Gippsland Lakes 1

Last weekend was the WBA weekend away down at Paynesville. As is the way with such things, the weather forecast was perfect midweek, deteriorating to apocalyptic over the weekend. I have been hankering to get the Core Sound down to the Lakes, so I decided to time shift and go down early - that flexibility is one of the blessings of retirement.

My original plan was to take a tent and camp, but Anne decided that she would like to come, and we managed to find a house, with a jetty at the bottom of the garden, in Eagle bay round the corner from Paynesville.

We drove down Tuesday, and there was a drive and beach next to the jetty, so I decided to rig the boat there, and try launching next morning. Which proved to be one of those dumb ideas. The trailer wheels sank into the soft sand before the boat was in enough water to float off. But after a lot of heaving and strong language I got it launched, tied up to the jetty, the trailer retrieved, and could saunter off and have breakfast with the nice feeling that the boat was all ready to go.

There was a glassy calm when we set off, and I sanctimoniously resisted Anne's sensible suggestion to start the outboard. I rowed, we ghosted, we bobbed round in circles, and three hourslater we finally got into McMillan strait, and tied up at the public jetty.

After lunch and with some supplies on board we set off out the south eastern end of the strait. The wind had picked up, and we tacked out, very inefficiently at first as I neglected to lower the centreboard after lunch, but once we got that sorted we had a lovely beat along the south side of Raymond Island, checked out the depth of the bottom of Point King, then settled in for a lovely reach back down to our jetty. I sailed in, pulling up head to wind next to jetty, without too much drama, a nice end to a lovely sailing day.