Sailing to and Exploring Remote Islands on Australia's East Coast NSW

I'm Garrett. At 19 years old, I left home in my 27-foot sailboat to explore the South Pacific. After two years of adventure, I upgraded to my new Hans Christian 40 in Fiji using the money I made from YouTube. I've sailed it from Fiji to Sydney, Australia, where I've been enjoying the city life for a change. In this video, I'm taking some new crew on board and sailing back up towards the Gold Coast on my way to Indonesia. We'll be spearfishing in remote islands and stopping at various ports along the way. If you want to experience what you're seeing in this video for yourself in real life this August, I'm renting some catamarans so I can make it a reality for you in the Whitsunday Islands. Everyone's able to come, no matter your skill level, and there's still spots available in all three weeks. I'll talk more about this at the three-minute mark. Got two crew members on board, no autopilot, in an uninstalled wind vane. We're trying to pull up to this fuel dock now. I think they've got some weird rule where you need a permit to get fuel and water, so most likely we'll head around the corner to where I was before on the mooring ball. But we're going to head to Pittwater today, I think. It's been fun hanging out in Sydney, but it's time to get the osmosis work done, get the wind vane installed, maybe get a water maker, get a discount on one, and get ready to head back up to the islands. So, yeah, I love Sydney, great place. Diesel is painfully expensive at the moment, and I'll have to motor a fairways up the coast of Australia due to the weather and current patterns. This is just the price I'll have to pay for sailing down. Spending this much time in Sydney was one of my favorite experiences to date. I got to live in a huge and notoriously expensive city for no additional cost that I usually spend. It's only 20 miles to Pittwater where we're heading this first day, but because I didn't want to be attacked by a shark in Sydney Harbour cleaning the bottom, it was absolutely covered in barnacles. This slowed us down by at least 1.5 knots. Alright, first time vloggers, here we go, little takeover of Garrett's adventure, mooring ball. I think we might have started too early here. And now you guys can wipe the 77. If you want to try sailing to places like this, exploring the remote islands and wildlife here in Australia, I'm here to help. I'm renting a catamaran or two with my friend in August in the Whitsunday Islands. This is your opportunity to see what it's really like to live in a sailboat. I'll keep you some of what I've learned over the last three years of sailing, and you'll be able to see pitch black starry skies, pristine coral reefs, and we'll be doing three weeks. We still have availability in Alden, so email me, Garrett at Garrett's Adventure dot com, and I'll be happy to chat with you about further details. Let's go sailing. Don't hit her hard this way. Probably about five meters now. Oh, she's shallow, dude. Oh, oh. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Oh, we've overshot. Oh, he's magician, darling. He's done well. Oh, oh, oh. Oh, that's no good. The what now? Oh, okay. So what? Are we just stuck in forward? Okay. Coming up next on Garrett's Adventure, we fix the gear shifter. Coming up next on Garrett's Adventure, we tow a mooring ball. Yeah, yeah, I got it. Now we tow a mooring ball all the way with us to the Goldie? No. Yo, where's your gun? Let's just like... Test out the pirate defense theory. Yeah, exactly. That works pretty good, actually. The old outboard belt. Oh, lads, masterfully done. Now that you're in Australia, Captain Gaz or what? Yeah, Captain Gazza. You should change it to Gazza's Adventure while you're in Australia. G'day, guys. G'day, I'm in Australia. Surf? Surf. Official diagnosis. It's not working. Real. I can't argue with that. So we're mid doohickey fondle. I'm gonna give this knob a fondle. Are you seeing anything down there, Garrett? Yeah. What are you seeing? Good things or bad things? The cable is moving. Oh, great. No. Wait, not great. I see a mystery screw. I told you something that was fastened came unfastened. If you guys ever have any questions, just ask me. So what are we working with? Zip wrap, Captain Gaz. Rats. Cranky. Yeah. That's good, mate. Oh. Herein lies the problem. Oh, it's even further down. Yeah, that's good. It is. That just means we keep on doing things. We may or may not put them back together. No, we probably won't. Oh. Hook the boy up with a couple of tins, if you know what I'm saying. That sounded very Australian. The clamp that stopped the steering cable from moving had a screw come loose, which meant instead of shifting it just moved the whole cable. To fix this, all we had to do was put the screw back on after taking the pinnacle apart and reassembling it. New gear selector. Tasty. You're not going to run into a rock. No, we're getting out of here, gentlemen. Don't worry, a little bit of veggie math for your morning. All right, now she's free. Yeah, I reckon you can get her. Let me just hit one of these ones. Oh, no, you're already on it. Gee, filming and doing things one hand is kind of hard. It's harder than I'd like to do it. Would you like me to? Would you like to add some hands? It's kind of hard even with two hands. Well, that makes me feel better, doesn't it? Look at that slimy group. Come here, you little sucker. Big shot. Oh, baby. And we are free. Bang. Goodbye, Palm Beach. We're off. We've got about 35 minutes left to get into Nelson Bay from Pitwater. Today we've been going since 7.30am. It's about 7.30pm. Unfortunately, the wind forecast was wrong. We've been motoring the whole time, but I knew I was going to get punished coming back up the coast because of this current, but it's all good. Still a good day. It's a beautiful coastline. I'd like to come back with a car and actually explore it. I think it's a better way to see it. Pull up on the beach and camp and stuff, but tonight we'll have a nice protected anchorage. One of my crew members is getting off tomorrow. And then it looks like we'll be stuck for a little while, so I'll have some time to explore this area. But, yeah, so far so good. It is about 10pm. We just pulled up to Port Stephens public dock. Nice and calm, so it was easy. We've got to move from there to there or here to avoid the ferry. But, yeah, it went pretty well. Burned lots of diesel unfortunately, but I think that's just how it goes heading back up the Australian coast. Australia has lots of public wharfs, and as long as you move around nobody seems to be too upset if you stay the night. Josh had to leave to go back to working as a lifeguard. After he left, we scraped some of the barnacles off the boat because the water was finally clean enough to swim. This added at least half a knot to our speed. We have been in Nelson Bay for two days now, staying at the public dock. We got kicked off the dock today because there's a fishing competition. There's some more stuff to see here, but not a week's worth of stuff, and if we don't leave now, we're going to be stuck here for at least a week, and we don't want that. So we're going to take off today, go to a little island on the way, swim around maybe spearfish a bit, and then do an overnighter to Port Mac. That's the plan. Could change, but we're going to drop off in the morning now. We just cleaned the propeller, so we should be going at least half a knot faster, which is good. And yeah, we're out of here. It's a nice little sleepy kind of retirement town here. It seems like a pretty place. Not too much going on, but I liked it. The dinghy over here is a pretty accurate representation of what the bottom of the boat looks like. Poor old true kit. Needs a good scrub. But I'm going to drop off in the morning now because we are all ready to go. It's a pretty cool rock. We're not going to do anything about it, but it is cool. Island. We've agreed we rate this island around a 3 out of 10. Not much going on. Cool rock though. We are pulling up to Broughton Island now. Looks like a really cool spot, and I don't think I want to waste it by leaving after a few hours. So we're going to spend a few days here now. There's a shallow spot to miss coming in, which I'll just look out for with my eyes because charts aren't always super accurate, but water's starting to get shallower. We could technically drop here, but it'd be miserable. Got a nice trip over. Played chess the whole time. Good day. We're getting the dinghy inflated now so we can go spearfish. It's known for being quite sharky, so bring a gun and a knife and the dinghy. Get it inflated now with the generator. Tyler got this fish almost immediately after getting into the water. Got him! I'm still thoroughly enjoying being able to actually cook and refrigerate in this new boat. One! Oh dude, this got rotten real quick. Tidak Bagus. Oh! Tidak Bagus times two! Dua Tidak Bagus. Holy Jesus! Ho! My head! Yes! Bird is the word. Alright, we're pretty sure this guy is called a mutton and they keep flying into the rig. We're probably getting about ten a night and he's probably a little concussed so we're going to drop him into the beach. It's another really nice day out here in Broughton Island, so we're going to pack up all the stuff and first we're going to head over to that island. I think it's called I don't know what it's called, but there's supposed to be a lot of sharks there in a swim-through cave so we're going to do that. And then I saw a bunch of manta ray mobulas this morning on the drone around that way and past that headland. We've pulled up to, what's this place called? Looking Glass Island. The Looking Glass Island. Tied up to this nice person's boat. We're going to jump in now, try to find some nurse sharks. We're not spearfishing, but I'll bring the camera and see what we can see. Beautiful day. It's just perfect. Alright, we are back from our snorkel, stayed some lunch, now we're going out to try to get a kingfish over there. It might be a bit too rough so we'll see. No luck again at the first spot, so now we're out to this island north of Broughton Island. About two miles away with the dinghy. Water's looking crystal clear. I tried taking a shot at this kingfish it was too far away, so I missed. This is the same kind of fish Tyler shot the other night. I decided we didn't want to fish this small again, so I let it be. Look at the kingfish spot. Just a bunch of blue grouper, which we can't shoot. We're headed back to the boat now to check out one more spot. See if there's anything along the way it looks promising, but tonight might be a pasta night unfortunately. Great day either way though. I love this place. What's going on? The motor has died with the best timing possible. Nice protected little area here, but it's croaked out. We think it needs the Australian touch so I'm going to have a reef. You can never be too sure. Give her a little pump. Yeah, it sounds better. You don't need to go as hard at the start. There we go, she wants it. Three more tries, I can feel it. There we go. I'm guessing this was just a bit of water in the carburetor which killed the engine, so we just ran it hard all the way back to stop it from quitting again. Turned out to be an absolute ripper of a day. We had a bushfire over there last night and then westerly, so we woke up this morning and it was completely smoked out, but as you can see, she's cleared up now and it's an absolute pearler. This is what we've been dealing with for the past four days now, so who's to complain? There were a couple fish I could have shot but they were a bit too innocent looking and small, so I didn't. We're pulling up the anchor now and we're going to head back to Port Nelson where I'll do a couple boat projects find my next crewmates drop off Tyler and get ready to head further up towards the Gold Coast. Anchor's up, we are leaving Broughton Island. I like this place a lot. Might come back when I'm passing by again. We had wind for most of the trip slowly bobbing downwind with only the Genoa playing chess Spinnaker was a fail because I didn't know where the sheet went and we're about 15 minutes from being back in the Nelson Bay where we'll kind of clean up the boat maybe get some Thai food because we didn't catch any fish today like big failures and drop off Tyler tomorrow. Captain Garrett focusing extremely hard right now for his favorite part of sailing docking the boat it's low tide here so we can't overshoot it otherwise we've got problems. Two metres off to bow, one metre off to bow. When docking a boat most people tie on the bow and stern lines first. The better way to do it in most conditions is to put the spring line on and then use the engine to motor forwards which pulls the boat into the dock. Once this is on you can also use the rudder to adjust the distance of the bow and stern from the dock Ooh is she long enough? Not really. Tyler had to leave the boat to get back to work as well but he'll be back. In the next video I'll pick up new crew and head further up the coast. Thanks for watching especially to those of you who support the channel on Patreon and make sure to email me if you want to join for the real life sailing trip. See you next time.