Lizard to Gove

Lizard Island was fantastic, but we need to keep moving on. The winds calmed down and we had a forecast of fair weather for at least a week. In the next section of our journey we pass by many remote and pretty islands and the beautiful coastline of the vast, unspoiled and largely uninhabited York Peninsula, the north-eastern tip of Australia. But with long distances between anchorages and little chance of getting updated weather forecasts, we wanted to move fast and so we settled into a pattern of early morning starts and long days of fast sailing.

Early on Sunday 3^rd June we left the paradise of Lizard Island for Cape Melville. After sailing for eight hours we anchored in the murky waters of Ninian Bay. We’re not expecting to enjoy any more coral reef snorkelling for some time: it’ll be all mud and crocodiles till we get to Indonesia.

Next day we were up and sailing by sunrise

The sea is quite shallow around here with extensive coral reefs and rocky hazards but they all seemed to be well marked. We didn’t get shipwrecked.

After Mondays early start and relatively short slow journey (34 miles in 6 hours) where we motored about half the time, we anchored in the channel in the middle of the spectacular islands of the Flinders Group for the night. 

We had enough time to go ashore and walk along part of the deserted Flinders Island.

It wasn’t always uninhabited - it had been used as a refreshment and re-provisioning stop for fishermen during the last century and by early colonial explorers in the century before that and by Aboriginal people in the centuries before that. Somewhere on these islands is a rather special piece of Aboriginal rock art depicting an early European sailing ship. I would have loved to see that but the exact location isn’t widely advertised and we landed up on the wrong side of the wrong island. 

There are also less interesting rock engravings made by crews of English early colonial ships and we found some scratchings that might be an example of that. Pretty illegible. 

The next day was another early start and a long, long sail, 10 and ½ hours! Not uneventful though, I caught my biggest and best fish to date, Spanish Mackerel for dinner for the rest of the week.

Morris Island, our overnight stop, is a comic-book-classic tiny deserted tropical island with one tall coconut tree and a long sand spit trailing off into the distant reefs.

The next day’s early start and long 9 hour plus sail took us to Portland Roads. The reefs cluster quite nearby to the mainland in this stretch and so the shipping lanes are forced to become narrow and we have to keep our wits about us to avoid getting too close to these monsters.

As soon as we anchored another kind of monster visited us. At about three meters it is the biggest shark I’ve ever seen:

Portland Roads is described in the guide book as an outpost of civilisation 250 miles north of Cooktown and 150 miles south of Cape York. In reality it is no more than the end of a long track for 4-wheel-drive explorers, a payphone, a bunch of beached fishing dinghys and half a dozen holiday houses, one of which doubles as a cafe advertising coffee and cake three mornings a week.

But still no Internet. There’s an aboriginal community nearby and Telstra, the Australian government telecom co, generally is quite good at providing cell phone services to these remote villages. The proprietor of the coffee-and-cake-selling holiday house told me that the big cell phone repeater got destroyed in “the wet”, which in Aussie speak means their Christmas-time monsoon storm season.

She also told me that the winds should remain calm for at least a few more days. Without access to the Internet and there being no VHF repeaters along this stretch of coastline, that information would have to suffice as our weather forecast. On AM radio we were able to pick up a local station broadcasting forecast temperatures for nearby towns (bloody hot everywhere), but in terms of wind conditions at sea all we heard was a DJ saying “Marine forecast ... hmm ... well ... I dunno ... I wouldn’t got out in a small boat today”. We had no choice but to sail on and hope that the coffee-lady was right. She was.

So after another early morning start and long sail we anchored in Shelburne Bay, where there’s nothing but empty beaches, muddy water, mangroves and crocodiles.

Nearby is Sunday Island, which features in the Mutiny on the Bounty story. After the mutiny Captain Bligh and a few loyal crew were given an open boat to try to get back to civilisation and they landed here briefly. They did eventually manage in their small open boat to sail to Kupang in Indonesia, which is also one of our intended destinations for about three or four months time. It’s incredible that they made it.

The next day we had to cover the longest stretch between viable anchorages on the whole of the Queensland coast, 65 miles.

We hadn’t seen any other sailing boats for about a week and then we came across this flotilla of seven brand new charter catamarans on a delivery journey, probably to the Whitsundays.

Eventually we anchored in the Escape River estuary, a site of lots of pearl farms. One of the security team was on shore checking us out ... We saw three crocs there.

Finally the series of long sails was behind us. On Saturday 9^th we had a sleep-in, a late start and a short and enjoyable after lunch sail through the Albany passage, a narrow and spectacular channel between the mainland and Albany Island. We had to get the timing right for the tide and currents but otherwise it was quite easy.

 

We anchored just past the passage in Shallow Bay, where finally we were able to get cell phone reception! It was a weak and feeble signal even with the external antenna on our especially sensitive device, but we were able to download a weather forecast and were very happy to receive a few messages from friends and family.

Next day we sailed past the most northerly tip of mainland Australia! That spit of land on the left of the photo is Cape York.

 

We’d done it! We’d sailed “Over The Top”, an ambitious goal of many Aussie sailors. And very smug we are:

 

We spent a couple of nights anchored off the Aboriginal settlement town of Seisia.

 

That’s our fridge built into the floor below the dining table where Marcelle is inspecting expiry dates on groceries. We collected a few provisions from the local pricey supermarket. And I filled up all our diesel Jerry cans at the local garage. It boasts of being the most northerly one in Australia. It’s probably also the most expensive.

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The Gulf of Carpentaria, that bite out of the top corner of Australia was our next formidable hurdle. It’s a vast shallow bay covering the latitudes where the tropical global ocean currents and trade winds are strongest and near where Australia meets Asia and where the Pacific ocean meets the Indian, all of which add up to giving it the notorious reputation for having an extremely complicated system of tides and currents and very uncomfortable boating.

The weather forecast was promising us a window of a few days of mild weather, and so we had to go for it. It turned out to be 339 Nautical Miles and took us 56 ½ hours to get across. This little island was our last view of Queensland.

Our first overnight sail was three days and two nights. The first day was OK.

Sunset with no land on the horizon in any direction:

The rest of the crossing was horrible! There was no moon and that night was really dark. The waves, although not huge, were steep and wild and rough and unpredictably came from different directions and I could not see them approaching or anticipate the resulting jerky boat motion and I became quite sick. The wind died down and the waves became much milder and we ended the journey motoring for 31 hours straight! We eventually anchored behind Bremer Island, the first bit of land on the Northern Territories side.

The next day we sailed to the little town of Gove. From the distance it appears to have a skyline of fairytale red-stone medieval towers and magic castles.

Closer-up it turns out to be the rusting desert-dust covered chimneys and industrial plants of the now largely defunct aluminium processing facility, as awful and ugly as can only be created by a big multinational corporation like Rio Tinto.

But the anchorage was secure, the boat club pub ashore was super friendly. And we have Internet, and a chance to update this blog.