It turns out there was a bit of confusion between us. She had said something like she wanted to go to "that island where a lot of cruisers stop that we hadn’t been before". Since we were heading for the Whitsundays, I thought she must have meant Gloucester Island, just up the coast from Whitsunday Island. Then she kept asking if we were going to stop in the Percy Islands. After a bit of back and forth, we worked out that it was Percy she had been talking about the whole time, not Gloucester. Fine, we’re stopping.
So, at the end of Day Three, we made the slight detour to West Bay at Middle Percy Island and dropped the hook next to two other boats.
Middle Percy is very pretty. The beach at West Bay is dominated by a big open A-frame building built by one of the earlier caretakers of the island. Since then, boats have been stopping by to share a barbecue or sundowners with each other and to leave a sign or a piece of artwork as a memento of their visit. The place is now so full of them that there’s no wall or ceiling space left and it’s hard to walk through without hitting your head on signs hanging from the rafters.
We headed ashore with our token sign (a mat woven with Begonia’s name made for us in Fiji) and found a place to squeeze it in. Then we went for a walk to the lagoon adjacent the beach. It is lined with mangroves and only accessible at high tide, so it makes an excellent hurricane hole.
The lovely A-Frame "Yacht Club" at West Bay, where we left a memento to Begonia among the many
We knew there was one boat in there since we could see the mast from Begonia. We were surprised to find many more, including two monohulls that were standing on the bottom, lashed to homemade high-tide docks. Diamond, the watchdog for one of the boats, alerted them to our approach.
We were soon having a long, meandering conversation with Kerri, a Mauri woman and her South African husband Malcom. They were one of two caretaker couples who had been awarded freehold leases by the government to manage the island and look after the National Park which is 5/6ths of its area.
We talked until it was proper middle-of-the-day hot and then we climbed the hill to the homestead at the top. There, we met Ann and Colin, who immediately welcomed us in and offered us cold limeade. Ann and Colin were the owners of the other big boat in the basin.
We disturbed a kaleidoscope of Blue Tiger Butterflies on our walk - magical
And yes, kaleidoscope is the accepted group name for butterflies - just perfect!
We were delighted to meet (and be looked after) by the resident custodians
Kerri and Malcolm, and Annie, and Robin
Kerri and Malcom had beaten us there by taking a four-wheeler up the longer, shallower leg of the loop track. We stayed for a while, chatting on their veranda and then Malcom took us to see the garden. He was a landscape architect in a previous life and was in a long program of trying to increase the variety and sustainability of the island’s yield of produce. Hopefully, in a few years they will only need to import grains like rice and wheat from the mainland. Their biggest problem at the moment is that they have missed all of the recent rains and were getting really low on water.
It was now late enough that I was starting to get a little worried about completing our loop hike before dark, so we bid them all farewell and started the gentle meander back down to the beach. Our plan was then to quickly clean ourselves up a bit and then return to the A-frame for sundowners with Kerri, Malcolm and the others on what was now five other boats in the bay.
The walk was a treasure trove of wildlife and amusing signs and ornaments to discover
We got there, just as one other young, (strangely aloof) couple was leaving to go to another boat. Kerri and Malcolm never showed. We met a young single-hander on the trail down and he said that he had been invited to dinner at the Homestead. I suspect Kerri and Malcolm were swept in as well. That just left a group of three catamarans, all of the same make. They seemed to be in a pretty impenetrable clique when we had tried earlier to bust in with waves and hellos. They seemed to have all decided to gather on one of their boats for sunset.
Sundowners ashore
That left just Maryanne and me to populate the big party at the A-frame that night. We opened a bottle of wine and I tried regaling Maryanne with some of my more amusing stories. She’d roll her eyes and then start correcting me, which seems much less amusing when it’s just us. Once the sun was well down, we decided we could be doing all of this in the comfort of our own home without having to face the crooked dinghy ride back to the boat. We packed up the rest of the wine to finish it there.
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