by Ken ‘Brownie’ Brown
In 1991 I was running my beautiful 40ft custom built Pleysier game boat, Spirit of Brisbane. I had done a charter on a Saturday and on the way back to Manly, blew a turbo seal on one motor.
Normally, I would have waited until the following Monday to get it fixed, but I had a 5 day charter of four prize winners from a competition run by the Sunday Mail to fish in the Sanctuary Cove Game Fishing Tournament. It started on the Monday and I had to be at Sanctuary Cove no later than 4pm Sunday, to sign on for the tournament.
Luckily, I had great mechanics who understood my need for a quick fix and to get back operational. They turned up at 5pm and after the engines had cooled enough to work on, got the problem turbo off. Frantic phone calls were made to an after hours number at Caterpillar to try and get the new seal. They flew it up from Sydney overnight and my deckie and I worked into the night cleaning up the engine room, which was a mess.
The next morning, I was at the airport to pick up the new seal and raced it back to Manly for the mechanics to start fitting it. It was 2pm after we had it back together and sea trialled to make sure it was OK. That left me 2 hours to get to Sanctuary Cove and sign on.
My deckie and I headed off and blasted across the bay to begin the job of finding our way through the narrow channels in the southern bay to get there. Although I had done a lot of boating in the southern bay, the work we did was mostly offshore and I needed to make sure we didn’t hit the bottom in those sometimes narrow and shallow channels. Not a good thing to do with exposed props and rudders.
We were going flat wick until I got to Snipe Island just south of Coochiemudlo and the need for accurately spotting beacons became intense. It was blowing strong SE and there were frequent showers, which made using the radar to spot them dodgy.
There was no GPS in those days, so my deckie had the big navigation chart for the southern bay with me in the fly bridge and we very nervously began the journey. We had slowed down initially, but soon realised we were behind time, so I had to give it some humpty if we were to make Sanctuary by 3.45, tie up and sign on by 4.
The wind and our speed made handling and reading the chart very difficult and I was barking at my crewie, asking where the next beacon was … and what colour it was.
Luckily, being a windy, showery Sunday afternoon, there was very few boats around, that we had to slow down to pass. At one stage my deckie looked at me and said … “these charts are OK if you have a chart table and are going slow … but they are hopeless for what we are trying to do. I wish someone would invent a book like a street directory, so you could have it on your lap and easily see the beacons”.
I was concentrating very hard on not hitting the bricks, but in the back of my mind I was thinking about what he had said. We had to slow down going up the northern arm of the Coomera and luckily, we made it just in time.
After we had signed on, we came back to boat for a relaxing few beers after such a harrowing trip and the idea of a street directory of the waterways was percolating away in my brain. I knew a government cartographer, George Daniels, who worked with my little brother at Sun Map and recalled he had told me he had been offered redundancy and was thinking of taking it.
I phoned him about 6pm and asked him to drive down to Sanctuary Cove because I had something I wanted to talk to him about. He did and we talked long into the night about the idea of a street directory of the waterways and how to produce it.
When I got back to Manly after the charter, I went and saw Captain John Watkinson, the general manager of MSQ and Captain Kerry Dwyer the director of MSQ and pitched the idea to them and asked if we could use official charts for our base mapping and have ongoing access to their cartographers for updates on beacon position changes for future editions. They thought the idea had merit, as anything that encouraged the use of charts on boats was a good one and permission was given.
George Daniels, his wife Jackie and a friend or two then started on the huge job of digitising the charts and working out the layout of the book, using a now very old computer program called Corel Draw version 2.
It took nearly 2 years of development and double checking everything and me consulting with George to strip superfluous information off the official charts and provide what we wanted, a simple, easy to read book of maps which you could read at a glance at speed in a boat. The master stroke was putting the pink course line on the maps showing which side to pass the beacons on.
In 1993, the first edition of the book was released and was an instant success. We went on to produce 4 editions, one every 2 years. We self published and distributed and every edition sold out.
The Beacon to Beacon had become a “must have” item for boating in SE Qld.
After the 4th edition, George and Jackie signalled their intention to retire and I couldn’t do future editions without them. I told John Watkinson there would be no more editions and he said, “that can’t happen” and subsequently bought the mapping and book name from us and government cartographers took the project on and published another 4 editions.
When Campbell Newman was elected premier, he starting slimming down the public service and along with a lot of other helpful things done by MSQ, the team producing it was abolished.
MSQ still runs the maps online … https://www.msq.qld.gov.au/beacon-to-beacon-guides and it’s still published by Marine Maps as a book http://beacontobeacon.com.au
These days, most boats have GPS chart plotters which make navigation easier, but the Beacon to Beacon is still a very handy book to have on board.
It is remarkable that an idea that came from a comment from my deckie, Brad Bobbermein, was developed and produced by George Daniels and his wife Jackie, me and my wife Shelly and a few others and produced in the rumpus room of George’s house, mostly on his full size billiard table … became such a success.
There’s a saying that “you get one good idea in your life”. I think the Beacon to Beacon was my good idea.