Early Tuesday morning we negotiated our way through the Brisbane harbour channel, sharing it with mega tonne cargo boats. Wolfgang thought it was amusing that the SKS Doyle’s container boat which is 820 feet long and 148 feet wide when it was about 500 metres away radioed us as we approached to ask if we had seen them!!
7 1/2 hours after entering the harbour channel we arrived at the customs dock at Rivergate Marina. The Customs entry went smoothly and we then waited for Bio Security. The officer came and did pratique on our food items etc which took about 30 minutes and cleared us for going ashore. However this was not the end of the biosecurity process as we then had to wait for the timber inspection that all boats have to have when entering Australia.
Although Imagine is a fibreglass boat there is a lot of timber work on board so the biosecurity officer advised us that they wouldn’t be able to do the inspection until the following day. The marina let us stay on the customs dock overnight as we couldn’t be fully cleared that day. It was suggested we had as much as possible of the timberwork available for them to inspect . The rest of the afternoon until early evening was spent bagging up everything from the vberth cabin, port cabin and aft cabins along with moving items from the saloon .
