Mary River Escapade

Monday, November 14, 2016

Mary River Escapade

With time to fill ahead of our Xmas trip home and having reached the relatively safe latitudes (in terms of Cyclones) of Harvey Bay and the Great Sandy Straits, the opportunity of visiting Maryborough was too good to resist. Why not? Merely 20nm upstream and a city of great historic interest. It was given consideration to be the capital city of Queensland at one time. Yes, just THAT important! In colonial times, wool and timber was exported from there as well as the gold from Gympie. The key attribute being that the Mary River is navigable albeit very shallow in places.

Our shadow on the water

We left 1.5 hours before high tide and had a current of 1kn assisting our progress. The shallow area around Horseshoe Bank needed to be approached, according to Alan Lucas' Cruising Guide, with a tide at least equivalent to one's draft. In our case we needed it to be 1.6m+ and on the day 2.5m was the High Tide prediction. Easy-peasy!

Careful scrutiny of the depth readings showed nothing less than 4m beneath our keel for a total of 5.6m at the first obstacle - the 2013 floods must have flushed the bank!

Spring Tides delivered extra depth As we progressed upstream the mangroves gave way to a riverbank more defined by dense eucalyptus of some kind. The terrain was very flat and behind there somewhere, were sugarcane fields plus State Forests.

We found the area where the depths were somewhat more exciting was in the vicinity of Beaver Rocks and luckily our electronic charts were up to the task. If we'd have followed some of the leads located on the riverbank we'd have run aground! Needless to say it was eyes-up all the way. Running aground is not at all uncommon, not that I shared that little nugget of information with The Bloke! Nor did I mention the recent reports of a couple of crocodile sightings close to Maryborough. Why complicate matters?

A bush fire in a State Forest gave the aerial firefighters plenty to attend to. We'd observed the plumes of smoke for a few days from our anchorage at River Heads. Things must have been getting out of hand if they were deploying an Erikson Aircrane helicopter - in fact 2 of them.

A gorgeous stand of trees on a bend in the river

As the river narrowed and embankments became steeper, evidence of habitation increased

A late afternoon wind created by hot conditions suddenly delivered 25-30knot gusts

The sight of the little family owned and operated Mary River Marina (a pontoon and some moorings) plus a bridge announced that we had arrived at our destination. We anchored for our first night in the lower town reach but after a brief investigation the next morning, we rapidly appraised that a 2-3 day stopover would be insufficient to properly investigate this gorgeous, gorgeous regional city.

For $10 per day we could bring in our tender, tie off at the marina wharf and use the marina facilities. For not a lot more, we could actually berth there. An event that I wanted to attend next Saturday up in Urangan was actually only a 40 minute drive away. The availability of a loan car was an instant 'game changer'. Rather than take 3 days to get there by boat, we'd use the '$400 bunkie' on offer and stay a week!