Episode 11 of The Sailing Podcast is an interview with Alan Hall from Coast Guard Noosa about crossing bars. The Noosa River has a very difficult bar crossing and the coast guard here are experts when it comes to training people about safe bar crossing and providing a volunteer search and rescue service.
Next Episode is Heavy Weather Sailing Tips with Allan Breckall
Alan Hall gave us a great list of Tips for safely crossing bars
Tip 1 – Check that your boat is suitable;
- Does it carry enough horsepower? You need sufficient power to drive through a breaking wave
- Is it seaworthy and carrying the correct safety equipment? Make sure everyone has their life jackets on
- Is the weight distributed evenly through the boat so that the trim of the boat is correct? Don’t have all the heavy weight in the bow or stern – distribute it throughout the vessel
- Is the skipper ready for the bar crossing? Have they ever crossed a bar before? Educate yourself before you attempt the crossing.
Tip 2 – Observe the bar conditions prior to attempting to crossing the bar
- Best way is to go and observe other boats crossing the bar – particularly watching the commercial vessels as the demonstrate the correct technique for crossing the bar
- Understand that the swell may be 3 meters and the bar may be only 1.5m deep, therefore you could be facing a standing wave
- Go and have a look on YouTube for examples of bar crossings – both the good and the bad examples
Tip 3 – Check your fuel before you head out
- If you don’t have fresh fuel in the boat it can lead to engine problems and stale fuel will lead to stalling with the engine
- The best advice is to make sure that you have fresh fuel in the boat. Don’t assume that because you filled up 6 months ago the fuel will be okay – it probably won’t so change the fuel. Stick the old fuel into the car where it can mix in with come more recent fuel and give your boat new fuel
Tip 4 – Prepare the vessel and passengers prior to setting out through the bar
- Secure all the items in the boat so they can’t bounce around during the crossing
- Keep the passengers seated in the boat – as soon as they stand up the centre of gravity shifts and can make handling much harder
- Call the Coast Guard and let them know that you are heading out. At Noosa, the Coast Guard will take details of the boat such as registration numbers, POB (people on board), your destination and your estimated return time
Tip 5 – Approach the bar and position the boat so you can observe the waves coming over the bar
- You need to check the number of sets coming in and look for a pattern in the waves
- Look for the wave action at the outer side of the bar (ocean side) and don’t just focus on the waves that are close to you, look for ones that may be breaking further out. Don’t base your decision on the what you see in the first 60 seconds
- Allow ample time for watching the wave patterns – you may need to be there for up to 30 minutes
Tip 6 – Plan a controlled passage through the bar
- Don’t power up and go too fast into the waves. You need to keep the boat in contact with the water and not become airborne off the top of the wave. This may look like fun but you are more likely to land down in the trough of the next wave and end up underneath the next wave without time for your boat to float up and over the next wave. The best small boat skippers tend to take it smooth and just go up and down on every wave
Tip 7 – Use your GPS to lay a track as you are heading through the bar
- Get the GPS running early and establish your location
- Save the track to assist you on your return to the river
- Don’t assume that you can rely on the GPS. It may fail (flat batteries, loss of data, etc.) so use visual signs to make sure that you can enter on the same line that you have identified from inside
Tip 8 – Take visual sights (Transits) as you are heading into the bar
- Use the compass to take a sight on a distant point so that you can use this navigation tool on your way back into the bar
- Take your transit off the stern on your way out – maybe get one of the crew to look back and spot something in the distance when you call out the compass bearing that you are going out
Tip 9 – Time your run through the waves so that you are not entering a wave as it is curling and about to break. You are looking to cross the waves prior to it breaking or to drive through the white water after the wave has broken
Tip 10 -Don’t stop or abandon your crossing once you have started! The waves are coming in so fast that you are unlikely to have time to turn the boat and have a safe exit
- If the boat is taken by the wave side on you are likely to roll the boat.
- It you do manage to turn the boat, the wave is likely to catch up to your vessel and flood the stern of the boat
- If you get caught in the trough of a wave you risk having the propeller digging into the sand and being disabled or at least stalling the motor and making you a sitting duck for the waves
- DON’T STOP ONCE YOU BEGIN TO CROSS THE BAR
Tips for re-entering the bar from the ocean;
- Plan to sit yourself on the back of a wave and come in at the same speed as a wave so you don’t get swamped
- Don’t go too fast so that you go over the front of the wave
- Don’t go too slow so that you fall back into the trough of the wave with shallow water
- Look for the action of the sets of waves, as you did heading out and look for a good regular wave to follow into the river
- Contact the Coast Guard and let them know that you are about to re-enter the bar and they will monitor your progress
- Look for your transit points to ensure that you are following the same path back into the river. You can also use the GPS track that you established on the way out of the river
Visitors heading into an unfamiliar river should contact the local Coast Guard prior to attempting the bar. For example, Noosa Coast Guard will come and guide you through the bar with one of their vessels. Their priority is safety and they would much rather come and show you the way through than come and rescue you when things go wrong.
Transcript of the interview with Alan Hall (Coast Guard Noosa)
Introduction This is the Sailing Podcast with David and Carina Anderson, episode number 11. We’d love you to come and join us on our journey. Well hello everybody and welcome to the 11th episode of the Sailing Podcast. Thank you for joining Carina and I on our journey. The episode today is an interview I had with Alan Hall from the Coast Guard in Noosa and it’s about crossing bars. The Noosa River has a very difficult bar crossing and the Coast Guard here are experts when it comes to training people and giving advice about safe bar crossing. They also provide a volunteer search and rescue service. Alan shares his experience with us and in particular what a skipper should think about before attempting to cross a bar. I later summarized our chat into a top 10 list of tips for crossing bars and you’ll find that information on the website and that’ll be at www.thesailingpodcast.com forward slash bar crossing. You can also see a link on the website to the webcam that looks over the Noosa bar and that’ll help you to get an idea of what we’re talking about. I’ll also add some other YouTube videos of bar crossings that I’ve found. Some of these might surprise you and might be more of an example of what not to do. Now feel free to leave us some comments on the website, especially if you think there’s some other points that you’d like to share with all of us. I’ll get straight into the interview now with Alan as he has some really good advice to share with all of us.
David: So hi everybody, I’m here with Alan Hall at the Coast Guard Centre in Noosa, the Australian Volunteer Coast Guard. I should mention, hi Alan, how are you going?
Alan: G’day David, how are you?
David: I’m terrific, thanks for spending some time with me today. We’re going to have a bit of a chat about crossing bars and what’s involved with that. You guys in Noosa are pretty well founded knowledge as far as crossing bars goes. But with the Coast Guard itself, just let me know, how did you get involved with the Coast Guard?
Alan: I moved up from Sydney 13 years ago and I decided that I needed something to do and I’d always had an interest in boating. I had boats in the UK and so I joined Coast Guard and that was 13 years ago.
David: What sort of boats did you have?
Alan: I had a fishing charter boat.
David: Oh okay, so you must have spent a lot of time on the water.
Alan: I spent a fair bit of time on the water.
David: Whereabouts in the UK were you?
Alan: Down at Whistable If anyone knows where Whistable is, it’s near the Isle of Sheppey, around there, on the River Swale. We actually were moored on the River Swale and came out of there.
David: And then moved to Australia?
Alan: Yeah, I was in partnership, I sold my half to my partner and then I moved up to Norfolk. We had five years up there and then we decided to move to Australia.
David: Excellent, I think you’ve moved to a lovely spot here.
Alan: Oh, so do I.
David: Now, I was going to ask you just for a quick overview of the Coast Guard at Noosa. And you were telling me before that Coast Guard can have different meanings in different countries as well. Can you just explain that to me again?
Alan: Well, I think people have the impression that the Coast Guard is a funded organisation by the government. It isn’t, it’s totally voluntary. But if you go outside of Australia, the term Coast Guard changes quite dramatically. The American Coast Guard are all paid. Their role is totally different to ours. Our primary role is saving lives. So the American Coast Guard, they’re involved in anything maritime. They’re looking for smugglers, drugs, illegal immigrants, anything that’s illegal basically. So we’re much more involved on the safety side.
David: So in the States, do they have an equivalent body as far as a volunteer marine sort of set up like you?
Alan: Not to my knowledge. I believe they have auxiliaries, which are volunteers. But I don’t think the volunteers actually run the boats. I think they’re just there as crew. Now, I might be totally wrong, but I think that’s the way it works. Now, if you go to other places like Indonesia or Japan and places like that, they’re paid. They’re not volunteers like us.
David: Okay, and so as volunteers, what are the roles of the people in the Coast Guard here in Noosa? What sort of roles do they provide to people?
Alan: Well, our main primary thing is saving lives. That’s what we’re set up to do and that’s our main focus. So we provide a 24-7 search and rescue. We have a 24-7 radio room, which monitors marine radios along the Sunshine Coast. We also have courses we run for the public. So we try and do educational courses for the public. Nearly all of them are marine related and nearly all of them are for safety.
David: Okay, and what area of safety is sort of your area of, like, what area do you sort of control?
Alan: Yeah, we do double island point in the north down to Point Arkwright, 50 nautical miles to sea and all the lakes and rivers. Our area is just over 2,500 square miles.
David: Oh, that’s a big area, really.
Alan: It is, isn’t it? When I say we do 50 nautical miles to sea, that’s our 2C registration, allows us to go 50 nautical miles. But in actual fact, we don’t have any restriction. We can go 500 miles if it was necessary.
David: Right, so if you got a big call and they needed multiple vessels and it’s outside of that range, they’re going to say come and help us if it’s the next coast guard up the coast. They’re going to say, you know, we need some help and you guys will jump in and head that way.
Alan: That often happens. If you get a police activation for something that’s on the Sunshine Coast, it might well be that three or four flotillas will send their boats. There might be eight or ten boats out there. It depends on what the situation is.
David: Okay. Now, the thing I was going to talk to you today is about bar crossings because the Noosa River is sort of infamous for its bar crossing. And, you know, for people who don’t live near a bar, how would you describe to them what is a bar crossing as far as describing what it is?
Alan: It’s where the ocean meets the river basically. And what happens is the water coming out of the river obviously meets the ocean and you get a lot of sand deposited both ways because it’s shallow. So you come from deep ocean to shallow river. And the water coming in or going out has to do something with itself because of the volume so you get the waves that stand up.
David: Right. So the river bar itself is like a constantly moving body of sand.
Alan: That’s probably the best way to describe it.
David: Okay, so that’s the danger, isn’t it? Because it’s a shifting, what would you call it? Something that has a shifting hazard in the water, isn’t it? So people can’t just come here one year at Christmas for a holiday and expect to come back the next year and find it in the same place.
Alan: No, you couldn’t even do that from week to week. So each week the duty crew that turns up on a Saturday, the first thing they do is go down to the bar, cross the bar in their boats, put their GPS tracks down there because the ones that we did last week may not be suitable.
David: Okay, okay. So from there, I thought maybe we could just chat about some of the general things people should consider for crossing a bar, be it in Noosa or be it anywhere else. Just try and shoot some tips for people about the difficulties, things they should think about when they’re crossing a bar.
Alan: Okay, as I said to you before, David, every bar is different. There are no two bars on the coast are the same. Some are deep river bars, some are very shallow. Ours is a particularly shallow one, which makes it more difficult for, you can’t get big boats in there because we don’t have enough water depth. So you tend to get a lot of small boats, and you get small boats and big waves together that really are not compatible. If you’re going to cross a river bar, there’s a number of things you need to do first before you even think about going down. – First of all, is the boat suitable? – Does it carry enough horsepower? It’s no good trying to go out there with a five metre tinny with a five horsepower on the back and expect to be able to do it safely, unless it’s dead calm. You need enough power to be able to get yourself in and out of trouble. Sorry, to get yourself out of trouble, not in trouble.
David: Yeah.
Alan: Get yourself out of trouble. – Is your boat seaworthy? – Does it carry the right equipment? – Does it carry enough life jackets for the people? – Are the people going to wear life jackets?
David: Yeah.
Alan: – Is the boat set up so that the buoyancy is properly laid out? You don’t want to put all the weight on the stern or all the weight on the bow, so you try and distribute the weight properly. They’re trying to get a good trim.
David: That’s right, try and get that.
Alan: – Is the person that’s going to do the navigation or do the skippering, is he familiar with how to cross the bar? – Has he ever crossed the bar before? The last thing you want to do is come down on a holiday, jump on the boat and go screaming out across the bar. That’s fraught with danger. You need to educate yourself before you do it. The way you do that is by going and watching what other people do. Yes. Go down to the river mouth, stand there and watch the boats cross. You’ll soon see the ones that know what they’re doing and the ones that don’t. If you watch the commercial guys, you’ll see they do it a different way, probably to the way that the guys in the small tinnies do. By watching the line that they take in and out of the bar, it’ll give you a general idea of which way? It would, it certainly would give you a general idea of where it is. It’s more the technique involved in actually crossing the bar. It’s fine if the thing’s as flat as a pancake. Anyone can cross the bar. Our bar’s benign when it’s dead flat. You can get out and walk out diversely. It’s when you get the remains or large swells outside, they come down there, they might be coming through at three metres say, three metres of swell and it suddenly comes to an area where it’s got one and a half metres of water. That’s fraught with danger because that three metres of swell goes into an area that has one and a half metres of water. It can only do one thing and that is stand up. The standing waves on Noosa Bar are notorious for causing major dramas. They appear out of nowhere. You can get halfway out and you think this is really easy. Suddenly you get three of them stand up in front of you.
David: I’ve heard stories of friends of mine that have been in and out of the bar many times by themselves and then they just didn’t see it coming.
Alan: The last couple of weeks we’ve had the remnants of that large swell from New Zealand and it’s caught so many people out on the bar. You think they’re outside and suddenly you might have half a dozen waves stand up in front of you and each one might be bigger than the one before. You get over one and they’re not very far apart so you don’t have enough time to let them break so you can go through the white water. They tend to break on top of you and once they do that you’re gone. Especially if you’re in an open boat, all of a sudden they just swamp. That’s the problem.
David: Let’s say somebody’s in the river and they’re approaching the bar to head out. What sort of things are they looking for as a skipper? You said you’ve got your boat safety equipment, you want to get your life jackets on everybody.
Alan: The other thing I would mention with regard to that as well is the fuel. A lot of people have a boat that gets used twice a year. They fill it up with fuel, go out there, everything’s fine, come out next time and that fuel’s gone off. Fuel that’s gone off is not compatible with the engine.
David: I’ve had that happen to me because I had a little trailer sailor that we used to sail just in the river. If the fuel sat around too long it just eventually doesn’t run properly. I got into the habit myself where if I was going out and I had a jerry can of fuel I’d tip it in the wife’s car and go down to the service station and get my boat fuel fresh to make sure that it was going to work for me.
Alan: That’s exactly the right thing to do. Just tip the fuel out into your wife’s car or your car and go and get some fresh stuff. We’ve had so many boats break down, even with the new technology now. The new engines don’t like the stale fuel any more than the old ones did.
David: It’s funny you mention that because I’ve got a friend with a runabout here as well and I think that nine out of ten problems he has is it just stops and he goes, oh, something’s wrong with the fuel again and he’s pulling things apart.
Alan: The point is you don’t want to be heading through a bar and be trying to power up or move forwards. It’s really the simplest thing to fix on the boat, isn’t it? It’s probably the most basic and it’s probably the one that people forget the most. They just assume that that fuel was in there six months ago. We had a chap here probably about four months ago now that him and his friend got rolled on the bar and we got him back here and I was talking to him and he said, oh, I can’t understand. He said, you know, the boat’s been as good as gold. I said, when was the last time you used that? He said, six months ago. I said, did you change the fuel? He said, no. That’s the reason why I didn’t run. Yeah, so changing the fuel is very important.
David: Okay, so we’ve got the fuel, everybody’s life jackets. I’ve heard people mention before as far as you were talking about trim before, they’re saying before you head out of the bar it’s important to secure things in the boat as well.
Alan: Yeah, absolutely. The last thing you want is things flying around. If you were unlucky enough to be swamped, the last thing you want is anchor ropes and fishing rods and anything, petrol cans, you know, flying around the place. So try and secure everything so it’s out of the way and tied down and make sure you keep the buoyancy down. Don’t stand up.
David: Yeah, because that was going to be my next question is what should you say to the other people in the boat because…
Alan: Sit down. And then to keep their weight low as well, not all be sort of hanging over the side trying to watch what’s going on. Yeah, we make a point of when we’re bringing people back in if we have to tow them back that they all sit down. And they sit down, they send in a rudder and that’s all they do and touch anything else. Once they stand up, the center of gravity disappears or changes and it’s much more reliable to have an accident. But going back to your question, you got down to the river, you got down to the bar, you’ve done the right thing, you’ve called Coast Guard and you’ve told them you’re going out. Now, there’s no excuse for not calling the Coast Guard. We do radios, all the frequencies that are used around here, or mobile phones, anything. There’s no excuse for not calling the Coast Guard. You might want to call the Coast Guard and say, can you tell me what conditions are like on the bar?
Now, we can’t say to you the conditions are good, bad or indifferent, but what we can say is, yes, we’ve had a number of boats go out today without problems or we’ve had 20 boats go out or 10 boats or five commercial, whatever the case might be, or we’ve had no boats go out today, and if we’ve had no boats go out today, that’s a pretty good sign that there’s something radically wrong.
David: Yeah.
Alan: Okay, so if you find the Coast Guard first and say, have you had many boats out? And they say, yes, there’s loads going out today, then you can bet your life is okay, or it’s reasonable.
So you get down to the river mouth, you sit at the river mouth and you look, and what you’re looking for is the least amount of white water. So the deeper the water, the deeper the water is, the less it breaks.
When it’s shallow, you get all this white water. Now, if you take a channel in between sand banks, you will have white water both sides and nothing in the middle, or you might have white water both sides and a little bit in the middle. So the less white water there is, and you’ve got to sit there for a while, it’s not just a quick glance, the less white water there is, the more chance there is that the channel is fairly deep. The other thing you have to watch, and particularly on bars like ours, you have to look beyond that first break, beyond where the first part of the surf is, look out, because you’ll find that you might have a flat section on the first bit, but then you might go another 150 metres and then you’ll find you’ll see these big waves standing up. Big curly waves, that’s the one you want to avoid. And because they’ve broken further out, people don’t even realise that there is a bigger break in the background. They’re just seeing the remnants even of it coming through. Once they break, of course, they just come through as little tiny wavelets. But the main problem with this type of bar is that the main area of danger is not the first section, it’s the second section. And if you go out there in a small boat, you can stand on the rock wall down there and have a look and you’ll see them. And you might think, I don’t look too bad, but put yourself in a small boat and they’ll look three times as big.
David: Well, I was thinking that also while you were saying it, again, it’s better to go early and have a look, because if you are down in the boat, you’re close to the water anyway, it’s hard to see those back breakers from that position anyway.
Alan: And believe me, David, they come up on you very, very quick, so you have to be very careful. I’m not saying every day is like that, it’s not, but that’s the sort of thing you’ve got to look for. And I think it’s that deception that’s what catches a lot of people out, because if they take a one-minute look, they’ll base their decision on what’s happened in the last 60 seconds, where that may not be long enough to get a real feel for what the sets are doing when they come in, like a surfer’s going to… It may be half an hour. You might have to go and watch it for half an hour. And you’ll see how the sets are coming in. You can go out there, you can miss every single one, you can go straight out. Or you can be dead unlucky and you’ll pick every single one. That’s where the skill comes in and the knowledge comes in on how to do it. There’s a contention that you have to cross the bar quickly. You hear this all the time. As soon as you’re in the bar, get the throttle down and get yourself out of there. You can’t drive the boat if you’re airborne.
David: No.
Alan: If you go down there and watch the guys that are not good at crossing the coastal bars, you’ll see them airborne. Taking off.
And the problem with that is, of course, you leave one and then you’re just slightly to pick the next one up on the way down, which is not a good idea. So you’re submarining into the next one.
David: That’s right.
Alan: The guys that cross the bar in small boats, generally, you’ll see them just go up and down, up and down, over the waves. But this is very general. Every bar is different. Every person that crosses the bar is different.
David: Yeah.
Alan: The other thing is, if you’ve got a GPS on the boat, it’s a wonderful piece of equipment, and there’s lots of good ways you can use those as well. Let’s say you’re just about to do your bar exit. You’re looking at the waves. You’ve got a feel for there might be some sets. And before you go, should you maybe do… You should lay a track down. Lay a track on your way out. And then if you’re happy, well, there’s a couple of things you should do. First of all, GPS is a wonderful thing, but it is an electronic tool. And electronic things have a way of going wrong. So if you rely totally on a GPS, you could come unstuck if the track disappears. What we tend to do is we lay our track down as we go out. We also take transits. In other words, we take the compass bearing on the way out, and we take a bearing on the way back. So you might say, okay, the White House on the top of the hill, in line with whatever it is out there. So you take a compass bearing, and you take a transit on the sturt. So if your GPS goes wrong, at least you’ve got something to get back in there.
David: Do you take the transit on your way before you go out, or do you go outside the bar and then look back?
Alan: No, no, we take it on the way out.
So I’ll be saying, for the sake of, I might say, okay, course is 030. We’ll have another guy standing behind me, and he’ll say, okay, it’s the tree on top of the hill, and I’ll turn around and have a quick look. Yeah, that’s okay. So if I come back on reciprocal course, and I get the tree over the top of the little hill, I’ll be pretty sure I’m in the right place.
It’s a good idea to delegate that to somebody else who’s on the boat with you, because as you’re driving, you’re pretty sort of busy watching the waves and controlling your speed. But I think a transit’s really probably a better idea. It’s an easier way to pick your line coming back in. Provided you don’t pick a car on the beach, which is not going to be on the way back.
David: That’s right, or a set of headlights.
Alan: But yeah, as a general rule, we do that, and at least it gives you an idea. The problem when you come back, David, is when you’re sat on the inside of a bar looking out, you can see the waves breaking. You can see the channel, because when you’re coming back, you can’t see anything. All you can see is like a wall of white water, or a lot of white water. It doesn’t show you the channel. The only time you see the channel is when you get up on top of the wave and you can see it in front of you. So coming in can sometimes be more difficult than going out, especially if you get in the wrong place. We might come back to coming in, because I guess there’s a rare situation where people want to enter a bar that they’ve never been out of.
David: We might talk about that as well, because I know the Coast Guard offers assistance for people. So as you’re driving out, now I’m more of a sailing person and not a powerboat person. I know when I took my yacht once out through, my little trailer sailor out through the bar, we didn’t have a very big motor, like eight horsepower or something. But let’s just say somebody is using a powerboat. What is the theory on speed? I guess it’s hard to say. You can’t say to somebody, do X amount of speed in such a boat, can you?
Alan: No, you can’t. It’s impossible, because you don’t know how fast and how far apart the waves are. So each one has to be done on its own. What you’re trying to do is to get the wave before it curls and breaks. It’s either you wait until the wave is broken and you go through the white water, because there’s no danger there. What you’re trying to avoid is the one that comes up in front of you and you’ve got nowhere to go. You have to sort of judge it. Maybe you might have to power into the first one, and then you might have to slacken off. Because you’re watching the one behind it, waiting for it to perhaps be broken. If you go too fast and you get out too quickly, you’ve got nowhere to go. The other one can catch you out. It’s really just practice, really. Once you get the hang of it, even locals get caught out occasionally. It has happened.
David: I think you mentioned to me that one of the worst things is to change your mind.
Alan: Oh, don’t do that, for goodness sake. I can understand why people do, though, because they might miscalculate. Like you say, when you’re sitting in the little boat and all of a sudden there is a wall, a three or four foot wave coming, it can be pretty terrifying. Our advice is if you’re in the bar, whether you’re coming in or going out, just keep going. I just bring it up because I know that’s always good advice from anybody who says that you really need to commit. I know it’s difficult for people to understand. You go out and you see this big wall of water coming towards you. You think, oh hell, I’m out of here. But believe me, they come in so fast, the chances of you getting the boat round quick enough are fairly slim.
David: because at least the bow of a boat is designed to push its way through the wave. But if the wave comes and hits a boat side on…
Alan: Oh, if it hits a side on, even if it comes over to stern and fills up with water, you immediately weigh twice, three times as much as you did before. The next wave catches you up and you’re gone.
David: Yeah, and then your motor could get swamped as well in that situation.
Alan: The other thing is motors touching the sand. That’s another thing. That’s another reason why you don’t need to power up too much because each time you power up, the stern goes down. So the amount of water you’ve got underneath you is less. If your prop touches the sand, it cuts out. You won’t have time to restart it before the next one’s got you.
David: Yeah, and then you’re at the mercy of the waves.
Alan: We don’t want to frighten people to death. But crossing the coastal bar is probably one of the most dangerous things a boatie will ever do. It can be done and you can do it and you can do it a hundred thousand times and it can be fantastic. Or you can do it once and it’ll come unstuck. And I know plenty of people that have been on the river for years and years and years and suddenly just didn’t see it coming.
David: Well, I think that’s the experience of one of the guys that I work with. Same thing. He was a confident person going in and out of the bar. And it just surprised him, I guess.
Alan: But it is, I’d say, it’s practice. Best advice I can give you is really just go down and watch what other people do. Or get on the net and look at the videos if people don’t do it correctly or do it correctly. There’s plenty of videos on there. There’s plenty of videos of people crossing on this as well. Yeah, and that might be good if you can find somebody with a similar boat to what you’ve got and see how it goes. And you can see the ones that make the mistakes. You’ve got the ones that are flying six feet out in the air.
David: Yeah, it’s not a good look.
Alan: It’s a shocker.
David: we were talking before, so let’s say we’ve made a safe exit out of the bar. And we’re saying that most of the times when people are coming back in, let’s assume it’s somebody who’s already come out through the bar. When they’re coming back to approach and re-enter the river from the sea, so they’re coming back maybe at the end of the day fishing or something, how do they set themselves up for success on the way back in?
Alan: Okay, well, provided you’ve got the track or you’ve got your transits right so you’re going in the right direction. That’s number one. The other thing is to try and put yourself on the back of a wave. Waves don’t overtake themselves. In other words, if you’ve got a wave, another one is not going to overtake that one unless it hits some sort of obstruction.
So if you can sit yourself on the back of the wave and come in at the same speed as the wave, you can’t be swamped. Okay? Now the two problems you get with that are going over the face of the wave, in other words, putting too much power on and going over it, and the other one is sitting too far back, so you come in at too much of an angle.
David: Okay.
Alan: So you need to have probably, where you are as a driver, you need to have the top of the wave level with you. So you’re sat with your nose over the wave but not so much that you’re going to fall over the face of it.
David: Okay. When you’re approaching, how long would you stay on the entrance? You were saying that it’s good to sit for like 30 minutes to have a good look at the sets on the way out. That’s going out, yeah. What about when you’re coming back in? How long would it take you to assess?
Alan: Well, like I say, there’s nothing you can really see from out of sight. You can’t see what conditions are like. I would say once you’ve got yourself, you’re happy with your line, then pick a wave. You can watch them go through, see what they’re like. Pick a decent one, not a great big greenie, a decent one to sit on.
David: And people call Coast Guard again prior to coming in?
Alan: If you call in, you’ll be watched on the camera, or you’ll be monitored. If you don’t call in, then unfortunately we don’t know where you are. In other words, if you go out and don’t call in, we don’t know you’re out there.
David: Yeah, and I guess there’s a big advantage in there because if you did need rescuing, if somebody’s actually physically watching you come in versus, let’s say, a boat did get swamped, there’s going to be a delay before anybody else is going to get on the phone and alert you guys. It could be valuable minutes.
Alan: If we’re watching it, we can have someone to you within a couple of minutes.
David: Right, but if they haven’t told you, you could have lost a valuable 10 minutes. That could be somebody’s life. You might not be watching the camera.
Alan: So that happens quite often. If people don’t call us, we’re not looking at the camera, we might be doing some paperwork or something. What we normally do, David, is because the surf lifesavers during daylight hours anyway are operational, and they are only a matter of 200 metres away, we would call them, we’ve got direct contact with them, and we’ll get them down to the people that are in the bar straight away. Then we go and get the vessel. The vessel really to us is unimportant. It’s only the people that matter. We can’t do that unless we know you’re coming.
David: So the theory is once you’re coming, if you’ve picked your transit, you’re looking at your GPS track, you’re trying to get onto the back of a wave because that’s going to be deeper water than in front of the wave, isn’t it?
Alan: It’s going to be deeper water, but if you can sit on the back of the wave, you won’t get caught by the following waves. One of the problems is if you go over the face of the wave for a second, you go down the front of the wave, gravity will try and push you left or right. There’s no way of stopping it, it just happens. If you fall over the face of a wave, it’s going to try and turn you. Whereas if you sit on the back of the wave, you won’t do it. But don’t sit so far back that you’re right in the trough because there’s not much water there. So once again, it’s experience.
David: And then for somebody, I was going to ask you as well, if people are visiting, at least coming up and down the Australian East Coast, there’s coast guard stations along our coastline pretty regularly. And I assume that in other countries they’ll have some sort of similar system. But here, if somebody’s approaching Noosa, they’ve never been in the bar before, the advice is that they call you guys, but they can’t call up and say, tell us where to come in. But they can call and ask for some help, can’t they?
Alan: Sure. Anyone that’s capable of getting into Noosa because of the shallowness of the water, we’re more than happy to go out and show them the way. That’s either in or out, doesn’t matter. We’re more than happy to do it. We’d much rather do that than go and start picking people out of the water. Because you can’t bring a keel boat comfortably through our bar, but people can bring a big sailing catamaran in and they can call from outside and request an escort, can’t they?
Alan: That’s right.
David: And that’s a service you guys are happy.
Alan: We’re happy to do that. Like I say, we’re here to make sure that no one gets injured or hurt.
David: Yeah, and that’s terrific.
Alan: So during daylight hours, that’s fine. We don’t normally do escorts at night.
David: No, I think I wouldn’t recommend doing a bar crossing at night.
Alan: It’s okay if the weather’s nice and you’re fairly experienced, but for the average person I would think it’d be quite daunting. I think one of the problems is, David, because we’re a tourist area, we get a lot of people come up here on holiday and they bring their boats with them and they might not have used it for six months or a year. Suddenly they’ve got the boat up at Noosa and the fishing’s good outside. They feel they Must get out there at all costs and that really is not the right way to go. You’ve really got to remember how dangerous the water can be.
David: Yeah, I guess when you say that, it’s like with sailing as well. People who’ve got to sail to a schedule often get themselves into trouble because they don’t pick and choose the best days to be out there and I guess that’s what happens with visitors. They’ve got a week’s holiday. They’ve booked something for Tuesday. The wife said you can play golf on Monday and you can go fishing only on Tuesday morning and the rest of the week you’re with us. And all of a sudden they’ve got an unrealistic goal in place because Tuesday’s conditions just might not be the best that it was going to be that week.
Alan: I know it’s unfortunate if you bring your boat up here for two weeks and don’t get out. It’s unfortunate but it’s better than being dead. No, I think you’ve just got to be sensible. You may just use common sense. If it looks wrong, don’t go.
David: If you’re not 100% confident that you can do it in your boat as well and yourself, get an escort. They just want to escort you out. And if the Coast Guard feels that the conditions are such that you shouldn’t go, then they’ll probably tell you.
Alan: If I said to you there’s two metre sets coming through, it’s probably not a good idea to go.
David: The other question I was going to ask you is just to sort of gauge how busy you guys are. Because I’m local, I see it in the paper, some of the reports about some of the incidents that you have. I’m not trying to bring things down, but you’ve had quite a few rescues that you’ve had to do on the bar, haven’t you?
Alan: No, we’re constantly doing them on the bar. In the last two weeks we’ve had something like 25 people taken out of the water. That’s a lot of people.
David: I think that’s why it made it in the papers, because it’s been an extremely high number.
Alan: Conditions were such that people said there’s no wind, so there can’t be any waves out there. And they go up and they have a quick look outside and it looks as flat as a pancake. So off they go, but what they don’t realise is we’re still getting the remnants of a swell that was two weeks ago. Because it only appears in the river mouth itself. Outside it’s just a gentle swell. And that’s where people get lulled into a false sense of security.
David: Have you had people out of the last couple of weeks, have people had to go to hospital for serious injuries?
Alan: We had a meeting last night with the rest of the skippers and I said to them, I don’t know how somebody has not been seriously injured or had a fatality on the bar in the last two weeks. Because the conditions were horrendous for small boats. We’ve had guys with propeller cuts on their legs.
David: That’s nasty, isn’t it? That’s something that you don’t hear about very often. I had another friend who’s had a propeller cut to his leg and it was not pretty.
Alan: Oh, it’s horrible. It’s a horrible injury. It did tremendous damage. And we’ve had people hit by bits of the boat and knocked them out and all sorts of things like that. But I wouldn’t want people to get the wrong impression. Noosa is a wonderful place, it’s a fantastic place for boating. It’s got wonderful fishing. The amenities for kids up here are fantastic. It’s like driving your car, you need common sense. I often say to, we have a lot of school kids come in here and we have little lessons for them. And one of the main things I say to them is, I had a kid say to me one day, what do you think is the most dangerous thing you see on the river? And I said, would you sit on your father’s car and go down the road at 40 kmph?
And he said, no. I said, well, why do you do it on the boat? It is so dangerous. Just one little turn and they flipped off. Hit a sand bank. It’s so dangerous.
Boating is different to any other sort of sport, motor sport, because you can’t get out and walk home. If you break down, you can’t just step off there and go to the nearest phone box. You have people go out with no anchors. I’ve seen that umpteen times.
David: That’s crazy. No anchors.
Alan: Yeah. Just drift away. They go out with the most ill-equipped vessels you’ve ever seen in your life. Engines that should have been thrown away 20 years ago. And they expect everything to be okay for 99.9% of the time it is. But there’s always going to be a time when you get caught out.
David: Is there information on the net about the base here as well? The Noosa Coast Guard base?
Alan: We’re just in the process of redeveloping ours, so there’s not much information as far as this is concerned. Anyone that wants to come up to Coast Guard is more than welcome to come up here and we’ll show them around, show how it works. If you’re a boatie, you can come in here. We’ll show you the bar and the bar camera, and maybe give you some extra advice if you want to tell you what’s been going on. So if you want to pop in in the morning before you go fishing, pop in, the guys will show you what the bar looks like, tell you what traffic’s been going across the bar. And I think as a general rule people should, and I think boys are worse at this, it’s like the boy thing of not going and asking for directions when you’re driving the car. I think it’s just a bit of a trait that we all, not we all, but boys tend not to go and ask. But I think that any sort of marine body along the coast, be it our Coast Guard or the equivalent in other places, because if you just go and say hello and seek out some local knowledge, it’s going to save you a lot of effort and people are going to welcome you with open arms because it’s a common interest. We’re all interested in being out on the water and doing it safely. We have no problem at all with you coming in here and we’ll show you what you should be looking for. Might be able to give you some information on how to use the radios to check in and check out and things like that and just show you what we do. People don’t realise what we do in Coast Guard. We don’t just sit here. People get the impression we’re multi-millionaires down here with our own boats and we just go tootling out when we feel like it. We have crews on standby 24 hours a day. They don’t stand here, obviously they’re at home, but they’re on standby. They’re on call.
And we have a radio operator here that’s only here 24 hours or they’re rostered on for 24 hours. So it’s always somebody here. It’s all volunteer. That’s amazing, isn’t it? Funded and run.
David: You guys do a great job. I think people feel that we are government funded.
Alan: Well, let me put the record straight. This flotilla costs us $160,000 a year to run.
David: Wow.
Alan: It’s like a small business. Absolutely, and the funding we get from the government is $23,000. The rest of the money we raise ourselves.
David: You guys are out working it.
Alan: We’re selling raffle tickets, yeah. It’s not all fun.
David: I’ve seen you guys at the markets. Yeah, the raffles are good too, I think. But people are still devoting a lot of time to get those raffles happening.
Alan: But yeah, that’s great. People are doing it for the love of it. They do it because they want to.
David: Well, thanks a lot, Alan. I really enjoyed hearing about that. And we’ll put all that info up on the net for people. Maybe they’ll send us a hello and drop in and come and see you. That would be the best thing.
Alan: Yeah, no, that’s like I say. If you’re new to the area, please, please call him. We’d much rather talk to you here than talk to you in the water.
David: Yeah, excellent.
Alan: Thanks for that. Thanks, David. Conclusion/Outro I’d like to quickly thank Alan for being available to make that interview. And I’d like to send a genuine thank you to all the volunteer Coast Guard members and VMR volunteers who freely give of their time to help the boating fraternity have that extra safety net around them while they’re out on the water. Don’t forget to drop by and have a look at the top 10 tips for crossing bars. That’s at thesailingpodcast.com forward slash bar crossing. And let us know how you enjoyed the episode. I have another episode coming soon with some advice about heavy weather sailing, and that should be available in about a week. I’m going to look at how to get the yacht to look after itself when conditions are too bad for sailing, as well as having a quick look at what to do if the GPS fails. Do you know how to take a noon site with a sextant and find your latitude? Thanks to everybody who’s visiting us on Facebook. That’s facebook.com forward slash thesailingpodcast. And you can find us on iTunes by going to thesailingpodcast.com forward slash iTunes. That’ll redirect you to our listing. Of course, you can always contact me via email david at thesailingpodcast.com and you can link up with me on Google Plus using that address as well. Thanks for listening and I hope you have a great day. And thank you for joining us on our journey. You’ve been listening to David and Carina Anderson of The Sailing Podcast.