DAY 3 - An interesting one!
Early start. 95 mile drive from the Heartbreak Hotel Roadhouse to the King Ash Bay Fishing Club. Move into our cabin for the week. Unpack the car and boat.
Early afternoon we ran the 20 nm down the McArthur R, out into the gulf and headed east to Lousy Ck. The plan was for the 3 of us to o/night in the boat and get an early start on the morning low tide. Its about 10 nm from the mouth of the McArthur to the mouth of Lousy.
Out in the Gulf it was blowing from the E at 15 kts gusting to 20. The gulf is very shallow and at low tide you are often running along in 4-5 ft of water, and it really stands up in a bit of wind.
We were handling it OK until close to where we turn into the creek (the asterisk on the map below). I was just thinking about turning around when we took two waves over the bow - and suddenly we had 6" of water in the cockpit!
I made the mistake of stopping! Two more waves over the bow and we had a foot of water in the cockpit and a wallowing boat!
Three electric bilge pumps kicked in at 4750 gal/hr!
My fishing mate Craig, a former pro-fisher, took the helm and powered the boat through 180 degrees to get the bow up and out of the waves and kept it clear of the then following sea. I jumped on the manual bilge pump and pumped like crazing! ]
It only took a few minutes to clear the water from the cockpit and get the boat safe and secure again, but we all got a bit of a fright! The boat is theoretically unsinkable and should remain upright if swamped - but I never want to test that theory!
https://youtu.be/sBAYyYwxzrM
https://youtu.be/VrFbqHJ1ZHE
We all agreed that the best course of action was to head back to the cabin, the air-conditioning ........... and cold beer!
Tomorrow is another day!
PS: I don't know why all of our tracks aren't showing on the GPS tracker.