Even more island hopping ...

Leaving the calm murky waters of Hinchinbrook Channel and the mangrove flats behind we headed out into the deeper cleaner Coral Sea with plans to tour the "Family Islands."  First up was Cape Richards at the end of the very shallow bay at the northern tip of Hinchinbrook Island. So shallow that we had to anchor far from the beach. Looking back towards the distinctive mountains of Hinchinbrook:

The "Family Islands Group" is a small chain of small islands that were named after English families by Captain Cook on his voyage of discovery through here in 1770. We love idyllic little tropical islands with coral fringing reefs and coconut backed white sandy beaches (who doesn't?) and so we were super keen to explore as many of these islands as possible. None have decent protected anchorages but luckily the weather played along nicely and we had one of the calmest mildest weeks yet. The itinerary (ours not Cook's) was: Richards on Monday,  Brook on Tuesday, Goold on Wednesday, Bowden on Thursday (with a brief excursion by dinghy to Smith and Hudson) and then on to Dunk for the weekend (with a lunch stop at Wheeler on the way).

These were all short little hops of an hour or two at most giving us plenty of time to go ashore and explore the islands and swim and snorkel off the beaches

Brook Island is our favorite place so far. It has a perfect little beach backed by palm trees and dense jungle covered hills with a long sandy spit extending into the sea.

It's a protected Marine Park with a rich coral reef with great snorkeling:

Rather than use our own anchor we were able to use a public mooring buoy. At the more precious coral reef sites these buoys have been installed by the Marine Park authorities for visiting boats to use because anchors damage coral. One always tries to anchor on sand or mud and avoid the coral but that is really hard to do in places like this where there is so much coral.

Goold Island was next.  Closer to the mainland the water is a bit murky and not so inviting.  The crocodile warning signs made us even more chicken. We didn't swim.

Instead we did a nice long beach walk

We found some fascinating fish traps among a few isolated mangrove trees. Built by Aborigines and possibly thousands of years old these low walls of stone and coral boulders in the inter-tidal zones leave fish trapped when the tide drops. Similar structures occur all over Australia and among them are some of the oldest surviving structures built by humans anywhere.

Bowden, Smith and Hudson form a triplet of almost identical islands.

All are small and circular, about half a kilometer in diameter. Each has a central rounded dome shaped hill, a small sandy beach on the western side and are otherwise ringed with big granite boulders along the shoreline.

They also all have some fringing coral reef and I did a bit of snorkeling but it was not spectacular. Most of the coral is dead and covered with algae.

We anchored closest to Bowden ...

... and visited the other two by dinghy.

The entire Great Barrier Reef is a marine park but it is subdivided into a complicated patchwork of zones with different levels of protection. In some areas you can't collect shells from the beach and in other areas you can drive 4x4 trucks on the beach. These three little islands and the waters around them are covered by relatively strict regulations and no fishing is allowed. In fact in this area one is not even allowed to have fishing rods or tackle out on the deck, they must be stowed away. In other areas there are limits to how many fishing lines you can have in the water, with different limits for different areas. Now that I am fishing I check up on the restrictions before each journey. While we were here a Marine Parks patrol vessel checked up on us. They are apparently very strict and penalties are severe. The rangers were professional and efficient, and very friendly once they were happy that I understood the regulations.

Wheeler is very seldom visited as it doesn't have a safe place to anchor. But we stopped anyway and went ashore and didn't stay long. It's a very  beautiful island with a with a small secluded pristine beach.

Dunk is much bigger than the other islands in the group. It is close to 'the mainland and gets lots of day visitors, arriving on a big public ferry, small private open boats and even rented jet skis.

It was developed as a resort, then destroyed by cyclone Larry in 2006 and then rebuilt. It was then destroyed again by cyclone Yasi in 2011, but that was after the global financial crisis and it now remains closed and ruined. The resort still looks fantastic from the distance

But from close up you can see that it is quite dilapidated and is slowly reverting back to jungle.

For us, coming from South Africa, it is remarkable that the place has not been looted and vandalised. This abandoned boat still has an outboard motor, a VHF radio and a sonar fish-finder!

Quite sad really, but by far the majority of  tropical Australian beach resorts that we have seen along the way have been in ruins. But there's still a beach bar here catering to day visitors, with tables and chairs and groovy music under the shade set up on the beach. It was tempting but at R75 for a beer we decided that a glass of wine on Pegasos would be nice way to end the day.

We spent three nights on Dunk which gave us two full days for walking the long beaches and longer jungle trails.

Next we visited a bunch of Barnard Islands, yet more dinky little circular islets each with a single central jungle covered hill and a west facing mini-beach and a fringe of coral. We did the two in the South (Stephens and Sisters) on Monday and the three in the North (Kent, Jessie and Huchison) on Tuesday. That's 12 islands in 8 days!

Anchored off Stephens ...

On Stephens we met a group of school boys on a kayaking and camping outing. What a fabulous school outing! Aussies do live well.

The sea continued to be flat and the winds calm, ideal conditions for taking the dinghy from one island to the next, exploring them all and their beaches and reefs. This is on Sisters looking back towards Stephens, at high tide.

This is on Stephens looking towards Sisters at spring low tide, looking back over the same stretch of water. It was quite interesting walking over the exposed reef and checking out the few live corals, seaweeds and sundry slimy marine animals trapped in the pools, mud and dead corals of the inter-tidal range. Not pretty, but interesting.

On Sisters we explored the mangroves. Even in this very shallow water, we surprised a small shark which did a quick circle around the dinghy and darted off to hide.

The jungle covered hill and sandy beach of Jessie, where we found more kayakers:

This pristine tropical wilderness is something of a kayaking nirvana with the islands being so close together and close to the mainland and of course there's coral reefs and warm calm water and mild weather.

The same paradise continues on Jessie, Kent and Hutchison.

By now (Wednesday 23rd) we've reached the end of this sequence of islands and we're running low on everything and we're out of chocolate (a crisis for me) and so tomorrow we'll be heading to the mainland for victuals.

Amazing Hinchinbrook

The Uber taxi driver was right - the Hinchinbrook Channel is spectacularly scenic. Back in Brisbane, we used an Uber taxi to transport us from a shopping center to Rivergate Marina. Chatting to the taxi driver, Ryan, along the way he was intrigued with our pending adventure so we invited him to step aboard and check out Pegasos. He told us he was from a town in the Hinchinbrook area and if we wanted to see a beautiful area, he recommended the Hinchinbrook Channel. The taxi driver was our first guest aboard Pegasos.

The Hinchinbrook Channel runs between mainland Australia and the mountainous Hinchinbrook Island. Either side of the main channel are flat and shallow but still navigable narrow side channels that wind through mangrove swamps and a few small jungle covered hilly islands. The entire area is a world heritage listed national park.

The trip from Orpheus Island to the southern entrance of the Hinchinbrook Channel was timed to coincide with a high tide as not only is the southern entrance a bit shallow in parts but our planned anchorage in Dungeness required us to cross a sandbar that almost dries at low tide.

Along the way, Robert caught another spotted mackerel with a trolling lure. Bigger than the previous one, this one is big enough for two dinners.

As we got close to the southern entrance, we saw a whale close by lifting its huge tail and whacking it back down several times in the exact spot we were headed.  Luckily it moved off in time.

Approaching the tiny town of Lucinda, its 5.76 km long jetty can be seen from miles away. It's the longest jetty in the southern hemisphere and follows the curvature of the earth. It is actually a long conveyor belt and at the end of it ships berth to load bulk sugar.

Dungeness is even smaller than Lucinda - one shop, one petrol pump, one motel, one pub, about 6 houses and zillions of mostly fishing boats.

Negotiating the river anchorage is very tight and tricky and shallow. We once briefly touched our keel on on a sandbar but managed to reverse off without getting stuck. Eventually we found a safe spot to anchor.

As the tide dropped, more sandbanks started appearing inbetween moored boats.

We did a short walk around Dungeness to stretch our legs and bought 2 single bananas and a packet of crisps for the equivalent of over R85!

On Saturday we left Dungeness just before high tide to cross the sandbar into the Hinchenbrook Channel and moved northwards through the channel. Mangroves line both sides of the channel. On the one side, the mountains on Hinchinbrook Island national park create a magnificent backdrop to the waterway. Very scenic and I'm so glad we had the opportunity to experience it.

Along the way we passed many small boats fishing. It must be Queensland's most popular pastime. I will always associate the Queenslanders with a typical picture of a couple in a tinny (metal dinghy) in the blazing sun intent on their fishing. We have seen that throughout our trip so far and Hinchinbrook Channel has more than its fair share of tinny couples.

Haycock Island is a tiny speck of a thickly wooded island in the middle of the channel.

We chose Gaylundah Creek as our overnight anchorage.  One of many very pretty creeks in the channel with dead calm still water, thick green mangroves and the backdrop of mountains.

It's paradise until the late afternoon when the mozzies and sandflies begin to descend in their billions. We burned mozzie coils and slathered ourselves with insect repellent. We got away relatively unscathed with several dozen kamikaze sandfly bites each. Sandfly bites are worse than mozzies, the bite is larger, much itchier and takes more than a week to stop itching. All this from an insect one can barely see. The next morning we woke up to a thin carpet of dead sandflies throughout the boat. My job to sweep them up while Robert indulged in fish lure sorting and displaying techniques. I glazed over the part about teasers, tracers and stragglers.

The next morning we took a scenic tour on Pegasos around a maze of mangrove lined creeks and inlets. Intriguing and picturesque and easy to get lost in the maze.

We stopped for lunch just before joining up with one of the main channels, Boat Passage, and Robert discovered a fish caught in his new arrangement of lures trolled behind the boat. This fish turned out to be a type of herring, known to be bony. Robert hooked it on to a lure as bait fish and we set off down Boat Passage towards the northern part of Hinchinbrook Channel.  When Robert reeled in the lure he discovered that some large fish had bitten through the metal and nylon trace, having taken the herring and two large hooks at the same time. Perhaps its just as well we didn't have to deal with taking whatever fish it was onto Pegasos, it must have had really big teeth.

Our intended anchorage of Scraggy Point turned out to be swell prone and we changed our minds and crossed to the other side of the channel and anchored off the small town of Cardwell. It has an extensive shoaling bottom and we anchored in only 1.9m.

We were running low on groceries and the next morning we went ashore. Cardwell is a small and dry looking town and the supermarket had hardly a choice of items.

There is a long jetty off Cardwell with a long beach on either side of it.  The water is very murky and although warmish, it looks unfriendly. An indistinct fin gliding past didn't make it more welcome. In the late afternoon we motored back across the channel and around the top of Hinchinbrook Island to anchor in Macushla Bay for the night.

 It was a bumpy journey with short steep waves and we faced into the wind all the way. We passed a huge turtle swimming laboriously against the chop who looked as surprised to see us as we were to see it.. The highlight for Robert was the reward of a new fish in his collection of lures trolled behind the boat at 6 knots. Not sure what it is, but quite delicious and big enough for 2 meals.

Macushla Bay:

The wind dropped and our chosen spot was calm, murky, quiet, lonely and pitch dark with mysterious splashes, plops and light bumps against the boat. The fish scraps Robert threw into the water when cleaning the fish must have drawn some visitors. Sometimes it's best not to go investigate.