Enjoying cruising the Queensland Coast

The sailing up the coast from Mackay has been delightful. There are lots of places to stop and anchor and the seas are blocked by the Barrier Reef. It has been a change to travel with breaks, and have something to look at. We left the marina midday Sat. John, who has worked in boating his whole life in this area, came to chat with us all in the morning about possibilities for anchoring. He is the father-in-law of Rabbit, our BPO contact in Australia. We stopped at Goldsmith Island that night, making the first 26 nm of the 860 to do. It was good to at least get started. This is one of the first Whitsunday Islands going north. Sunday night we did another 46nm to Hayman Is, the last in the chain. We got a chance to see the scenery from the water, if not from land. Being a weekend and a school break, there were a lot of boats and ferries around.

From there we did an overnight, with the days before and after, to arrive at Magnetic Island off Townsville. You can cover a lot more miles doing that, although the winds were very light. The wind wasn't going to get back up to a usable speed until Thurs, so took the opportunity to go ashore on Magnetic, and take a trip into Townsville. Today we are doing another 2 days and one night which should get us to Cairns (pronounced without the r).

I'm glad we had a chance to do some touring as we have seen so little of Australia. And we really enjoyed the location. It is much more interesting than Mackay. The anchorage was large and shallow with a small town and resorts on shore. Tides are getting lower (10 ft as opposed to 16) but that still gives a lot of beach to pull your dinghy up at low tide. The patch on the leaking seam is not working as well as we hoped, but we need to wait to find a place to redo it professionally. Since the island is only a 20 min ferry ride from Townsville on the mainland, it is quite developed as a tourist center. If we had more time we would have done some of the hiking trails which looked interesting. Instead we took a bus to the ferry terminal on the opposite shore. That and the ferry ride gave us a tour. Interestingly, the island is nicknamed "Maggie". That was also the password for the ferry's wifi.

Townsville with its architecture reminded us of a cowboy town from the last century. It is the largest city in tropical Queensland. There are many mining operations, active as well as defunct. The other industry is sugar cane, with its black smoke pouring across the landscape from many locations. There has been a water shortage this year so the hills look quite barren. There is a new Museum of Tropical Queensland where we spent several hours. I particularly enjoyed the information and displays on corals and sea life in the reef areas.

There was quite the exhibit on Captain Bligh and the ship he returned with after the mutiny. It had been damaged on a reef near here. We had watched one of the 5 versions of Mutiny on the Bounty a few months ago. It was interesting to hear about the "rest of the story". He managed to get to the Dutch East Indies, which is now Indonesia, in his small boat and crew. Quite the navigational challenge! From there he took a freighter back to England. He returned to the South Pacific to avenge the mutiny, with mixed success. The whole story could make another movie.

Rob and I did some provisioning and chandlery shopping as well as the sightseeing. We bought some more fishing lures. We have had several bites on the line today but nothing has made it to the boat. We have seen several turtles and perhaps a whale. There are been many birds that we don't recognize. The lorakeets on Magnetic Island were colorful and numerous.

It has been good to have Bill aboard to share the workload. He has a lot of experience on sailboats. He needs the Indonesian visa before we leave Australia. It is being mailed to Cairns so we need to stop there, hopefully not for too long waiting. However, we would like to spend some time seeing the city. We got our visas done in NZ where the consulate was near Dan and Becky's. The 400nm trip from Cairns is supposedly windier and wetter. We are thankful we have gotten this far without a north wind. We will add overnights as needed to get to Thurs Is by Oct. 8. The wind is forecast to go up to 25 to 30 tomorrow. The men on board will be happier about that than me. Right now we are going 6 kn with 12 kn of wind using the spinnaker.