Ballina bar strikes

looks like a hood 23, swamped, dismasted and sank on the Ballina bar a short time ago.

Marine rescue said the bar was rough and a bad time to be crossing!

one of the rescue boats had to be itself rescued when rope got caught in their jet drive?

on abc north coast


RESCUERS AND SKIPPER SAVED FROM SINKING YACHT
It was a case of the rescuers needing to be rescued during a dramatic incident on the Ballina bar yesterday afternoon.
The Ballina Jet Boat went to the aid of a stricken yacht, with the help of a Roads and Maritime Services vessel.
RMS Senior Boating Safety officer Wayne Langshaw said the bar conditions were extremely poor when the 7.5-metre yacht was swamped by waves.
"The yacht had been dismasted and it obviously had a fair bit of water in it," he said. "The master was clinging to the deck at that time."
"They (Jet Boat Rescue) took the person on board, gave him some first aid treatment and we both came back to shore."
Mr Langshaw said the yacht still needed to be salvaged as it posed a risk to other vessels.
He said the plan was to tow the yacht to Lighthouse Beach, but during the operation it began rapidly sinking and had to be cut loose.
"During the course of the tow the vessel actually sank, with one of the jet surf rescue crew members onboard it who was duly rescued from the water," he said.
"At that point in time, the jet surf rescue boat became disabled when it had a large amount of rope ingested into its jet unit."
Mr Langshaw said the Jet Boat was successfully towed back to shore, and the RMS is monitoring the yacht, which sank about 300 metres out from the bar.

What a disaster - for both the yacht, the owner and the Marine Rescue people. Glad to hear no-one was seriously hurt.

Last year we planned to sail into Ballina across the bar for our third time. We had left that morning from Yamba expecting the 35nm trip to be a leisurely 5-6hrs, arriving before some predicted thunderstorms in the north east crossed the coast.
Yeah - nah, I got it all wrong with the tides and swell. We arrived around 1600hrs and I called up Marine Rescue for an update on the bar conditions. The reply was "treacherous".

We quickly decided to continue north, but with a bad experience at the Tweed Heads bar fresh in my mind, we weren't keen to tackle that again, especially in the dark. So we informed Marine Rescue that we would notify the QLD authorities when we arrived in Bums Bay, Southport - which we guesstimated to be about 0300hrs.

The predicted thunderstorms did materialise and we had to go out to sea to skirt around them.
We dropped the pick around 0230hrs in a very crowded and very dark Bums Bay after travelling 97nm (18hrs) instead of the planned 35nm (6hrs).
A few hours later, we were rudely awoken with someone "a-hoying" us - we had anchored right next to some very good friends of ours!

Big lesson learnt there - plan the trip better and have a back up plan rather than make it up on the fly.

I went in there in 2011 and was lucky to get out early the next morning, never going back again.
Hope both those guys have recovered from their ordeal .