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A place called Fairhaven on the NW corner of French Island in Western Port Bay near Melbourne that we have Nicknamed Daffy's Mile because it has such a long sandbar (about 8kms) to run a nautical mile. I was too unfit to do a nautical mile ( I think my hands would have let go at speed), but did manage to get one in on my first reconaissance run out in the chop.

It was a bit of an edventure that shows there is some potential at this spot, but the tide needs to be very low to get a good bank.

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First session at the new westernport Bay spot. Loads of potential but it will be hard to realise without a super low tide. I thought todays tide was low but the skipper of our mothership said it gets half a meter lower. Like that it would have a clean bank for miles. As it was we were forced to run 20m outside the sandbar as the edge if the channel was submerged unter about 15cm of water. Too rough with following chop and ever present danger of not knowing if you were going to hit 2cm shallow mud bank. Wind from 20-35 knots but surging up and down and swinging west to North west so in a NM run you could start off at 115 degrees and 30 knots, have 100 in the middle and 20 knots and finish on 125 degrees in 30 knots again. This is how my best NM went with 36kts speed at the start, a dip to 25kts in the middle and 37 knots at the end!

We only just scratched the surface f this places' potential. The mothership got stuck in the mud as the tide dropped so we didn't get a chance to check out the southern end of the run. After the boat was stuck the skipper tortured us by casually mentioning that the bank was often higher and straighter at the other end. No one felt like sailing down the 9 kays to see if he was right. I was struggling to hang on for even the NM at the end.

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Excellent adventure!

Found it hard to get settled - was not familiar with this type of rough water.  The chop was running near near-parallel with the direction of travel and with a period of about 2ft wide, which meant that you got stuck in a groove.  Then at about the 1km mark, the sandbank disappeared upwind somewhat, for a distance of about 100m, thus making for some exilerating moments of chop bashing, before continuing for the second km.