Whitsunday Bareboat Sailing

Bare Boat Charter in the Whitsunday Islands.

Saturday:
We picked up our boat, a 34' catamaran named "Tropical Moondancer" During the briefing / skipper check out, Geoff was demonstrating the use of the traveller and oops, allows the boat to Jibe whilst the traveller was loose. The first swing took Brian in the face (luckily, just the main sheet, not the boom) and the second had the boom hit Steve (luckily, in the arm, not the face). Profuse apologies followed, but a good lesson in why it is a tad dangerous to Jibe. Guess he figured we could handle the boat as he left us on our own after a bit.

On the way from Hamilton Island to our overnight anchorage: Joe's Beach, inside of Cid Harbor on Whitsunday Island, we managed to convince our boat mates (who had told us that sailing in anything more than 10 knot winds would be dangerous and we should motor) that sailing was OK after all. We raised the sails and were making 4 knots with a beamside wind when Steve decided to trim the sails and boosted the speed up to 5 knots. This is more than we could make with our pair of wee little 9 hp engines, the sails were trimmed without capsizing nor smacking anyone with the boom. Hooray!

There was some concern that the anchor wasn't well set, so Kathy and Denise had a sleepless night, awakening often to ensure we were still anchored. Steve & Brian were sawing logs. We did end up fairly close (30 m) to another yacht, but finally figured it was due to a lot of anchor chain and the tidal change. (The stupid stinkin' markers on the anchor chain were mostly missing, so we had little idea of the chain we had let out until it reached the end. At that point, with dusk on us, we left it all out). The sunset was spectacular - see the cid harbor sunset photo.

Sunday:
A long day of sailing put us at Blue Pearl Bay at 12:10 pm for lunch, then around the N. tip of Haymen Island to Butterfly Bay where we found a public mooring bouy and overnighted there. The best snorkeling is on the northern bays of Haymen and Hook Islands. With south-easterly winds, things are looking good. Croc for dinner - it doesn't taste like chicken, for the record.

Monday:
Breakfast at Butterfly Bay with Kathy & Steve snorkeling on both sides of the bay. Fine, but nothing spectacular. A short trip to Maureens Cove provided awesome snorkeling for Kathy, Steve & Denise.

Wanting to see more, we made an error and left an awesome sight for another location, Manta Ray Bay (which is supposed to be yet better!) There were no mooring spots well in the bay, so we took one near the point. With an ebbing tide, the current was out to the ocean and Denise, occupied by a sighting of a "big fish" (Maori Wrasse) she didn't notice the tide was pulling her into the big sweels of the open ocean. Kathy finally got her attention as Steve swam to the Tropical Moondancer and released the tender for her grab and pulled everyone onto the boat. All ended well and we gained experience in rescues.

Brian preferred to motor through the swells on the north side of the island and we made it around to Saba Bay on the east side of Hook Island for the night as the winds were changing from south-easterlies to north-westerlies. It was a bit un-nerving as screws on the tiny motors kept coming out of the water as we went over swells. Kangaroo kebabs for dinner.

Tuesday:
Good snorkeling in Saba Bay first thing in the morning. We continued clockwise around Hook Island and hit Raven's Cove for some fair snorkeling. Due to the winds, we went into the well-protected Nara Inlet at Mako Bay. No snorkeling in this Hammerhead shark breeding ground. There were so many boats moored here, it appeared to be a marina (see picture).

Wednesday:
Now at the S. Tip of Hook Island, we decided to take advantage of our position and see what all the hubub about White Haven Beach was. Long (5 NM) beach with incredibly white sand, but really not that spectacular from the water. Careful around all the shoals, we took a peak of Chaulkies Beach, but the strong afternoon northerlies made this inhospitable. We continued to the S. end of Whitsunday Island to Turtle Bay. Kathy and Steve jumped in for a snorkle, but there was essentially no sea life - probably due to a large amount of fresh water run off.

We decided to get an early start to catch the tides through Solway Passage and to provide good timing for making shore at Tongue Bay, the nearest moorage for visiting Whitehaven Beach that is just around the point.

Thursday:
One person on the boat was NOT happy the the 0645 start to Tongue Bay, but traveling with the current through a narrow passage is the preferred way to do it!

We arrived and had breakfast at Tongue Bay around 0830 then took the dinghy to shore, while our boat mates chose to stay on the boat. Kathy & Steve hiked to the lookout for an incredible view of Bettys Beach & Whitehaven Beach. Wow! Hot from the climb, we went down to frolick in the ocean (without our stinger suits...gasp!). Fantastic. We decided we *had* to convince our boat mates to leave the boat and come try the beach. We succeeded over lunch and Steve took everyone around the point to Betty's Beach. All enjoyed the placid water and perfect views. Anxious to see how things looked with a different tide level, Steve & Kathy went to the lookout and took a few more pictures. A bit more swimming and back to the boat. Emu Fillets for dinner (bird with texture of beef).

Oh, almost forgot. Referring to the beached boat and bikini girls... OK, get this. Kathy and I are walking on the beach and these girls come running toward us. The blonde looks right at me and asks, "Are you strong?" (Honest, Kathy is my witness!). "Of course," I reply in a rich baritone. OK , really: "Why?" we ask. "Well, we ran our boat up too close to shore and the tide went out." We look over and see a dingy. "Sure, no problem." They reply, no, "That boat," pointing to an 18' power boat. Crikey! Well, turns out I was strong enough when I added my knowledge of physics. Was it Archimedes who said, "give me a lever large enough and I can move the world"?

Friday:
We set sail at 0700 toward Cataran Bay on Border Island in hopes of finding more good snorkeling. We put in and were to swim toward shore, but after a few minutes of seeing nothing but jellyfish, we called it quits and had breakfast. (there is more to this story - we'll tell you if you ask)

Sailed back to Whitehaven Beach for more swimming & sightseeing. Steve took the dingy our to take pictures of Tropical Moondancer under sail.

We made another snorkeling attempt, this time at Chance Bay, with plans to overnight at Turtle Bay, an easy sail back to Hamilton Island Marina in the morning. Snorkeling was fairly good, but by the time we returned, Brian and Denise had received orders from the ship owners to NOT overnight in Turtle Bay, but return to Whitehaven, due to an oncoming storm. On the return to Whitehaven through Solway Passage, enormous eddy currents pulled the boat off course, changing the tack by 40 to 50 degrees and the speed from 4 to 7 knots! Our first real white-knuckled sailing. Finally around the point, we made Whitehaven just before dusk.

Saturday:
Left Whitehaven at 0730 and had breakfast while underway for worry about not making Hamilton Island for our 11:00 turn-in deadline. We arrived at 0930 and handed the boat back to Geoff, the same fellow who did the briefing. Off to our first real shower in 7 days.


Other pictures - find the fish. I think it is a rock fish. I noticed him whilst taking pictures of the coral. Unfortunately, the ONLY one in sharp focus has part of the fish cropped out. Bat Fish (looks like a BIG butterfly fish), decent shot of a butterfly fish. Looks like a racoon b-fly, but the white is only a spot. Hmmmm? Oh, and a night shot of the mast. That bright star - part of the southern Cross. 6th brightest star in the Milky Way Galaxy. Makes Polaris look like a sissy.


Next up - Cairns.

Hamilton Island

We next moved to Hamilton Island, one of the 74 islands that make up the Whitsundy archipelego. We arrived at the tiny airport and picked up our bags without benefit (or need) of a baggage carousal. All simply waited for the baggage carts and took our bags off it directly. We stayed at the reef view hotel, which has a view of the reef if you pay enough to be on the top floors. We were on floor 2, we had a substantially better view of the parking lot than did those on floor 1. What they didn't tell us is that a) the bay is man-made b) therefore it has no coral c) and it is so shallow that except for withing 2.5 hours of high tide, the "bay" is a salt-water swamp. What c) means is one's day revolves around the tides if he wants to play in the ocean.

Oh, one other thing they didn't mention: buggies. You can rent a golf card for $70/day. Seemed ludicrous to jump in an oversized lawn mower to avoid a 5-minute walk, but they are all the rage. The concessionaires have cleverly worked it so that there are so many buggies buzzing around that it is not only annoying to the pedestrians, but also dangerous as buggies don't stop for anything or anyone. This causes more folks to rent buggies and, well, you see where this is going. I made a wrist-rocket and started picking off the most offensive ones from my very convenient vantage point on the second-floor, overlooking the buggy parking (in AU, it is LEGAL to make your own wrist-rocket, but illegal to sell or import them)


As we walked to the hotel, we noticed a kookaburra. Not terribly surprising, but it was the first one we had ever seen. All we knew about this bird is that he laughs in the trees ("Laugh, Kookaburra laugh. Kookrburra, gay your life must be) and that he eats snakes. We learned this from one of the Aborginal dream-time stories.


Once upon a time, Kookaburra and Snake were good friends. However, one day, Kookaburra returned to her nest and found her 2 eggs were missing.

"Does anyone know what happened to my eggs?" she asked. Someone told her to ask the Snake, so Kookaburra went to Snake, who tried to hide when she called. Kookaburra found him and saw two lumps in his body. Furious, she grabbed Snake, flew very high, and dropped snake on the ground where he died.

From that day onwayrd, Snake and Kookaburra have been enemies."

OK, so we not only saw a kookaburra, but also she was eating a snake! This didn't appear to be a taipan, just a green tree snake, but is impressed us nonetheless.

We took a shuttle around the island to see what was what. Apparently, the upscale/private side of the isnald is home to a bunch of movie stars' home away from home away from home (we saw the room of John Travolta's "bungaloo"). Also, Qualia, which rents out villas for $4000 a night and hosted P!nk (she rented all 20 Vi8llas) for a couple of days. That's as close as we came to the rich & famous, thank goodness. Our future boatmate could probably tell you the name of every famous person with a home in the Whitsundays. She seemed to know trivia about anyone the paparazi chase.

We spent any time near high tide at the ocean. We sailed in virtually no wind and in 20 knot winds that really made the hobicats move. Lots of fun. Oh, those boat mates - they had menbtioned that in any winds over 10 knots, that we should probably just "motor" around on the 34' catamaran that we were going to sail. Luckily, we got over that issue pretty soon after leaving port (more on that later).

We also tried paddle boarding. This is quite a feat. Stand on a surf board and paddle it. OK, now turn without falling over. After 5 or 6 times in the water, it gets easier. Or, one can cheat and kneal. You guess who figured out how to stand and paddle and who has bruised knees.

Since the bay was man-made, we didn't do any snorkeling here, but booked a trip with H2O Sports for an excursion to the outer reef. Steve did 2 dives and Kathy had fun snorkeling. We hit the Stepping Stones and then a short distance away, Bait Reef. Odd that this only gave us a 40 minute surface interval, but since the dives were only 45 feet and 45 minutes, it really wasn't an issue. It is a bit expensive and time consuming to dive the reef. Over 2-hours to motor out and so it takes all day for a dive trip. Not surprisingly, the cost is about 2x as much as a 2-tank dive in Hawaii.

We saw some pretty good fish, unfortunately, there was some operator error with the camera and so not very many pictures turned out. That great video of the Maori Wrasse was actually a mistake. The clicking you might here is me pressing buttons trying to take a still photo. Hey, at least with the regulator in my mouth, any cursing that *might* have occurred didn't. Visibility was OK - about 30 feet, and there were plenty of cool fish, both large and small, including a black-tipped reef shark. What was really amazing was the coral & sponges. I have never seen so much.

We met a couple more people on the dive trip, Rob (currently from Australia, but born in Holland) and a nice couple from Cypress (whose contact info is buried in a folder, we hope!). We might meet up with Rob again as he lives in Sydney and invited us on our one-day return trip en-route to the USA in 3 more weeks.

We also found more fruit bats, which made Kathy happy, but no more pictures, which made Kathy sad, and a large number of incredibly annoying sulpher-crested cockatoos. These things make seagulls look like calm, quiet birds. They are substantially more aggressive at taking food (stupid tourists think it is fun to feed the birds) and their sqwawk sounds like someone screaming while being strangled. They are pretty birds and it was fun to watch them fly in and steal the sugar packets from people's tables. Too bad they don't have any teeth to rot.

Other "wild" animal sightings include a bush-baby, also well conditioned to people, having found the garbage can an ideal place to forage. I thought Kathy wanted to walk by, but w/o the bush-baby around, so I threw a rock at the garbage can, effectively scaring the bush-baby and frustrating Kathy who wanted to watch it forage. Go figure! (This a term from Rick Gelt).

When we weren't playing Crocodile Hunter (btw - the vessell, "Steve Irwin" was docked in Sydney while we were there. This boat makes the Greenpeace guys look like sissies and spends its time tormenting the Japanese whaling fleet) or in the ocean, we lounged at one of the many pools, this being the only available water! Both of us are working on our swimming skills and spent a bunch of time swallowing water instead of air, but managing to make it back to the lounge chairs anyway. Seriously though, for as much as we play in the water, Kathy (formerly) could not swim at all and I could swim, but with neither style nor efficiency. Kathy made tremendous progress, particulary given that she never really considered swimming a sport where one gets wet, particularly, ones face and hair! We tried to swim up to the bar in the pool for happy hour, but found that the only happy guy was the owner, he becoming rich quickly at $15 each for a weak drink.


That pretty much wraps up Hamilton Island. Next - bareboating in the Whitsundays.

Maori Wrasse Video

Arrived in N.Z

Only have a few seconds left on my card. We arrived in NZ to more RAIN. Today is a down day and tomorrow we pick up the camper van.

More later.

Sydney & Environs

Time for a major update. I know - we're way behind, but here's the rest of Sydney. BTW - most of the pics have embedded captions - hope you can read them in the full-size picture.

Jumping back to when we were in Sydney. We took an excursion to the Blue Mountains, which, unfortunately, were hidden in rain. Go figure - it's a temperate RAIN forest and it was raining. On the way up, we stopped at a wildlife park and saw some fun critters. Kathy decided that Wombats are adorable and we found that Koalas like to ensure they are well scented with urine. You may notice in the pictures, Kathy isn't terribly close to the koala.

Also, Emu chicks are very inquisitive and love the camera. Put it close, and they run toward the lens! Oh, and we found an inquisitive Joey poking out of the pouch...

We also hit an old coal mine. The upper layer of earth eroded quickly, leaving a steep slope to reach the coal seam. The "railroad" down to the bottom takes only a couple of minutes, but that is because it runs at a 52 degree incline. You get in while it is horizontal and are essentially lying on your back. Once it starts down, you are standing on your feet. Once down, we had a nice walk in the rain forest. I've included a shot of the canopy of the eucalyptus trees.

The guide was a great guy with a lot of local knowledge. He makes some extra $$$ on the side by hunting for opals when he has a tour group heading to the opal fields. He also works directly with one of the original aboriginal tribes and sells their wares - art & boomerangs without markup. Fortuitously, he shared one of the Ngaro Dream Time Stories about kookaburra and the snake (I'll get to that later when we get the shot of kookaburra eating a snake). Picked up a nice one to put on the wall. Anyway - turns out hunting boomarangs aren't meant to come back - it is supposed to hit the prey! Sometimes they are used for fishing as well.

We did finally have some decent weather and took advantage of the 4 hours to head to Manly beach. Beautiful beach with a nice little center that had a jazz festival and markets. We ate our first Aussie meat pie and sausage roll. Pretty good and only $AU 2.50 each. (Note - we've found others that were stale. Locals advise to only buy the meat pies where they turnover quickly and aren't in a warming oven for hours) We wandered along a trail to Shelly Beach (photo is labelled Shelby Beach - oh well) and had a fantastic view of the ocean and also back to Manly beach.

On the ferry ride back to Sydney, rain came again with the time between flash and sound about 0.1 seconds. That means the lighting strike was about 150 m away. Yikes! Luckily, being from Portland, we had our rain gear handy.

After making port, the rain abated (a bit) and we walked through the Royal Botanical Gardens - primarly seeking the not-so-elusive fruit bat...another of Kathy's favorite animals. Thousands of them in the trees--seriously. We have a lot of pictures of rain on my camera lens and fruit bats in the trees. At sunset, the royal guards kicked us out of the garden. First guy was nice and just asked us to leave, but a second one stalked us to the exit. Well, a nice thing about the rain is the reflection on the cement of lights and the possibility of dramatic photos. Got a couple of those, but then at 6:30, the fruit bats took flight. Thousands of them in the air and me with merely a 24 - 105 mm lens. Too bad the long lens weighs so much and is at home (actually, a friend, Braxton, is making good use of it taking pictures of his girls' soccer teams). That picture is taken at f/16, hand-held after sunset. Did I mention I love the light sensitivity of the Canon 5D MII? Why f/16? To make the star on the street light.

Next up...Hamilton Island photos including the Kookaburra I mentioned earlier. To give you taste, here is a sunset from Cid Harbour and a nice video. Funny story about our boat mates afraid of this "big fish!" (Hmmm... trouble uploading the vid. Maybe next time - the internet cafe is closing down now).

Back on the mainland

Hello All,

We are back on the mainland after 10 days in the Whitsundays. First 4 were spent on Hamilton Island (aka Hamo) where we tuned sailing skills on a Hobi-Cat with 20 knot winds - FUN! Fruit bats and Sulfer Crested Cockatoos galore!

We then spent a week on a bare-boat charter (that is, we skippered the boat) and sailed all over the islands, enduring hazards such as sharks, jelly fish, perilous eddy's in Solway Passage that changed the boat's tack by 45 degrees and speed by 50 percent in just a few seconds. Whew!

Sorry for the dearth of updates, but we have thoroughly enjoyed not having any access to the world! No phones or internet for 10 days was really peaceful. We have some wonderful pictures to post after I edit them down to web-sized images (20 MB is a bit much for this post).

Heading now up to Cairns & Port Douglas where we expect to see the tropical rain forest and lots of Aussie critters.

Sydney

We arrived in Sydney at 0630, were checked in by 8:30, and back on the train to Sydney by 10:00. We found out that North Ryde is WAY north, on a new subway line. Someone had fun with the interior design: Image5865. (Note - with the connection speed I have here, I'm not going to worry about embedding the images in the text in the proper order - I'm lucky to get them up at all. Please use the file names for reference)





















Shortly after starting our city wandering IMG5775, we made a new friend who was in town from China, Shimmer Liu. We'll leave it to him to post his Chinese name .













We found a place to eat at the GlenmoreRooftop Beer Garden. IMG 5784

Nice view of the entire bay, if you don't mind the industrial look. IMG5779. Not sure if "Bangers & Mash" is an Aussie dish, or British - only though to take a picture after it was half eaten :-). The Glenmore is just above Argyle, a pub where Dan Meador recommended a drink...more on that later if we make it there.




















Later, on the other side of Circular Quay, we had a Porland-like fall day to view the OperaHouse up close. That is - grey skies with a good chance of showers. The clouds gave soft light, but nothing interesting. Had to use some imagination to find a neat shot. Let us know what you think of these. IMG5804. IMG5813, IMG5807.















I'm not sure how this picture of the inside of the main performance stage ended up on my camera, but it is a breathtaking concert hall. IMG5838













Yesterday, we had a nice ride aboard a coach (aka bus) to the Blue Mountains. Beautiful, Foggy, Rainy Day. Hope to get some of that posted tonight. Kathy found a Koala and we did have fun - albeit without seeing most of the sights!



Technical Stuff:
Oh - I'm using JoboGPS for GeoTagging. Pretty slick design concept - A GPS receiver that fits on the camera hotshoe, but it has a few flaws, one of which is it won't it won't insert the GPS data unless it can make a connection to a JoboGPS server to also install local Points of interest. Sheesh! So, for now, there are no embedded GPS coordinates as I've already down-sized the images for posting. Anyway, I would NOT buy this thing again until the application software can embed the GPS coordinates in the EXIF header without need for an Internet connection. Here are Scott Kelby's comments

We found out that virtually no image editing SW runs on a netbook. Hello Canon,Photoshop, Nikon, etc. Netbooks are NOT 1024 x 768. Please provide a SW upgrade that works on 1024 x 600 resolution displays! For a comparison, on CPU speed, my5 y.o. desktop at home (then a top of the line- 3.2 GHz Dual Core Pentium) can convert from AVI to AVI (just a baseline test)at about 140 fps, the NB 205 does the conversion at about 80 fps. SO, it's not a screaming fastPC, but that's a fine trade-off for a travel-sized PC.



We're using a Toshiba Netbook 205. A reported 9-hour battery life. The touch pad seemsunresponsive for a few seconds every once in a while, but other than that, having a 3 lblaptop is pretty nice. We ripped several of our DVDs using cucusoft - GREAT stuff. You can get the package for about $US 29 to convert anything to anything. http://www.cucusoft.com/ is the retail site, but we purchased it here: http://www.regnow.com/

Oh, and the reason for no update until now on the blog...Internet Access in Sydney is miserable. During our first 2 days of city wandering, we looked for hotspots. Starbuck (sigh) was the only coffee shop we found with a hotspot, but the captive portal screen wouldn't open after 10 minutes. Here at the hotel, they charge $AU 20/day for "high speed" internet. From here to Seattle, WA (http://www.speakeasy.net/) we have a blazing upload speed ot 60 kbps! I can type faster than my gmail account (in TEXT mode) can accept characters.

Tuesday we leave at 10:45 AM (subtract a day and add 6 hours for PDT - so 4:45 pm on Monday for the USA west coast) to the Whitsunday's where there should be sun!