I programmed in your co-ords, but they were a bit different from the position of the North East Channel as shown on my c -map (about half a mile north). Your initial points would according to my C-map plotter have taken me over a 1m sandbank just north of the NE channel, I uhmed and aahd.... but decided to go with my c-map instead as it had quite a lot of detail which usually means that its accurate. In the end I still went over a shallow 2 meter sand bank not shown on my plotter. The water was flowing out of the bay very fast, we were only doing 3 knots with both engines, this strong current is what dumps the sand just outside the channel and I think the sandbar shifts around a lot. Moreton Bay is big, it took us the whole day to get to Rivergate, we arrived after dark, buggered.
Last night we had a good kip, but we are not used to the cold, I ended up sleeping in a t-shirt plus a full track suit.
Today we spend the whole day driving from Brisbane River down to Hope Island, through a myriad of shallow channels, between Stradbrooke Island and the mainland. Its like the Florida swamps, just shallow channels, brown water and small shrubby islands in all directions. Once again nerve wracking stuff, but my c-map is accurate, we just drove with our eyes glued to the plotter, following a phantom channel, some dodgy channel markers, sometimes we only had 2 feet of water under the keel.
We could not make it to Hope Island Marina, when we came past Cabbage Tree Point (I wont blame you if you've never heard of this place) it was 5pm, and we decided to call it a day and dropped the anchor for the night. This is the land of mullet hairstyles, swamp breath, yellow teeth, V8 Holden yutes and the tinnie on the trailer.
Our anchor co-ords are 27deg45.3S, 153deg31.3E, there are a bunch of other mostly derelict boats at anchor/moorings just north of us, we are near the entrance to a big marina complex called Horizon Shores.
Hope Island Marina is at roughly 27deg52S, 153deg20.9E http://www.blogger.com/www.hopeharbour.com.au
As soon as the sun comes up tomorrow we will drive the remaining 12 miles or so to our slip at Hope Island. We are going to stay at Rosa town house not far from Hope Island, we are booked in for tomorrow night already. So we will move off shimmi tomorrow. Snif, snif. Or Hooray!? Not sure, lots of mixed emotions at the moment as you can well imagine.