Moving North to Peel Island and North Stradbrook Island

[Kyle]From Paradise Point, we were up early, excited about the prospect of moving on. There wasn't much in the way of wind, though, so we had a day motoring on one engine to Peel Island, the closest uninhabited island to Brisbane. We've stopped here before, mostly because the big anchorage is uniformly shallow and has good holding. It's easy to get in and out without getting competitive over limited space.

A calm day to move North in Moreton Bay

The trip was pleasant enough. With everything below the waterline freshly painted, we were seeing speeds 5-10% or so above normal for the configuration. The one glitch was with our autopilot. Since a replacement was not going to be available for months from the factory due to supply chain issues, we had installed our backup. It has been buried deep in a locker since we bought the boat. The previous owner said something to me at the time like, “It kind-a works, but I haven't had the time to take it apart and figure out what's wrong with it.”

I installed it in the yard and all of the components tested okay, reacting properly to heading command and rudder angle changes. Now that we were underway, it kept failing every two minutes or so with a 'motor stall' message. It takes longer than two minutes to make a cup of tea or to reef the sails, so that effectively meant someone had to remain at the helm to cancel the messages and reengage the autopilot. That was no big deal when motoring up a waterway, but would be quite a hardship doing long sails with only one of us on watch. Hopefully, it's something that is fixable before we can get a replacement.

As we approached Peel Island, we got the news that the state Health Minister had declared a lockdown for Brisbane and the surrounding area due to a local COVID outbreak. We were in the area and so was Peel Island. The directive said to go home and remain within ten kilometers of your home until the lockdown ends. Unlike the last time, they were very clear that recreational boating is not considered outdoor exercise and is not a permissible reason to leave home. It looks like our one or two night stop may last a little longer.

At the anchorage, we were a bit surprised to find it filled with over seventy boats. Almost all were clearly local and several were obviously not residences, like the jet skis. Perhaps the word of the lockdown hadn't spread around yet. After all, most people don't take their boats to the beach for a better place watch the news.

No jet skis returned the next morning, but there was also not a mass exodus of boats heading back home either. Maryanne and I went ashore for some exercise and met a few people along the way. All of them had heard about the lockdown. Most had thin rationalizations for staying, like, “I live on the boat if the police are asking” or, “I live on the boat this weekend”. We're not sure how well that will hold up if your driver's license says you have an address in Brisbane.

By the time Monday came around, the lockdown was extended until the next Sunday. Then the anchorage started to thin out. The crowd decreased to about a dozen boats, including us. When the wind started blowing into the anchorage on Thursday, three quarters of them left.

During lockdown we went ashore a couple of times to enjoy the trails of Peel Island (exercise)

We were curious to see if any boats would start mysteriously showing up on the weekend again, but the weather was supposed to be pretty bad then so even we high-tailed it to nearby Myora Bay, where the mangroves ashore to windward would offer better protection.

Before the wind actually arrived, we went ashore to a spring that was once a social center for the indigenous population. There, we found a well done boardwalk with information boards that was far too short to be counted as exercise, We tried to supplement our distance with a walk along the nearby road, but found that it had lots of fast moving traffic and barely any shoulder, so we called it a day and headed home to ride out the blow.

We hung out at the quiet Myora Bay, and took the Kayak into the mangroves to explore the aboriginal stories at Capembah creek

During our day aboard, I dismantled our autopilot drive to see if I could find anything that was obviously fixable. The wiring was fine. The gears were fine. I removed the motor and took it apart. It all looked pretty good, but the rotors were not uniformly shiny. I gave the whole thing a gentle polish with fine-grit sandpaper until everything was the color of a shiny new penny and reassembled it. We turned it on and kept in engaged for over an hour, watching it fruitlessly trying to counteract our swing around the anchor. It ran from one stop to the other several times and never failed. Hopefully, that fix was enough to do the trick.