alarm from feet to metres.