The rains and big winds of the previous few days returned in earnest, so all of the boats in the anchorage stayed tucked inside our cabins waiting for the next break in the clouds to appear.
When the din decreased somewhat, Maryanne quickly dove out of the protection of the bimini and threw off the mooring pendant. She was dry on her leeward half, but soaked on her windward half. I gave her a couple of twirls, then she was just damp all over. I was feeling smug because my top half was still dry. That wouldn’t last. By the time she had changed into dry clothes, the deluge had resumed and all of mine were sticking to me. The bimini didn’t seem to stop the rain so much as slow it down by making it go around the sides to get to me.
The river was the color of chocolate milk, with plenty of debris to dodge along the way. All of that rain made for a fast ebb though, and we made it to the Sandy Strait turnoff in just two hours. The wind was from astern now, so I used the opportunity to give the jib a good, long rinse. The water drained off of it in a big sheet onto the deck, where it joined the river plunging toward the trampoline. At least the rain was keeping the midges at bay.
The rain stopped just as we reached the anchorage at Pelican Bay, which is just inside the notorious Wide Bay Bar. We were at the wrong state of current/tide to go through that, so we would have to wait until tomorrow to actually transit.
Our relief at finally seeing blue skies was short-lived. Ten minutes later, the sun started evaporating all of the accumulated water and we suddenly found ourselves in a steamy, airless sauna. Oh, be careful what you wish for.
That was good for the current, but bad for the tide, which had just passed dead low. The Mary River has quite a few shallow spots to traverse and a meter buffer at mid-tide would have been nice to have for them. We had one spot where the depth dropped to 1.6 meters (we draw 1m). Luckily, the great wind that got us this far was dying, so we were down to a crawl by then anyway. I was half expecting a bump as we found a submerged log or something, but it never came.
We started an engine to keep us going. As the river narrowed, the banks slowly eased from being thin lines halfway to each horizon, to walls of mast-high trees only a few boat widths away. The current increased and we ‘zinged’ up the river at over seven knots. When we got to Maryborough and made the one hundred and eighty-degree turn to pick up the mooring ball, we practically stopped. I had to use 2,000rpm just to hold us in position while Maryanne got us secured. I timed some debris going by with a stopwatch to see if our speed transducer was accurate. Yep – three knots of current.
I did all of the outdoor items on our checklist first because a wall of black cloud was looming ever closer. No sooner had I made it inside than the skies opened up and stayed that way for the rest of the day. It rained so hard we had to shout to each other to be heard over the noise. Sometimes we could only see the barest hint of the nearest bank through the rain-streaked windows. This is what the forecasts said our sail from Bundaberg would be like, but each cell along the way managed to pass just ahead of or just behind us. We never had more than three or four stray drops on the way. Now that it was really coming down, it was nice to observe from the comfort of a warm, dry cabin without the need to go out there and do any sail handling or navigating in it.
Maryborough is a strange and surprisingly interesting town. We started our first day there at the Bond Store Museum and information center. Maryanne gratefully collected every brochure she could find and then handed them all to me to carry.
The Bond Store Museum was mostly dedicated to the history of Maryborough as seen from the perspective of the busy seaport it was until just a few decades ago. For the longest time, it was the northernmost port on the east coast where ships could clear into Australia. When I remarked to the staff that it seemed a strange place to put an international seaport, I was met with blank stares.
”It’s only fifteen miles up the river.”
Actually, it’s twenty, all of which is winding and shallow, plus it’s another fifty miles from the first break in the coastline to get that far. Places like Gladstone, Bundaberg and Mackay are all right on the ocean and they have all been in existence for much of Maryborough’s history. In the days of sail, it would be common to spend two days just on that part of the journey from the ocean. This is Australia, though. Most of their population centers are completely on the other side of the continent from the rest of the world. In that context, sailing an extra seventy miles must seem like nothing.
We then went to the Military Museum, which is comprehensive and depressing. War is a horrible business to begin with and Australia seems to have suffered disproportionately. They were attacked directly in WWII, but most of the people lost were halfway around the world in defense of allies also halfway around the world.
In an effort to cheer ourselves up a bit, we went out into the rain and splashed our way to Brennan and Garaghty’s Store Museum. Brennan and Garaghty’s was essentially the last of the old-fashioned General Stores where customers would give their list to the grocer behind the counter instead of perusing the aisles and filling their cart themselves. The orders would get filled and delivered when they were ready. The last proprietor spent all day in the store and then made deliveries afterwards, earning him the nickname “the Midnight Grocer”. Newer, cheaper stores with better selection eventually siphoned away all of their business and the store was abandoned after the last Geraghty died, complete with fully-stocked shelves. Surprisingly, it was never vandalized or looted and is now being restored as a snapshot in time by the Historical Society.
We finished out our day weaving back and forth through the town in search of the its many murals. The one that impressed me most was not the biggest or the best, but the one that told the story of an old man who pushed a wheelbarrow full of tools from Maryborough to Perth during the Great Depression looking for work.
The next morning, after breakfast out with a cruising friend who lives in the area (the lovely Justine), Maryanne also had us booked in for a guided walking tour of the town. Our walk started unexpectedly at the epicenter of an anti-mask, anti-vaccine rally. We listened for any hint of a reasoned argument within, but mostly the crowd was red-faced and screaming about how having to wear an itchy mask is JUST LIKE being loaded into a railroad car and taken to a concentration camp. The Australian band, Midnight Oil, did a song called, “Short Memory” about this. They need to go to the Military Museum and read about the horrors Australians and their families endured just three generations ago to protect the world from the Nazis and then try to make the argument that wearing a surgical mask at Baskin Robbins is to be subjected to the same type of tyranny. It’s not the same thing. It’s not even on the same planet as the same thing.
Our tour group was eager to separate ourselves from that biome. We retraced a lot of the steps Maryanne and I had taken the day before, but with much better explanations for what we were seeing. Afterward, Maryanne dragged me to the Story Bank. I knew I would never be able to get out of this, because it is Maryborough’s main tourist attraction. It occupies the birthplace of the author of the “Mary Poppins” books, P L Travers, whoes family promptly moved to England and never returned again.
Only slightly less important than John Jameson (who you may recall basically invented Western Civilization by opening a distillery in Ireland), P L Travers singlehandedly and most expertly created the genre of children’s Literature. Every children’s book before and after were inspired by her prose, except for that cheeky Mark Twain. Every fond memory I have ever had of my childhood was apparently made while reading fanciful passages from one of her books. Oh, yeah. I must’ve forgot.
One thing I did enjoy learning was that P L Travers hated the Disney movie. She was not a fan of singing or dancing and thought Disney’s compulsion to squeeze a three-minute song into every five minutes of film made her serious and stern character Mary Poppins look like a chirpy idiot.
Maryanne and I were starting to suffer from all of the miles put on our footwear, so we popped into a local, semi-dodgy-looking pub to take a load off while enjoying a cold pint. Maryanne has been looking for a while for a place that will do a roast dinner as an alternative to our usual Thanksgiving Day fare, which she cooks and I clean up after. When she asked the barmaid if they do roasts, she said, “Sure we do, Love.”
Great.! No, just good. Great came later, when Maryanne asked what kind of roast. The answer came, “What kind do you want?”
”Since it’s American Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, do you have turkey?”
The woman disappeared for a while to confer with the chef, then came back and told us that the next day’s roast special would now be turkey. He said he hadn’t done one of those for a while. Maryanne pushed and almost, almost got them to agree to make a cherry pie for us as well. Apparently, Australians don’t like cherry pie as much as I do, so she would have to do it herself aboard Begonia.
Since we had pretty much exhausted Maryborough’s offerings, our third day there was an easy one. First on the list was a ride on Mary Ann, which Maryanne insists that I find a different way to phrase. Mary Ann is Maryborough’s historic steam train. Trips are run one day a week by a small cadre of very enthusiastic volunteers. The train used to deliver timber to the docks, but now runs 1/3 of a mile through the park, then reverses to return to the beginning, turning a ten-minute walk into a six-minute train ride. The interesting thing about the Mary Ann is that it has the only steam engine in the world with a vertical boiler. This was so that the wheels could be placed closer together, allowing for tighter turns.
One of Maryanne’s favorite running jokes is that I am an embryonic train spotter, so she was having a great time making jokes about buying me a clipboard and a lawn chair so that I could carefully record each passing of the one and only train as it goes back and forth in the park. Har, har! She even practically shoved me onto the engine so that I could experience a real conversation with real steam train engineers, “Soooooo…pressure gauge, huh? Well, I’ll be off, then!” I give it about a thirty percent chance Amazon is sending me a baseball cap with a picture on to commemorate the moment. She thinks she is funny.
We still had a few hours to kill before the Thanksgiving pub meal we were not going to miss, so we decided to go to the movies for the first time in a while to enjoy some real air conditioning. The movie theater business is not doing well. In attendance were us and six other old people to see the James Bond movie where he dies. Oh, Wait! Spoiler Alert! There you go.
Thanksgiving at the pub didn’t quite replicate the atmosphere of being surrounded by friends and family, but they had done it just for us and made sure we left clutching our bellies and complaining about how full we were. We couldn’t have been more grateful and the staff all seemed genuinely happy to have a part in giving us our own personal holiday.
{Maryanne: Kyle has barely touched on the things we did in the three days ashore. Maryborough was a beautiful town full of plenty to occupy us. We sampled at least 3 different tea-shops, several pubs, and tastings. We wandered through various parks, art galleries, and museums not mentioned above. It was a delight. It was so sad to hear that in Jan 2022 the town was subject to yet another major flood event (over 10m above 'normal') that burst through flood barriers and put many of the places we had visited under water, leaving many businesses and residents struggling to work out how to recover}.
