Broken Bay and Home & Away Beach!

Tuesday 24^th February

Broken bay is just 16 miles north of Sydney harbour and as our cruising guide says ‘this region constitutes one of the world’s great cruising grounds’. We had a beautiful sail up the coast and then another 6 miles into the bay heading up the Hawkesbury River. There are loads of cruiser friendly 24 hr courtesy moorings throughout the bay and along with ‘Helen Kate’ we picked one up off the town of Brooklyn, happy not to have to drop the anchor. Our Dutch friends on ‘Antares’ had rented a house further north for a couple of weeks while their family visited & had invited us all up for a BBQ. The next day we jumped on the train and headed to Gosford where Jasper met us in a huge rented car and took us to their house in Coca Cabana beach.

After living on the boat for so long it’s a really strange feeling to walk into a house with a full size kitchen and Bathroom – everything seems huge. The back porch is bigger than our whole boat and the BBQ grill almost twice the size of our Galley!! We had a great time relaxing in a new environment and it was easy to see that Astrid was going to find it very hard making the transition of moving back on the boat after all this luxury. Their son Marijn, who’s just over a year & a half and lived on the boat his whole life, was over the moon to have so much space to run around in. However, we heard later that he was the happiest of the three to return home to the boat……with cruiser kids it’s in their blood!

A couple of days later we headed to one of the southern inlets called America Bay and picked up one of the hundreds of moorings right next to a huge waterfall that pours into the bay. It’s named one of the best anchorages on the east coast of Australia and is extremely beautiful. However it’s not a well kept secret and you’re certainly not going to get any privacy here! Every square inch is taken up with private mooring balls and on the weekend or holidays boats are packed in like sardines with music blaring. We couldn’t really go ashore here as the sides of the bay are sheer rock faces and vegetation and so after a couple of days of being boat bound we decided to head around to Pitt water and re provision.

Pittwater is an inlet that stretches south of the main harbour with Ku-Ring-Gai Chase national park on one side and Sydney’s northern beach suburbs on the other. As we started to motor down the channel we had a call on the radio from Ingvil and Gunnar to say that their engine had broken down and could we give them a tow in. We took them to the closest mooring ball and then decided to sail the five miles to the end of the inlet as we’d be closest to the facilities. We’d never seen so many sail and power boats in one place and every bay was packed full. Luckily we found two free police mooring balls and squatted on them for the week – If the police came we’d tell them it was an emergency!!

It turned out that Helen Kate had shattered a few of the valve springs and bent one of the rocker rods in their engine. After checking out the price of mechanics here in one of the richest parts of Sydney, Gunnar decided that he’d just have to fix it himself! Luckily he was able to order the parts and had them in his hand a day later; he went to work straight away and did a great job. Three days after he’d ordered the parts the engine was back together and chugging along happily. It goes to show that cruisers can do anything when they put their minds to it!

We were all happy to leave the rolly moorings in Pittwater and headed back up to the entrance of the bay to anchor off Palm Beach – the home of the TV series ‘Home & Away’. I grew up with this show in England as it’s been screened five days a week ever since I can remember. We Walked over to the ocean side of the spit and stood outside the surf club looking at the familiar scene of the long golden beach. It’s probably the most beautiful beach in Sydney and surprisingly very few people on it. Hiking up to the light house high on the point we got fantastic views of the whole bay. Looking out to sea it was obvious that this was perfect weather for making our next hop north up to Port Stevens. Southerly winds don’t come along too often and so the very next day that’s exactly what we did!