Living it up in Townsville

We arrived in Townsville halfway through the first week of the winter school holidays, minus two key crew members who were still in NSW enjoying shore leave.

Townsville icon Castle Rock from the tropical lushness of Queen's Gardens.

Capering round the Capes - Gloucester to Cleveland Bay

East cardinal mark, Gloucester Passage, with nestling chick.

Buoyed by our fantastic dinner ashore the previous night at Monte's Resort, we set off early from Gloucester passage across Edgecumbe Bay towards Bowen. We bid farewell to the wild and windy Whitsundays, although they had really had the final word: another wild sou'easter had blown up on our last day and shredded our mainsail as we headed across the top of Whitsunday Passage.

Third mate reports from the Whitsundays

Hello. It's the third mate here to tell you about Hammo, Montes, and Mays Bay. I have been living aboard for six months and I'm ten years old. I'm loving life on the seven swelly seas (a.k.a. Coral Sea). So down to business.

Mum, can I have a pie for breakfast? Mum, can I have a pie for dinner?

The Uncrowded Splendour of the Whitsunday Islands Continue

The weather had now most definitely become far more tropical sun and less tropical cyclone and we were burning up good days and good dollars in port. We thoroughly checked the underfloor smuggler hatches and dry stores for stowaway rats, wookies and backpackers and then made our departure from Airlie under perfect sailing conditions. A couple of charter catamarans lay off our bows heading for the islands. We ruffled our luff in a threatening fashion, they spilled their margaritas and thus we soon put them behind us. It was a late departure from the coast so we aimed for Stonehaven again and moored there for the night.

Manta Ray Bay, First Light. Suspiciously tranquil

Again with the Whitsundays

At Blue Pearl Bay we spied the sun and courted the voracious batfish with their favoured meal of delicately flavoured arborio rice. At last, the Whitsundays were beginning to show us their true colours and some snorkelling was likely in the upcoming days with the water clearing after the turbulence of the recent winds. All was well. Which is when a gentle wind change, much like that early in Pirates of the Carribean, wafted across the bay and heralded trouble brewing in the air. Months on the sea had tuned the senses of the Captain to these subtle shifts in the atmosphere and sure enough, on the falling of dusk, a no good pirate ship drifted into Blue Pearl Bay and secured itself to another mooring buoy. There was something unusual about this boat indeed: it came with the lines of a clipper but with a fully enclosed transparent marquee erected on the deck. The immediate blaring of some sort of Ibiza house music mix heralded its intentions and these intentions were unmistakable: a backpacker's dance party until the wee hours of the morning.

`The sun departs for the Winter Solstice at Stonehaven