A New Adventure - To Tasmania

Well it's been 3 years and 8 months since our last cruising adventure and poor Winkali has been sitting idle for most of that time with only the very occasional short trip since then.

It's finally time to dust her off and go cruising - to Tasmania.

We left Port Douglas on 1 November for the first leg of the trip which took us to Townsville. Winkali was due her 2 yearly haul out for a bit of maintenance. Sailing was quite uneventful with calm seas, meaning we had to motor most of the way. 

We had a bit of a hiccup as we left Orpheus Is when Ian noticed a bubble in the hose leading from the water pump. Worried that it might burst and leave us motorless, we headed back to Orpheus Is to the safety of a mooring.

On closer inspection, the bubble seemed 
to a result of corrosion on the metal pipe to which the hose was attached. The following day we had fair winds in which to sail which brought us closer to Townsville. From there we were confident the hose would hold out and we weren't disappointed.

Travel lift awaits

Now hauling a yacht out for maintenance is always an interesting thing. First up we manoeuvre into a u-shaped enclosure where a travel lift awaits.

Two giant slings are then carefully (we hope) placed into position under our boat so as to lift it without tipping the boat out. Incidentally, we are still on board as we haven't had a chance to get off yet. You can see Ian standing at the bow.

Winkali is carefully lifted out of the water.

The travel lift then drives forward far enough so Ian and I can step off the bow onto land.






Winkali is then lifted high into the air to clear the dock.

From there she is taken onto dry land where she is lowered so all the growth and sludge can be guerneyed (high pressure hose). Ian kindly offered to take a photo of me doing it, however, OHS rules mean that we stand and watch while someone else does it for us 😊.




From there she is parked and propped up so we can work on her. 

I dressed up as a marshmallow and did the painting.

Ian dressed up as a tradie and did the mechanics.





We both worked very hard and completed our work within two days and were ready to be set back in the water first thing on Friday.

Unfortunately, strong winds arrived which made it unadvisable to launch without risk. Not wanting to damage the paintwork, and the rest of the boat under the paint, we decided to delay. This meant having to wait till Monday as all the workers around here have weekends off. How inconvenient!!





Might as well make the most of it and get the washing dry. Winkali becomes a clothes line for the day.




Winkali is ready to sail and we have three days to kill, so I google up the 10 best things to do around Townsville (for free).

Number 1 is to go to the top of Castle Hill, the only hill in Townsville. 
We have the choice to drive up there or to walk the Goat Track. Since we don't have a car . . . . . Mmaaaaa.

It's a fair old walk from the boat yard to town which is the starting point. We time it perfectly for walking in the hottest part of the day.

Castle Hill against the backdrop of high-rise units

We have already walked 3.5k to get to this point. Another couple of ks should get us to the base.

Getting closer

At last, the beginning

It's steep

The view from the top made it all worth while.







We even befriended an unsuspecting tourist so she could take a photo of us. We had to abandon her later though as she was too fast for us.

Now google hadn't listed our next major activity in the top 10. As a matter of fact, I don't even think google knows about this place!

Well, it's not a secret that Ian and I like nothing better than to go poking around swamps with our cameras, and our boat yard was located right next to a lovely tidal mangrove swamp. 

Tides out. Perfect!

This is what we found:

An enormous mudskipper, with an old man face.

A Great Egret eating an enormous mudskipper.

A Royal Spoonbill, looking for a mudskipper.

A Reef Egret fleeing from a mudskipper.

More small mudskippers, with a weird periscopic fin on their backs which they erected when they got aggressive.

These little ones were extremely territorial and would erect their fin and go at anything which stood in their way, even crabs. 

Ian emerges safely from the mangroves.







Well, fingers crossed. Tomorrow is Monday and we are hoping to get back into the water first thing in the morning. It's still windy, but it should ease off over night.

As I have already covered most of Queensland in previous blogs, I won't bore you too much by going over old stuff. 

The Whitsundays

An odd thing happened to me in Townsville, 2 days before we left.  I had somehow picked up a tick while in  town.  It must have come off an overhanging branch from one of the trees along the road.  It had attached itself to my head just above the hairline. 

Ian managed to remove it and found that it hadn’t been there too long as it wasn’t bloated yet.  That was lucky.

The morning we were leaving, bright and early, I woke with a very swollen face and a closed up eye.  We decided I should go to the doctor before leaving, just to make sure I wasn’t going to die. 

A couple of hours later, armed with Cortizone and antihistamines, we left for Magnetic Island.  Half way there, the wind picked up for favourable southward sailing, so off we went, towards Gloucester Island instead.

All was good till that evening, when the wind changed direction and the weather turned nasty.  We had bought more bananas, were we getting too complacent with them? 

We quickly found an anchorage off Rita Island, which isn’t to be found in our anchorage bible.  Ian is getting good at this.  I think he should write a book on alternative anchorages

The next afternoon saw us anchored at a better known anchorage off Gloucester Island with a friendly name of Breakfast Bay.

We did a little fishing, as usual and before long, I caught an interesting looking fish with blue teeth.  After putting him in a bucket of seawater to keep him alive, we looked him up in Grant’s Fish Guide to see if he was edible.  Grant’s tells us that it was a Blue Tusk Fish – “ a well textured food fish with bright blue-green bones.”   He was delicious!   

The next day we went ashore to do some exploring.  We found some sunscreen left on the beach which was handy, as the last one I found a few weeks ago had nearly run out. 

There were quite a few Mistletoebirds on the island.  I made some silly little noises that seem to attract birds.  It worked and this female Mistletoebird came and had a curious look.  The males have a bright crimson breast, similar to a Robin Redbreast.

A Young Sea Eagle lands nearby.  He calls continuously to his parents for more food.

Our next island was Grassy Island.  The unsettled weather continued and produced some heavy rain.  We took advantage of it and washed our clothes, hair and anything else that looked a bit grubby. 

We noticed a Sea Eagle sitting on a tree branch on the island, looking very wet and miserable.  Later that day, after it cleared we went ashore and found that he had move to a sunnier spot to dry and rearrange his messed up feathers.

Next on the list was Hook Island, one of the larger islands of the Whitsunday group.  We stayed at Nara Inlet, which provides protection from most weather directions.  It is an outstandingly beautiful spot to anchor, somewhat reminiscent of the New Zealand  fiords.













Large tides swirl around the foreshore boulders, creating natures sculptures.



Apparently, Nara Inlet is a breeding area for Hammerhead Sharks.  I decided not to go snorkelling today and thought I might do some fishing instead.  Ian said if I dropped a nail overboard, I might catch a Hammerhead.
From here, we went to Whitsunday Island  where we snorkelled and saw squid. 
At Shaw Island we found a freshwater stream which flowed down the hillside in a series of rock pools.  Heaven is laying in one of these pools, looking through the overhanging palm fronds at the white fluffy clouds in an azure sky.  Memories like these stay fresh forever.

Another stroke of luck at Shaw Island was that evening when we heard a thump in the cockpit.  We went in search of the source of the thump and found a squid of edible size which had committed a kamikaze act.  How convenient.

Next stop was Goldsmith Island.  This was part of the Sir James Smith group of islands which all had wonderful names to do with forging and smithing, such as, Ingot Island, Solder Island, Farrier Island, Blacksmith, Silversmith and Lynne Island which threw a spanner in the works.  Thinking Linne must be some smithing term that we hadn’t heard of before, Ian looked it up.  Linne turns out to be the man that formulated the system of botanical classification using Latin names for genus and species.  We’re not sure if he ever even came to Australia.

 




We found a really unusual tree which is Hoop Pine on the bottom and Golden Orchid at the top.  I doubt that it has a  name, either Latin or common.






By now our fresh food supplies had almost run out, so our next destination was Mackay. 
On our return bus trip from shopping, we met a woman who had sailed around Australia with her husband on a 21 foot yacht.  It took them 6 years.  They were living on that boat in the marina, so Ian and I went for a walk later that evening to have a look at it. 
It was tiny and had been built in 1893.  This was a reality check for me, who had been secretly thinking lately that maybe we should have a bigger boat with a watermaker and a hot shower on board.  The truth is, Winkali (36 foot, built 1990) is palatial in comparison.
I’ve had a couple of computer problems lately which is why I haven’t blogged lately.  I managed to Google up the problem just before we left Mackay and I’m back in business. 
Right now we’re at Curlew Island which is just south of the Whitsundays. 

 

Although we have sailed through countless schools of fish, they are impervious to our fishing lure and the closest we come to catching one, is on our camera.

The above photo is a collage of 7 photos I took going through these schools.  I'd like to get all this in one photo but I don't think it will ever happen.

The Last Crab

Brisk winds got us from Dunk Island to Goold Island in only 2 hours.  Ian was hoping it didn't turn nasty because he had bought bananas during our last shop.  

Bananas are meant to be bad luck on boats so I thought I might like to buy one and eat it before we got back to the boat. Ian had the same idea but he had bought a bunch of them and was ignoring his superstitions. 

  

We had a relaxing afternoon after anchoring off Goold Island and did a bit of fishing, deciding to go over to the island the next day.  Ian had better luck than I did by not catching anything.  I caught a small fish (hooked in the gills), which I released,  Unfortunately, it had been mortally wounded and slowly sank, belly up.  I felt lousy!

Cameron and Colin had also anchored at Goold and had gone over to the island in their dinghy.  On their way back, they dropped in to warn us about a particularly nasty stretch on the beach, and whatever we did, don't go there.

Horrified, we said "Crocodiles?'

No, it was Paper Wasps.  Colin explained that one minute they were walking along the beach, minding their own business, the next thing he was being stung all over.  They even got up his board shorts.

We tried unsuccessfully not to laugh.

The following day, Ian goes to the danger zone to track down and photograph the culprits.  

I stayed well away.

That afternoon, we sailed to Hinchinbrook Island via the Hinchinbrook Channel and anchored in Gayundah Creek a beautiful mangrove lined estuary set against the magnificent backdrop of Mount Bowen.

It was a perfect habitat for mud crabs

THE MUD CRAB SAGA

About 14 months ago, while in Darwin, we decided we should buy a crab pot as there were millions of Mud Crabs out there in the mangroves waiting to be eaten.

Although we almost set it once (see A Conundrum), it has just been one of those items which adorn our boat - until now.

This was the perfect opportunity in the heart of Mud Crab territory.  Off we went in the dinghy to set the pot in a likely place.  Then it was off to do a bit of trolling while we waited for the Mud crab to get in the pot.  With Coral Trout heads as bait, how could he resist.

A while later, we returned to inspect the pot. Nothing!

We relocated it just around the corner, maybe it was too secluded where we had it and the crabs didn't even know about that little estuary.

So far, no fish and no crabs.  We had curried vegies for dinner.  

Ian wanted to check the crab pot before we went to bed. I was worried about him getting eaten by a croc, so I went with him, that way he had only a 50% chance if there was a croc about.

We pulled up the pot. Bingo!  A beautiful fat mud crab.

Now a Mud Crab has powerful claws and can be the cause of lost fingers, so it took a bit of maneuvering to get him from the pot to a bucket.  From there it was over to Winkali where Ian had to truss him up with string before putting him into the freezer which would put him to sleep before going into the pot.  By now I was feeling sorry for the Mud Crab.

An hour later it was into the cooking pot.  I looked sideways at the pot as its legs were waving about.  Ian explained that it was only nerves left.  The crab had been killed instantly with the boiling water.

The following day, we sat down to a fine lunch of Mud Crab.

We cracked open the huge claws and found . . . . . a small amount of meat in them. 

Does anyone want to buy a used crab pot?