The Whitsunday Islands – Take 1

I apologise for taking so long to provide another instalment of Symphony’s travels.  We’ve been busy having too much fun and not enough time to just sit and write.  Or maybe I’ve just been slack.  You decide.

So, to reward your patience, I’m going to publish not one but TWO blogs.  

Keswick and St Bees

From Mackay, it’s just a hop and a skip, and you’re in the Whitsunday Islands wonderland.  We left Mackay on 6 September and headed to an island pair which seem to be called collectively ‘Keswick and St Bees’.  It was a lovely sail with less than twenty miles to cover, so we took our time, enjoying the scenery and the whale encounters.

With gentle southerly winds, we anchored in north facing Connie Bay on Keswick, pleased to find we had the place to ourselves.  That’s a rare thing up here.  Once anchored at a safe distance from the coral reef, we dinghied over to the beach and went for a wander.

We thought we could climb quite easily to the lookout on the western side of the bay; surely there was a track from the beach straight up to the lookout?   We discovered after some searching that we had to walk to the eastern end of the beach, through bush land, up a steep hill and along a ridge to the west to reach the lookout.  What might have been a fifteen-minute direct walk turned into a meandering 7 km round trip.  And we didn’t take much water with us.  And it was hot.  But the view was worth it.

When we arrived back at the beach, there was good news and bad: Blackwattle had joined us, which was the good news.  Bad news was, the tide had gone out, leaving the dinghy high and dry with many rocks between us and open water.  We hadn’t expected to be away so long.  You get some pretty impressive tides up in these parts!  It took quite some effort to get the dinghy back to deep water, which included taking the outboard off and lugging it to the water’s edge first. There might have been some cursing and slightly heated exchanges while this all took place.

It was nice to be reunited with Christian.  Graeme helped Christian feed a cable through his mast – for better radio comms.

We enjoyed a lovely sunset and caught up with news.  Later that evening the whale song started up, filling our boat with the otherworldly moans, whistles, clicks and hoots for the best part of an hour, and it was the loudest we’ve heard it.  Jamie was a little freaked out by the whole thing, and thought the whales were crying.

Brampton,  Lindeman and Shaw Islands

From Keswick we travelled in company with Blackwattle to Brampton Island.  It was once quite the destination (who hasn’t heard of Brampton?), but the resort has been closed for years.  It seems that everything was just left behind – the furniture, artworks, a cluster of jet skis, vehicles… Sand has claimed some of the beach-front cottages, sifting in under the doors and spreading.

From Brampton, we hot-tailed it Lindeman Island (another – extensive – closed resort).  Our friends from Bush Spirit had lost an anchor a couple of days earlier at (Pain-in-the) Neck Bay, Shaw Island.  Fortunately, they had another one as a spare. But they’d lost a Rocna, and were very keen to retrieve it.  They did some soundings and spent a lot of time with the Go-Pro, scanning the sea bed where they thought the anchor was.  They managed to pinpoint the anchor to within a few metres.  They’d already had a diver attempt to find the anchor, an unsuccessful and costly exercise, so were almost ready to give up and relieved we had turned up to help them with our dive set-up.  Graeme went over with them at low tide, and within sixty-seconds of him descending, he had located the anchor and was ready to begin the retrieval process.  We had a long celebratory happy hour that evening, with Hilary and Allan chuffed at the day’s results.  We passed them the next day as they were switching their spare anchor from one bow roller to the other, and reattaching their newly retrieved anchor (not as easy or simple as it sounds).

Cid Harbour, Butterfly Bay, Maureen’s Cove, Whitehaven

From Lindeman Island, we started doing some pottering around different anchorages.  First it was off to Burning Point – a lovely north-facing anchorage at the southern end of Shaw Island.  Then Cid Harbour with a million other boats and some rain.  The weather quickly fined up and we were off to Butterfly Bay at the northern end of Hook Island for some (average) snorkelling, followed by Maureen’s Cove where we used the Power Dive from the dinghy for some excellent diving.

We moved from Maureen’s Cove eastward past the Pinnacles and an unusual rock formation known as the Woodpile, and down towards White Haven.  White Haven, that long stretch of pure white sand, is ‘Tourist Central’ and always packed with big tourist boats and charter boats, so we gave it a drive-by, shocked at the carnage wrought by Cyclone Debbie earlier in the year.  The once-lush coastline is a tangle of sticks, and the hill, in places, looks stripped back to its bones.  After the cyclone, a lot of people got together and tried to ‘fix up’ the beach.  They’ve managed to make the southern end (where the tourists go) look half decent, but it’s a long beach and there’s an awful lot of destruction.

Pretty sad to see this once pristine beach has taken such a beating.  We picked up a mooring at Chalkie’s Beach (roughly opposite White Haven), where we spent a rather sleepless night listening to the mooring buoy clanging against our hull with a contrary tide/current thing going on.

The weather forecast for the following night had us scratching our heads a bit.  There was meant to be four days straight of 25-30 knot winds.  With northerly winds forecast, ahead of the southerly change due about midnight, we thought we’d spend the day in Turtle Bay on the southern side of Whitsunday Island before heading to the protected anchorages of Cid Harbour or perhaps Airlie Beach (Muddy Bay) to sit out the nasty stuff.  But then we thought of being stuck in either place with not much to do, and all the charter boats potentially dragging their anchors…  Mackay suddenly started to look very appealing.  With the boat safely in a marina berth, we could hire a car and go exploring, go out for dinner, go shopping, potentially fix the water pump (which was supposed to be getting delivered to Mackay), Jamie could get his laundry fix… So, the decision was made – not until after 10am, mind you!  We had an easy, quite fast sail on calm waters all the way back to Mackay, with whales keeping us company for some of the way, and we were safely back in the same marina berth by 1700 with plenty of daylight left.  Lizzie, one of the office ladies, sent her hubby along to help with our mooring lines, which made docking all that much more relaxed.

Mackay

If you haven’t brought a yacht into a marina berth before, it’s like trying to drive your stretch limo into a really tight car space, expensive cars on either side. Now, imagine the road is ice and you’re sliding all over it, and the wind keeps blowing you towards the other cars, so you’ve got to keep your speed up to counter-act the drift, and did I mention the owners of the nearby luxury cars are standing there watching you? And you’re steering the limo from a position pretty much in the boot.  And you don’t have any brakes.  Your passenger has one shot at lassoing a cleat or a post to control your forward progress so you don’t collide with the end of the parking space.  And the limo weighs 15 tonnes so you can’t just push it away from other cars with brute strength. That’s what it’s like getting a boat into a marina berth.  Pretty much all there is to it.  

As Graeme says, ‘What could possible go wrong?’

Ah, Mackay Marina.  How we love thee.   Once safely tucked into our berth, we enjoyed long showers and delicious Thai takeaway from George’s Thai on the marina.

The wind came in that night not long after midnight, as predicted.  It blew around 25 knots all night, making Symphony shudder and vibrate against her mooring lines.  This vibration caused Jamie excessive anxiety and he stayed awake all night, stressing.  This meant we stayed awake all night too…  It was a long night.  It was pretty tough to get into motion the next morning, but we got the washing done and took Jamie to see the Emoji Movie.  Maybe we were tired, or maybe it was just meh. (You’ll appreciate that reference if you’ve seen the movie. If you haven’t seen it, don’t bother!)

Cane fields and Finch Hatton Gorge

The following day, we had a hire car and spent the day enjoying Mackay’s surrounds.  We took a big drive out through the cane fields, watching the cane trains in action.

Our destination was Finch Hatton Gorge in the mountains, a semi-rainforest area with pretty walks.  We walked to the Ring of Fire waterfall and Araluen Falls, about a 7km round trip and well worth it.  There was plenty of bird life and critters in the undergrowth.  Even way out here there were signs of the recent cyclone, with huge fallen trees in places.

All but one of the four forecast models turned out to be wrong about the wind strength.  We only had that one day of strong wind then it all settled down again.  So, the next day, once more stocked up and with clean washing, we headed north again.

Coming soon: Whitsunday’s – Take 2.