Beachcomber and Badger's Blissful Beaching at the Barrier

A lovely Summer day, and a picnic on the beach with friends...a bit of pleasant sailing thrown in just to remind me how incredibly lucky I am.
Barrier Landing is about an hour and a quarter from us by displacement boat. Beachcomber had all three sails set, but the breeze turned onto the nose and the narrow Reeve Channel was fairly well attended by planing boats (appearing to be late for an important appointment), and tacking across all of them repeatedly upwind was a bit tedious, so we kicked the little diesel into life and set her to idle and that gave us enough way to pinch into the wind higher than she could have under sail alone, with sails and motor both contributing to our passage along with Badger- who has the more grown-up 3 cylinder diesel to push her along.

Before heading off we called into the local fuel jetty to fill the tank with diesel. I honestly can't remember the last time I did this- maybe August last year- but she only took seven dollars to fill her up. I'm told the little Yanmar sips 0.5 litres per hour at around five knots.

The Barrier is a strip of beach on the lakeside of dunes that face Ninety Mile Beach on the east coast for, well, ninety odd miles. It is an easy walk across the scrub covered dunes to the ocean, but we were more than happy to set up near the boats for lunch and swim in the salty, tidal lake.

Escorting PSS Curlip

The story of East Gippsland is inevitably linked to waterways as the country was so remote and the roads so poor in the early days of development, the lakes and rivers became the arteries for supply and export, transport and fishing. The advent of steam on the water pre-dated the arrival of railways and  the names of many steamers still resound in local lore.

This boat, the Curlip has a wonderful, if more modern story too as a replica of the type in general and one boat in particular that ran the great Snowy River that flows into the sea near Marlo, a little town in the very north eastern corner of Victoria.

If there is interest I have a link to more of her story, or I could write more, but this post is just about the trip that she undertook from Marlo, out through the heads of the Snowy, down the coast and in through the Entrance of the Gippsland Lakes, stopping at Kalimna for fuel and water, and then onto Paynesville where she will be restored for tourist use by an enthusiastic group of boat lovers.

Along with a small group of small boats we were able to help provide a welcoming escort from Kalimna to Metung, after the big Police boat and Coast Guard boats left her at Kalimna
 jetty.

I'm sure these two boats were aware that they shared a certain type of backside...although beachcomber's is much more petite..

Our lovely friends in Badger, (a traditional Lakes fishing boat) were there with us and we spent some some time rafted up together fortifying ourselves with a beverage while Curlip was filled with water from two loads from a local fire appliance.