Nara Inlet (Horn Island, Whitsundays)

[Kyle]While anchored at Cid Harbour Maryanne said that she wanted to go to Nara Inlet, on adjacent Hook Island. Nara is one of two deep, fjord-like indentations that cut far into the island. They have a couple of short walks as well as plenty of shoreline for kayaking, so off we went.

Nara is very pretty, which makes it popular with charterers, tour boats and packs of jet skiers. We used our shallow draft to tuck way in above most of them. {Primarily the cell phone signal doesn't go deep into the inlet so most boaters stop and anchor before losing the signal}.

Our first trail took us a short way uphill to a cave with Aboriginal art dating back almost 3,000 years. Our second trail was a less well-defined scramble to a freshwater swimming hole, which exists in the wet season. Since it is now approaching the end of dry season, we were not likely to find anything other than either a dry bowl or a stagnant pond for our efforts. We gave that a miss in lieu of some extra kayaking.

The cave art wasn't exactly spectacular (I thought they were fishing nets, the signage suggested possibly turtles). However the signage boards and audio story board were really well done and gave a lot more info on the Ngaro Aboriginal history

We enjoyed a tranquil kayak about the 'fjord'

As we were winding down afterwards, we got a visitor. A Sulfur-Crested Cockatoo landed on our davit solar panel. We were both inside at the time. I was munching on a handful of cashews, so I went out to see if he was interested. Oh, yes he was! He plucked each nut from my hand as gently as if he had been the wind itself.

An unexpected visitor from a Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo made Kyle very happy

Since we know parrots need a balanced diet just as much as we do, Maryanne cut up some fruits and vegetables for him. He ignored each one as if we had offered him a handful of pebbles instead. He didn't screech or talk, but the message was clear: "Stop wasting my time, I want nuts!". He only departed after I'm sure he was quite full and had taken the last of what was supposed to be my snack. I'm sure he's got quite a racket working the boats. The charterers are always splurging on especially nice appetizers. A well behaved bird like that could probably get away with showing up and fixing himself a plate.

We were lucky enough to have a very calm morning
(Maryanne went out on another kayak tour to fully enjoy it)

Cid Harbor (Whitsundays)

[Kyle]In the morning, Maryanne was still hankering for that walk, so we took Begonia over to Cid Harbour (Sawmill Bay) so she could hike the Whitsunday Peak trail. I had another day on board to make sure our laundry stayed dry. A few lingering computer issues took up enough of her time that she only ended up selecting the shorter walk to the next beach along (Dugong Beach).

I was feeling better and was pretty sure I would be up for walking pretty soon, so I gave myself the easy task while she was gone of installing our big new beach wheels on the Pudgy in preparation for our next excursion.

Everything was going great until I dropped one of the new wheels in the drink. Thankfully it floated, but it fell just out of arm's reach. By the time I got to it with a boat hook, it was still just out of reach. Damn! Now I have to launch the dinghy. I lost more time because our new oarlocks weren't installed, so I had to dig out tools to do that. By the time I was in the water. The wheel was no longer in sight, but I had a general idea which way it had drifted.

The good news is that the new oars work great. They are a little bit longer than our old ones and have more oomph. After stroke #6, I was happy to note that neither oarlock seemed to be in danger of imminent destruction. That was a new record.

The bad news was that the new axle, even without the actual beach wheels installed, was creating a LOT of drag. Rowing by myself, which is normally quite zippy, felt like I had Maryanne, a floor full of groceries and jugs of fuel and water along for the ride.

I found our wheel, then returned to Begonia to install it and its mate. Then I rowed to the beach, mostly because I didn't quite trust the new oar locks yet and I wanted to give them a good test. It took AGES to get to there. By the time I made it back to Begonia, I realized two things: First was that my back was just fine again. The second was that our beach wheel experiment was a failure, except for very limited circumstances. The drag is just too great and I worry that we wouldn't be able to fight any current at all with any kind of load. It's back to the old, low-profile little wheel at the back of the keel.

Kyle wasn't up to a walk ashore (so I went solo). I love the washer-shape shell debris on the beaches here (perfect for necklaces and bracelets)
We both enjoyed another stunning sunset

Another Reunion and more fixing things

[Kyle]Our plans after Shaw Island were to continue northward to eventually meet up with our friends Nick and Caitlin of Mahana. We also had a replacement oar lock awaiting pickup at the post office on Hamilton Island, so we decided to pop in there first.

We spotted a whale and calf (nursing) as we left Shaw Island

It turns out that having our mail sent to Hamilton Island wasn't our best idea after all. The post office is right at the big marina complex there. That makes it really convenient if you are in the marina, but an hour over-the-island hike if you are not. We hadn't fully understood that Hamilton Island is really a giant high-end resort. The transient rates at the marina are astronomical, so there was no way we were going to pull in for the night. They do have a dock you can use if you're not staying the night. That should work!

Then Maryanne found out that dock goes for $20/hr. After some back and forth, we decided to splurge on two hours worth and use the time to do a whole flurry of things. We booked the dock. We then got a message from Mahana saying that they were on the way south to rendezvous with us for dinner at their boat at May Bay, just a couple hours north of the marina. It was tight, but looked like we would be able to make it there by sunset.

For some reason, The Hamilton Island Marina doesn't just let you come on in. It is necessary to wait outside of the entrance for a launch to escort you to the dock. We lost nearly another hour waiting. This was cutting it close for dinner. The path to the dock wasn't that complicated, but we could see how a deep-draft vessel that didn't see one of the buoys and cut a corner could end up aground. Perhaps the marina management eventually decided that it was easier and cheaper to lead everyone in than to deal with the aftermath of the few who didn't make it.

As soon as our last line was cleated, Maryanne hit the dock running, towing a cart of laundry behind her. While it was washing, she would collect our mail and make a trip to the grocery store. My jobs were to pay, fill our water tanks and hose the salt off of the decks. When the guy asked me how many hours we wanted, I told him two should do it. “Okay,” he said, “That's sixty dollars”. Apparently, prices have gone up a bit!

Our Flying Visit to Hamilton Island resort was NOT by plane

We got everything done, plus a pair of longish showers each, and cast off our lines an hour and forty-eight minutes after we had arrived. Talk about a flying visit! We saved our wet laundry for drying in the sun the next day to save another hour's charge for using the dryers.

We left the marina and turned north for May Bay (on Whitsunday Island itself). Fortunately, there was still just a little bit of the ebb left from the falling tide. That boosted our speed enough to get us to where Mahana was anchored well before dark. Nick even came and picked us up to save us the trouble of deploying our dinghy.

Dinner was delicious and we stayed well into the night swapping boatyard stories (they had left just when we arrived) and catching up on what they have been doing since we last saw them. We now had a whole fistful of places to either seek out or avoid while we are in this neck of the woods.

In the morning, everyone else was keen to go out and get some exercise. Actually, I was, too, but my back wasn't better yet, so I decided to stay aboard watching our laundry dry. Fun! They had suggested moving to either nearby Cid Harbor or further away Long Island for a hike. I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about going to all of the trouble to move Begonia, so Nick and Caitlin offered to take Maryanne to Cid Harbor in their dinghy. I saw them disappear around the corner, but didn't realize they had given up on the whole journey once they saw how much distance still remained. Instead, they were all just pottering around at the beach behind Begonia. Oops! Maybe I should have been more helpful.

Ashore at Mays Bay with the lovely Nick and Caitlin

In the evening, it was our pleasure to host them. They were nice enough to be very complementary about the improvement in Begonia's appearance as compared to before the yard. Nick had even taken our broken oarlock back to Mahana with him during the day, where he engineered a good-as-new repair so that we will have a spare. These are the kind of goodies boaties sometimes bring as gifts for dinner.

Morning came again. Mahana set off west and we planned to relocate to Cid Harbour for a walk, but I just wanted to do one quick thing first. The seawater foot pump in our galley has been having trouble holding its prime. I had a theory that one of the anti-return valves had something in it that was keeping it from closing all of the way, allowing the water to flow back through the inlet. I wanted to take it apart and clean out the valves. The problem had been slowly getting more annoying, so I knew I would need to get to it soon.

Then Maryanne noticed seawater on the floor of the cupboard. Well, we can't let that continue. I guess I'm doing that this morning. These pumps are a little bit annoying because you can't get to any part of the innards without dismantling the whole thing and you can't test it out without putting the whole thing back together again.

I took it apart, then carefully cleaned and reassembled it. The leak was still there. Second time, same thing. On the third overhaul, going over everything very carefully, I finally noticed a tiny pinhole in one of the rubber diaphragms. Ah, hah! SIX hours after I started, I finally got the damn thing back together and working like it was supposed to. Then I spent the next hour and a half cleaning all of the dishes that had been marinating in the seawater at the bottom of the cupboard.

Maryanne, in an attempt to keep herself busy while I was doing all of this, decided to swap hard drives in three of our computers. This, of course, led her down her own rabbit hole of needing to reinstall new operating systems, which needed to be uploaded because the hard versions that we have aren't the current version. Then, of course, the new versions weren't compatible with much of our tried-and-true software, so we needed new versions of those, plus licensing agreements, blah, blah, blah. All of this was necessary before she could even restore backups of the old drives onto the new ones. She got done even after I did. Then she was faced with the message: Estimated Time Remaining: 13 Hours. So there were two five-minute jobs that ate up a whole day!

Maryanne did manage one more trip ashore via Kayak
To investigate the beautiful 'coral trees' and the noisy Friar birds

Onward to the Whitsundays

[Kyle]We decided that our next stop after Arch Cliffs (Fraser Island) would be Shaw Island in the Whitsunday Group (a 350nm passage to the north). We had a few reasons for this. Firstly, we had lost a lot of cruising time in the yard. Secondly we explored much of the intervening area the year before, so we didn't feel so much like we were missing out on that. Lastly, since we were now entering the edge of the trade wind zone, it would be a lot easier to get there than to get back. This would allow us the maximum time to wait out any weather windows for going back south.

Since Arch Cliffs is a very well spaced out anchorage with no tricky exit, I decided I wanted to leave without bringing the engines into the equation. Thus, we switched our usual roles. Maryanne took the helm and managed the sails while I manned the windlass as manual lever-pumper. Without the requirement to baby the engines by warming them up slowly, the sails filled and we were immediately zooming away from the beach. Since it was around the time that I usually go off watch when we are on multi-day passages and since Maryanne was already comfortably seated on our fancy new helm seat, I left her to it for the next few hours.

By the time she woke me, we were almost completely across Hervey Bay. My day-watch was not so productive. The wind died, as forecast, and I kept having to tell myself to be patient, it will return soon. I clocked eight miles to Maryanne's twenty-nine.

After I had been off watch for an hour or so, the wind finally showed up. I roused briefly to help Maryanne deploy the spinnaker and then went back to bed to sleep through the next forty miles. It went that way for the next two days with bright, cloudless days and nights that were fifty percent bright moonlight and fifty percent brilliant stars. Our ETA was now predicted to be in darkness, so we brought the spinnaker down and bagged it in exchange for a much more sedate run behind the full jib.

By my next night watch, I gradually reduced sail from the full jib to nothing at all. We were still going too fast to arrive in daylight, so I turned Begonia broadside to stop us completely. That worked perfectly, but makes for some boring watch keeping.

A mixed sail: Spinnaker to waterspouts, and we were entertained by the stars (not photographed), the sunsets and the dolphins - bliss

In a fit of industry to help keep myself awake, I decided to move our spinnaker bag from its temporary home under our cockpit table to its usual spot in our forward starboard berth. As I was making the last heave, I felt a very distinct and painful pop. That instantly transformed me from a relatively fit and healthy person to an almost complete invalid. I managed to make it through my watch, but when Maryanne saw the way I was crouching over the wheel, she immediately knew anything physical was going to be her job for the next few days.

She was a much better sport about it than I was. I felt terribly guilty and useless as I watched her do all of what were normally jobs that I do specifically to take the load off her.

We were kind of lucky on our first day at Shaw Island because it was uncharacteristically cold and drizzly. We had crossed the Tropic of Capricorn on this passage, but we did not feel like we were in the tropics. That made it that much easier to have an easy, indoor day where my main task was to try to find a comfortable position while Maryanne did the rest.

When the weather did finally improve, I encouraged her to explore the island on her own while I stayed behind trying to resist the urge to do something that I thought was helpful, but was really going to screw up my back. I even had to miss out on a reunion with one of the other boats that had also written an article for the Go West magazine. We hadn't seen each other since arriving in Australia. Maryanne got to do that one on her own as well.

Exploring ashore at Shaw Island

Arch Cliff (Fraser Island)

[Kyle]There are no actual arches at Arch Cliffs. Our best guess is that the dunes that make up the “cliffs” and are collapsing in a roughly semi-circular shape, might have looked like arches and cliffs to whoever coined the name as they sailed by at a distance of many miles. At any rate, it is very pretty and has that curious Australian feature of having sands of completely different colors right next to each other with absolutely no transition whatsoever.

The sandy cliffs attacted the odd (fancy) tour group too

A trip ashore for another beach walk (and dune climb)

Arch Cliffs is another one of those places that has no hiking trails, per se. However, there is a closed 4WD fire road that leads inland from the campsite at the north end of the beach (Bowarrady Creek), so we walked to the creek campsite and found the trail. We had initially planned to do a nice, mild walk where we went in for fifteen or twenty minutes and then turned back. Further study of the map revealed that the road forded a stream in only four and a half kilometers. We thought that might be pretty and changed our turn-around point to that. Like back at Garry's, most of the walk was uneventful, but it was well shaded, and it felt good to be out in nature stretching our legs.

The very best part of the walk turned out to be almost immediately after leaving the beach campground. About a hundred meters in, there was a zone about another hundred meters wide where the birdsong just completely took over the forest. So many different varieties were chattering away or whistling long, lilting songs. It really did sound like one of those phony jungle soundtracks that they pipe into the tropical rain forest section at the zoo. We knew when we started hearing it again on the way back out that the sound of surf on the beach would not be too far behind. Later on the trail we heard (but never spotted) several whipbirds, with their impressive 'whip crack' of a call and mostly getting the traditional simple 2-note female reply)

We loved the fire-trail walk

And the birdsong surrounded us as soon as we enter the trail from Bowarrady Creek Campsite

The Male (eastern) Whipbird has a distinctive call

[Maryanne]We haven't shared that Fraser Island is quite a special island in a few other ways. It's the world's largest sand island for a start. It also the only place on Earth where tall rainforests grow on sand dunes at elevations of more than 200 metres (656 feet), and it has half the world's perched lakes (lakes formed when depressions in dunes fill permanently with rainwater). And the amazing interior forests are due to a symbiotic relationship with a range of fungi that helps trap and retain the required nutrients in the sand dunes. Its original Butchulla name is K'gari means 'paradise' (remember Garry Owens from Garrys Anchorage was also of the Butchulla mob?). I was so happy we were able to spend a few days and nights here this time.

In the evenings we simply sat and enjoyed the sunset, and were occasionally entertained by the spouting of a passing whale, and one in particular that seemed to want to spend hours tail-slapping in the distance.

Sunsets and passing Whales