Hi guys,
Well we just came home from 2 weeks on Moreton where we had a brilliant holiday camping in the wilderness beside the ocean beach without a care in the world.
Basically we left Monday the 25th and after a one hour trip up the highway we arrived at Scarborough harbour and waited for the ferry. Loaded ourselves on the ferry and after a 2 hour trip across Moreton Bay arrived at Bulwer on the north east of Moreton Island. We collected our bread and water and headed off on our cross country trip to Yellow Patch. Vinney the hothead (my 4wd) worked extremly well and behaved himself the whole trip. The 4wd was totally loaded with 3 adults and all other space taken up with heavy gear and food. The boat was totally loaded with camping gear and with all 6 tyres let down to 20 psi, handled the bush track well. We hit the beach at Tailor Bite and had a nice easy beach run right thru to Yellow Patch just south of North Point where we found out camping spot. That was about 1pm and with a stiff SE wind made it difficult to get the tent and tarp erected but buy 5pm we had it all set up. We had our own toilet (porti potti) and our shower was a battery operated one that was about 30 bucks and worked really well with solar shower bags left on the sand during the day. Nice hot showers and comfy toilet made life easy.
Next day was spent tidying and adjusting the camp and a bit of a relaxing sit around. The next day saw us dropping the boat in to the ocean via a beach launch. Interesting concept but worked well. Out we went and dropped our dilleys and popped off to catch a feed of fish over the coffee rock in front of Yellow Patch. Not much in the way of fish and only the one spanner crab from the dilleys, but was good to get MTpockets into the water and give her some curry in the open ocean. We then went round to the eastern side and caught about 30 odd Dart and a few bream. If anything we had some bait for the dilleys.
Over the next few days the wind only got stronger and shifted to the N-NW bringing rougher seas so we decided to try run the boat around to Bulwer on the west and see if it was calmer. Unfortunatly it wasnt so we slogged it back for another fishless day. Over the next 2-3 days we went 4wding around the Island and did some sight seeing. Visited all the nice places and had a swim in the beautiful Blue Lagoon. Then visited The Desert, which is where they all go to sand toboggon. Awesome sight to come out of a thick forrest and drive dead into a total desert.
I ran into Reel Hard (Kev) around the Bulwer wrecks on the previous weekend and had a yarn with him, and saw him 2-3 more times while we were getting round. Nice to meet you KevHope the fish bit well mate.
One more attempt at catching a fish and we hit Curtains Reef and drifted it a few times for a nice pair of leather jacket. Weather came up rough again so back to Bulwer and a well earned ice-cream. Thursday just gone saw us back at Curtain with a much better day for fishing and finally we started to hit the snapper with each of us pulling in a snapper each drift. After 6 nice snapper and another huge leather jacket we decided to try for the mactuna which werein a feeding frenzy. I latched onto one with my lure and with 30 lb firewire easily had him to the boat and I thought I was doing well when my dad latched onto another with only 6 lb mono line and I thought this will snap very easily but the old salt managed to bring him to the boat after a fight of only 10 mins or so. We lost him as we tried to release him at the boat so all in all a good effort.
After that it was time to think about getting ready to pack up so the next day and night we started to prepare for our trip home. As usual it stormed like a mongrel friday night and we thought we were going to come home with a load of wet gear, but it stopped mid way through the night allowing a nice stiff breeze to come in and dry it all off for a nice dry pull down and packup job Saturday morning.
All in all it was an excellent holiday with very good camping in the rough and a few fish caught as well.
The only downer was Vinney decided he wanted to boil on one of our trips around the island and basically boiled everytime we tried a long trip after that including on the way to the ferry after we packed up. After letting him cool we eventually made it to the ferry and also the highway trip home.
The other problem was the fridge pulled a bit more out of the battery than I had thought and we had to charge the batteries each day, but in the end it was a succesful trip with no loss to frozen or chilled food.
Like I said a bloody great trip, lots of fun and cant wait to do again one day.
PHOTOS http://groups.msn.com/toyotasurf/mor...ip.msnw?Page=1
cheers
Les
