Whitsunday Islands part 1

Sailing Oasis a Beneteau 43 in the Whitsunday Islands

Oasis in the Hamilton Island marina

Interior layout of a Beneteau 43 Cyclades

Peter enjoying a cup of coffee with Hella

Friday 12th May
For some years Queensland Yacht Charters, based at Airlie Beach, north Queensland (http://www.yachtcharters.com.au/) have provide a sponsorship promotion at the Canberra Yacht Club. This takes the form of a free yacht charter for 5 days of sailing in the Whitsunday group. Such a prestigious prize is traditionally drawn on the night of the annual prize giving at our club. This draw is restricted to those boats that have regularly sailed in the weekly summer competition at the CYC. Last year I won!
After a bit of thought to choose a good combination of crew and an upgrade to a bigger yacht the six of us in the party headed for Proserpine at the end of the second week of May. Our upgrade was further improved at the last minute to a six berth Beneteau because the slightly smaller yacht we had originally chartered had been taken out of commission only weeks before after being put aground and seriously damaged. Our Beneteau was brand new!
Our journeys north were a bit uncoordinated. I traveled with Iain and Katie McCalman to Brisbane via Sydney meeting up with Ross Pover (my regular crew on the Flying Fifteen State of the Ark and my co-winner) and finally Peter and Hella Dalton. Peter is Commodore at the CYC. We arrive in Proserpine close on dusk and sort out our car hire and then 4 of us go into Airlie Beach to find the pre-booked overnight accommodation. About the only bird I noticed on the way was a Black Kite or two near the airport.

Airlie Beach

Shute Harbour Road - Airlie's main street

Disconcerting sign Airlie Bay

We settle in to our self-contained luxury Sea Star apartment on Nara Avenue high above Airlie. Peter then drives back to the airport to retrieve Ross and Iain who volunteered to stay for the second run. It took much longer than we had expected to do this shuttle so they were stranded at the airport terminal well after it had been shut-down for the night. We have a great seafood meal in town close to the beach at the corner of Airlie Esplanade with Bush Stone-curlew calling in the background. We could see them on the sand when we walked back along the Esplanade to our car.

Saturday 13th May
Lewin’s Honeyeater call at dawn and Rainbow Lorikeet are noisily flying about. We see some Yellow-breasted Sunbird and some Rainbow Bee-eater fly over. We head down to the Esplanade again to have breakfast in a beachfront cafe. There are House Sparrow in town and Torresian Crow are vocal and conspicuous. A few Australian Magpie are seen. Eventually we go down to the QYC offices at 9:00 AM and start the briefing process. Iain, Ross and I concentrate on this while Kate, Peter and Hella go off to do the shopping. Iain has an ear and throat infection so needs first to see a doctor for a suitable prescription and then joins us when this is sorted out. Two very confiding Welcome Swallow resting on a mooring line in the marina are frustrating in that I do not, of course, have the camera ready at the time. We meet up with Phil and go over the features of the yacht and talk about what we are expected to do with regards to our regular radio skeds at 09:00 and 15:45 each day. Eventually, the others arrive with the food and grog and we load up and make ready to depart mid-afternoon. Peter and I take the car back to the Avis depot in the main street (Shute Harbour road) and walk back to the marina along the boardwalk. Here I see a female Darter, a Great Egret and a dark morph Reef Egret.

The Abel Point boardwalk from Airlie to the marina

A view across Abel Point marina Airlie Beach

QYC offices upper floor top left

Phil takes us out of the marina and leaves us to head off to Nara inlet on Hook Island for the night. The wind is steady from the SE at 25-30 knots. We decide not to hoist sail and motor all the way to an anchorage at the top of the inlet. We settle in and the mooring is reasonably comfortable. There were few birds to see on the way across. A few Silver Gull and some Crested Tern near the marina but the sea crossing was otherwise lacking in the way of any interesting seabirds. Absolutely nothing. Several Sulphur-crested Cockatoo gather in small pre-roosting groups in the tops of Hoop Pines Araucaria cunninghamii on the hillsides around us at dusk and then noisily fly off to their final roosts as night falls. The slopes are thickly forested with extensive areas of Hoop Pine. To provide some background information I have extracted the following from a PDF document at (http://www.epa.qld.gov.au/register/p01108aa.pdf) set up by Queensland Parks and Wildlife service as an Whitsunday Islands information sheet [with some additions and corrections by me]:

‘Off the Queensland coast, east of Proserpine, lie a number of continental islands known as the Whitsundays. The Whitsundays include more than 90 continental islands that were once part of the adjacent mainland. National park status has been given wholly or in part to most of these islands. More than 96 percent of the 30000ha of wooded hills, rocky headlands and shingle beaches are managed to protect a range of values including fauna, flora, water quality and the scenic integrity. The waterways and beaches surrounding the islands are marine park‚ and fall within the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area. Temperatures in this tropical area, range from 5°C to 35°C and are moderated by south-eastern winds in winter and north-westerly in summer. Rainfall varies from 1200 to 2000 mm per annum, with most falling in summer. The generally mild climate, natural landscape and warm sea temperatures make the Whitsundays a popular holiday destination. Nature-based recreation includes bush camping, diving, snorkeling, sailing, exploration, bird watching and photography. GEOLOGICAL ORIGINS. During the last ice age (about 18,000 years ago) expansion of the polar caps reduced the sea to a level approx 100m lower than it is today. At that time, the Whitsundays were an inland mountain range and the Great Barrier Reef was a line of coastal limestone hills. About 10,000 years ago the icecaps began to melt causing valleys to flood and bays and inlets to form, isolating the Whitsunday Islands from the mainland. The tropical waters surrounding the Whitsunday Islands are a particular shade of blue. The colour is caused by very fine particles of sediment in the water which scatter the sunlight as it penetrates the surface. ABORIGINAL OCCUPATION. Research indicates that Aboriginal groups belonging to the Ngaro tribe inhabited the Whitsundays for at least 8000 years prior to European settlement. Evidence of their occupation can be found in authentic cave paintings discovered at Nara Inlet, Hook Island and in a stone quarry that exists on South Molle Island, where stone axes and other cutting tools have been located. Numerous fish traps which clearly demonstrate Aboriginal use of the marine environment are also located throughout the area. FLORA and FAUNA. Vine forests and thickets of lush vegetation grow in gullies and hillsides where fires are less frequent. Towering Hoop Pines, Araucaria cunninghamii, emerge from these forests and mark the skyline with their distinctive radiating branches and tufts of deep green foliage. The tall pyramid shaped Flame Tree [Brachychiton acerifoliu?] is easily recognizable during the summer months when their red flowers can completely cover the tree. Drier slopes are generally covered by open grasslands as well as eucalypt and acacia forests and woodlands. These communities rely on fire to regenerate and survive. Pink Bloodwood [Eucalyptus intermedi], Poplar Gum [E. alb], Moreton Bay Ash [= Carbeen E. tesselaris] and White Mahogany [E. trianth] are common. Their distribution and density is determined by soil, aspect and fire frequency. The Grass Tree, Xanthorrhoea, is a typical plant, attracting noisy flocks of birds, butterflies and many insects to its large flowering spike. The fauna of these island forests and woodlands is less diverse than that of the adjacent mainland. Birds are conspicuous with many species recorded. Whitsunday Island supports a population of Unadorned Rock Wallabies [Petrogale inornat] while Gloucester Island is colonized by the Proserpine Rock Wallaby [P. Persephon]. These highly social and nocturnally active wallabies are an unusual occurrence on east Australian islands [in fact, their entire ranges are restricted to this part of Queensland-PF].’

There are signs that some islands have been extensively cleared and grazed: Hamilton, Dent, South Moll, North Molle and Henning, for example, but the rest seem to be pristine.

View forwards from the cockpit

Iain offering up the prawns (photo by Hella)

Sunday 14th May

Kate returning from snorkeling in Nara Inlet

Hella enjoying the snorkeling

Laughing Kookaburra call at dawn and Lewin’s Honeyeater can also be heard. Pied Currawong and Sulphur-crested Cockatoo add their calls to the morning sounds. I see two Striated Heron moving along the rocky northern shoreline. A couple of White-bellied Sea-Eagle are soaring overhead. A good night on the mooring and after breakfast some of the party go for swims and a shore party of Iain, Kate and Ross go to look at some aboriginal cave paintings above the nearby southern shore [noted above]. We decide to head out of Nara inlet and sail downwind under reefed main and a foresail to the top of Hayman Island before we slog across some choppy water into Butterfly Bay. We spot a couple of turtles and one came close enough astern for us to identify it as most likely a Hawksbill Turtle Eretmochelys umbricata. It held its head up and looked at us closely before diving and disappearing from our sight. I suspect all those seen by us over the next few days are this species but we do not see many. Occasionally we see a solitary small uniformly rather brownish dolphin and I suspect these are all Long-beaked Bottlenosed Dolphin Tursiops aduncus a recently recognized smaller inshore warm water species (See Menkhorst & Knight (2001) A Field Guide to the Mammals of Australia OUP; page 230 and plate 94) that should occur in these parts. Again there are not many seen. In Butterfly Bay we are in a no-discharge protected area in the Marine Park and we use a permanent mooring buoy for the night.
An absolute must is to have on board a copy of the magnificent book 100 Magic Miles by David Colfelt and illustrated by Carolyn Colfelt. This is a superb source of information and is essential to safe navigation in the Whitsunday islands. We are supplied with the latest seventh edition (2004; Windward Publications. ISBN 0 9586989 3 7). It has 256 pages packed with helpful tips, lots of excellent coloured pictures and loads of large, clear, full colour charts, together with many colour high resolution vertical air-photos. If there is any fault it is very short on information about flora and fauna except for mention of a few of the reef fish especially those that are legal to catch.

On our mooring in Nara Inlet

Weighing anchor (photo by Hella)

At the helm (photo by Hella)