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
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