More Island Hopping

Refreshed and re-stocked,  we departed the small city of Townsville on a grey windless Saturday morning, motoring the two hours across the bay to Magnetic Island. Maggie Island as it is sometimes known is a popular holiday destination with pretty bays, nice beaches, forest covered hills and excellent ice-creams. We spent the night anchored in Horseshoe Bay, along with scores of boats of all kinds.

We took a long beach walk and we sampled the ice-creams. Of course.

One the beach we saw an Osprey with a decent sized catch of the day

We spent only the one night there, with a spectacular sunset.

Sunday was another windless day and so we motored 3 hours to our next anchorage in a narrow passage between two islands named Herald and Rattlesnake. 

It was an eventful journey. We saw dolphins and lots of whales including a mother and calf that were really close. And biggest surprise of all, I caught a fish! The previous owners of Pegasos had left us with some fishing tackle and lately I've taken to dragging a spinner behind the boat and today I had some success, a spotted mackerel. It made a fine dinner.

Herald, Rattlesnake and a couple of other nearby islands are part of yet another military practice area and every now and then the Royal Australian Air Force use the islands for live firing exercises. But there was no military exercise going on and we had both islands to ourselves, so we ignored the warning sign and went ashore on Herald Island for a short walk ...

... and to gut and clean my fish ...

... and take a skinny dip.

On Monday it was still calm and so yet again we motored to our next destination, Havannah Island.

It is always a bit disappointing when you can't use the sails on a sailboat and have to rely entirely on the noisy diesel engine to get anywhere. But we knew it was going to be calm for a few days and we used this as an opportunity to visit islands that don't have protected anchorages and are not often visited. And so at Havannah Island we were once again the only boat there and we had the entire island to ourselves.

Some of the beaches that are gleaming and white from the distance are not sand but coral rubble which is not so nice for walking on and certainly not without shoes.

The island has quite a nice fringing coral reef and we took the opportunity to do a bit of snorkeling.

Next day was still calm but our destination was close, only an hour of motoring past a couple of little islands.

We were entertained by a dolphin surfing our bow waves

Next up was Great Palm Island, another pretty, forested, hilly island but this one is inhabited.

It's home to a small Aboriginal community with a sad history of forced settlements, alcoholism and violence, but they seem to be doing alright nowadays.  I took a brief outing ashore (without my camera) and bought a few expensive pieces of fruit from the only shop. The place has lots of colour: in the clothes, the buildings, murals and of course the lush vegetation. With crowds of cheerful noisy people just hanging about it doesn't feel at all like rich white Australia, or any other first world country for that matter. But it's certainly not a third world village and there are no free ranging chickens or skinny stray dogs running about or desperate vegetable patches or any similar signs of poverty, yet the people are clearly not nearly as well off here as on the mainland.  There can't be any chance for employment outside of government services, but these people are obviously looked after.

We anchored near the end of the airstrip on Great Palm Island, which is served with several flights a day by little eggbeater airplanes.

We spent only one night before moving on again to Orpheus Island just 13 miles away. The trade winds have returned and so we sailed all the way and gave the engine a break. It was a pleasant trip with whales and dolphins. 

Orpheus is yet another stunningly beautiful, jungle covered, hilly coral-fringed tropical island paradise. There's some really nice coral here but it was windy and a bit too cold for swimming so we indulged in a lazy and comfortable way to view the reefs. The coral is shallow enough to be seen quite clearly from above the surface. So we took the dinghy out and slowly drifted over the reef and every few minutes we would don some goggles and hang over the sides of the boat with just our faces and my camera in the water.  

We saw lots of giant clams ...

... and pretty corals ...

Because that was so much fun we decided to stay here an extra day and do some more snorkeling and dinghy based reef exploring.  We went ashore to yet another gorgeous beach ...

and walked along a forest track to the top of the hill in the middle of the island.  

Pegasos anchored way off beyond the coral far below ...