Around Cairns

Sunday 3rd September found us in Mission Bay just a stone's throw from Cairns, which is where we are going to leave Pegasos while we fly home for the summer. Not much to do here except admire the view.

This is aboriginal land so we're not allowed to go ashore without permission. It's full of crocodiles so we wouldn't really want to go ashore and it has a shallow muddy bay so we probably would not be able to get the dinghy ashore anyway. After only one night we moved on to Green Island.

Green Island will be the last island that we will visit on this trip. It is a pretty place with a healthy coral reef. It's also heavily infested with big fast ferries and tourist enterprises of the sort that aims at herding vast hordes of bewildered Asians thorough tourist experiences.

On Green Island there's snorkeling experience (with buoys and ropes partitioning off a safe zone) and coral island beach walking experience.

And of course these always going to be gift-shopping experience with lots of overpriced tacky crap that was probably made in China in the first place. But beyond the shop stalls there's a lovely board-walk path through the dense thicket of scrub-forest that gives Green Island its name.

The snorkeling was good. The coral is extensive and the water is the clearest we've seen on this trip.

It is very difficult to anchor here. It took a long time but eventually we found our Goldilocks anchorage: Not too deep; not too shallow; far enough from ferry traffic but not too far off the island; the bottom must be sand and not coral nor sea-grass and the clearing must be big enough for us to to place the anchor and swing around without bumping into bommies (coral covered boulders). In the end we landed up being quite far off the island, and hence not very well protected from the uncomfortable rolling and bumping of irregular steep choppy waves and so we only spent only one night there. Unfortunately the dinghy engine was still playing up. The carburettor blocked again. We had to row back from the island. Quite exhausting! Buried deep in the storage space of one of the side hulls is a weenie little old two-horsepower two-stroke engine, which I dug out, cleaned up, pulled the starter cord and Hey Presto! It works! So now I’ve installed it as a backup.

Our final destination for the season is Bluewater Marina a bit north of Cairns at Yorkies Knob. These Aussie names! I can’t say that last one without getting a disturbing mental image of some horrible randy pooch trying to hump everything that moves. Anyway, after a rough night of bouncing at Green Island we sailed on Tuesday 5^th to Trinity Inlet, the vast protected waterway adjacent to the Cairns CBD. It was a fairly short sail of only 15 miles and the sea was quite bumpy but it was still a very enjoyable sail. We were on a beam reach with all three sails out, genoa, staysail and mainsail, and sustained 6 to 7 knots with just over 10 knots of wind.

In Cairns we anchored across the waterway from the ritzy Marlin Marina quite close to extensive mangroves. For the third night in a row we’ve had some of the mackerel that I had caught for supper. It’s getting a bit boring now and so we tossed the rest overboard into the dark and murky water of Trinity Inlet. There were lots of crunching and clicking noises from crabs and things under the boat that night!

The waterway between where we’ve anchored Pegasos and where we need to land the dinghy when we go ashore is busy. Apart from all the tourist ferries racing each other and the armada of local fishing boats there’s navy ships, cargo ships, other yachts and even cruise ships to avoid.

Although I now have two engines on the back of the dinghy, neither is very reliable and I really don’t want to have to row out of the way of one of these giant ships! So our first mission on shore was to go to the Mercury agent for fuel filters and spark plugs. Next up was laundry, groceries and ice-cream, and only once we had sorted these urgent priorities could we play at being tourists. And Cairns is a great town for tourists. We started with a long stroll along the shore-front esplanade

Visiting botanic gardens is always on our must-do list, and the Cairns gardens are a real treat with spectacular examples of the wonderful extravagant vegetation of the wet tropics and rainforest.

There's no beach at Cairns. The coastline along the mainland is all mud and mangroves. Water visibility is about 3cm, ideal for saltwater crocodiles and bull sharks, but not for swimming. And so just a few meters above the seaside mud flats they've built a very pleasant swimming lagoon with clean, clear, warm water, a sandy beach, sunbathing lawns and shady trees and picnic facilities. And hot showers in the change rooms - a real boon for us. All bathing that we do on Pegasos is in water that I have to collect in jerry cans.

Its baby bat season in Cairns! All about the city are big sprawling fig trees, home to thousands of pigeon-sized bats (spectacled flying foxes) nesting, squeaking, peeing on pedestrians (including Marcelle) and giving birth to baby bats.

On the weekend we went to the colourful Rusty’s market.

The Cairns war memorial St Monica's Cathedral has superb stained glass windows with scenes of volcanoes, coral reefs and undersea wrecks of war-planes.

It’s been windy over the past week but now the forecast is that we should be getting a few calm days and so if all goes well we plan to leave Cairns and sail back to Green Island tomorrow.