Bundaberg: for mail again

[Kyle]We did an overnight sail from Pancake Creek to Bundaberg. We had light tailwinds with drizzle, which allowed us to use the spinnaker and give it a good rinse along the way. The wind was light enough that we could avoid the rain completely by staying under the bimini. Our first arrival in Australia was into Bundaberg, but this was to be our FIFTH time visiting the Burnett River and Bundaberg Marina. That's too many times visiting the same place for us, but it was a convenient stop to collect some critical mail so here we were again.

We arrived at the mouth of the Burnett River just after the sun came up and anchored to one side of the channel next to the boat 'Notorious', a black 15th Century carvel replica we had first seen at Marble Island. It is an impressive thing with a very distinctive and ominous silhouette. Graeme Wylie spent ten years building it in his back yard using old drawings and wreck diagrams as guides. These were the ships used by mostly the Portuguese, but also Christopher Columbus, to explore the New World. Graeme now lives and cruises aboard it full time with his wife (we didn't catch her name), stopping from time to time to show it as a museum exhibit.

Unfortunately, the first thing that comes to people’s minds when seeing it is, ‘pirate ship’. We saw an interview where Graeme he kept referring to it as a carvel and even the reporter wouldn’t stop gushing on about how great it was to see a real pirate ship. She never referred to it as anything else, completely oblivious to the fact that if it were, she would not be doing a syrupy interview, but would likely be dragged aboard to be a sex slave for the crew. Pirates are not nice people.

The owner/builder (Graeme) was a nice guy. He seemed to realize that, even though he kept correcting her, he would never win the battle with the public about what kind of boat he had. Occasionally, when they are in a big town, they offer tours to locals and schoolchildren, which the reporter immediately rebranded as ‘pirate ship tours’. I guess if that’s what lines people up to help pay for your next bottom-paint job, that’s what you have to put up with.

They upped anchor to head upriver before we did. As they went by slowly, we had a lovely shouted conversation about where we each had been lately. They said to come on over if we ever see them in an anchorage. Definitely not pirates.

The boat Notorious, and Begonia, both anchored in the Burnett River
(Begonia photo credit:Morpheus of London)

We had hoped to meet up with our English boating friends aboard 'Morpheus of London' during our time at the marina. Unfortunately they departed early in the morning the day after we arrived in the river, and before our slip was ready at the marina. We missed them but they took a stunning picture of Begonia as they sailed by (and were kind enough not to wake us).

It was weird being back in Bundaberg. It’s the place in Australia where we have spent the most time, which made returning feel a little like a homecoming. We spent almost all of our time here waiting on delayed mail and just dying to leave, so our conditioning also immediately made us feel kind of trapped, this time was no different. We were finally able to meet up with a host of critical mail (bank cards, parts, replacement camera, etc), and a few opportunistic bits of online shopping too, but one of our parts seemed to be running late.

Our plan was to spend a couple of days at the marina refilling our water tanks and doing laundry before heading upriver to provision downtown. Then Maryanne met a local in the laundry room who agreed to loan us her car for the day while she was at work at the fish and chip shop in the marina complex. Now we were going to be busy.

With a car, which was a big station wagon to boot, we could now drive right up to all of the grocery stores, buy a bunch of heavy stuff and then drive it practically back to the boat. That beat making multiple treks across downtown wearing heavy packs on a hot day and then having to shuttle it all back and forth via bus and dinghy.

This meant that our provisioning downtown would only be for a few last-minute perishables. The rest of the time, we could spend ambling through parks and resting in pubs. "Bundy" was on lockdown last time, so we never had the chance to sit on a balcony overlooking the river and do things like enjoy a cup of tea and a slice of cake.

We had a leisurely time in downtown Bundaberg, and river trails.
Kyle found a new bird friend at the small (free) zoo

In order to get over the shallow bits of the river on the way downstream, we had to leave twelve hours earlier than would have been ideal. That was okay, because we needed to collect our last piece of mail before the marina closed. We got it. We’re free again. Then it was back to the Burnett River anchorage for a nap before the overnight sail to Maryborough.