A Drought Ends

On our Pacific crossing we got well used to the occasional windfalls that trolling lures behind Pelagic gave us - tuna and mahi mahi became regular, though unpredictable, staples of our diet.

But when we reached Australia things changed.

We've dragged lures up and down half of the east coast of Oz, with exactly one bite - something that broke our line off the Gold Coast almost a year ago. And because we've been generally unimpressed by the fish and prawns available in the fishermen's co-ops along the coast (Alaskans can be terrible seafood snobs), fish has largely disappeared from our diets.

But, on our sail into Townsville, things changed.

Instead of the southeast trades, we found northwesterlies that made the few anchorages along this stretch of coast unusable, and kept us tacking back and forth at sea all day and all night. We passed a humpback whale cow and calf that wouldn't stop breaching and slapping the water with their pectoral fins. We passed flocks of pied imperial pigeons, striking black and white birds, flying over the water on their migration from south from New Guinea. And we caught this:

Tuna for dinner.

The last fish we "caught" from the boat was the shark that bit our windvane three times, and our rudder once, 170 miles from the Queensland coast on our passage from New Caledonia.

It looks like the drought is over.

Behold, the Platypus

Well, our email has gone unchecked lately. The blog has been quiet. Op-ed writers on the Times web site have opinioned away without reaching us. For the last two weeks or more we have been blissfully out of range of the internet, doing some great traveling in tropical Queensland. More on that soon, but for now I'll catch up with past doings.

~~~

Alisa needed a quick visit to the doctor on our sail up the coast, so we pulled into the town of Mackay ("muh-KAI"), a regional hub in sugarcane growing country. There is no anchorage in Mackay, just a marina sitting inside an artificial harbor. Normally we would just do a hit and run in such a place, but our visit to Mackay also gave us the chance to fulfill a quest we've been discussing ever since we came to Oz. So we spent three nights in the marina, and hired a car to boot.

Elias catching a ride in a marina cart. Yes, he is sitting on two cartons of beer.

Once we had taken care of our errands, we spent a day at Eungella National Park, an hour from Mackay. Like every other foreigner who comes to Eungella, we came with the goal of seeing a platypus in the wild. Before staking out the platypus habitat at dusk, we spent a few hours rambling around the upland rainforest of the Finch Hatton Gorge.

Elias taking an apple break in the rainforest.

The "Wheel of Fire" waterhole, at the end of the track. The day was very hot. The water was perfectly cold.

Alisa shamed Elias and me into submerging in the chilly water. Then we kicked it on a sun-warmed rock, ate another apple, and watched the big flock of swifts high overhead.

Along the way, we did some birding, and saw three species we'd never seen before. We didn't get pictures, of course, but I got pics of all three off the web:

Wompoo fruit dove.

Azure kingfisher.

Red-headed honeyeater.

I'm not much of a birder back home, but I love to bird when I travel. Birds are the easiest part of a foreign natural history to learn, and looking for new birds gives you something to do in those odd travel moments when you're waiting for something else to happen. Plus, in the tropics, the there are just so many bird species, and they are so beautiful.

The real quarry, though, was the platypus, which as everyone knows is a monotreme, or an egg-laying mammal, and one of the marquee stars of Australian natural history. Platypus are typically retiring and difficult to see in the wild, but there are one or two spots in the country, like the Broken River in Eungella National Park, where they've become habituated to observers.

And, to break the suspense, we did see one. Most of the people who were at the viewing platform with us had already given up, and it was starting to get dark, when a platypus came paddling down the river below us, diving to the bottom to forage and stirring up mud clouds in the clear water as it probed for food. We watched for ten minutes as it went about its business with no concern for us, and for those ten minutes we were able to behold one of the true curiosities of the world, a sleek little water beast with a duck's beak (a great example of convergent evolution, by the way) that is the only mammal to produce venom (in spurs on the males' hind legs, and strong enough to kill a dog). They're such odd bods of the living world that European naturalists examining the first stuffed specimens to be transported back from Oz immediately assumed they were fakes. And we got to just stand there and watch one do its thing. We even got a pic:

Not bad, considering the light.

It was, in addition to the happy event of seeing a wild platypus, a great all-around day, a reminder of how fun it can be to get away from Pelagic every now and then to do some exploring ashore.

And, now that we have ticked this must-do of our "while in Australia" list, we have been prompted to consider what other items should be on that list. For while we're at that point where our Australian stay seems to stretch unbroken to the time horizons before us and behind, we know that the end will come suddenly, and we'll have the chance then to regret anything that we left undone.

Pancake Creek, Mostly

We left Mooloolaba just before sunset and we felt sick. There wasn't enough wind to steady the boat's motion, and the piddling little swell kept us jerking back and forth in an unpredictable way. Alisa and I both felt miserable, immediately.


"I can't believe we were just talking about sailing to Patagonia," she said.


The night before we had been inspired by the video that our friends on Six Pack had shot in southern Chile, our imaginations stoked by the idea of heading there ourselves.


"I mean, we're getting sick outside Mooloolaba," she added.


The only person on board who wasn't sick was Elias. He sat in the cockpit, completely unruffled, and asked us why.


"Why does a motor boat float?"


"Because that's what boats are designed for, honey."


"Why?"


"Just because."


"Oh. Why do sailboats float?"

"No more questions, honey."


"Why?"


Alisa and I were gruff with each other, and short with him. Seasickness is death on tolerance for other people, no matter if those other people are your spouse and adorable child. Alisa even came up from the cabin when she was getting Elias ready for bed and hugged the rail for a moment, just on the verge of throwing up.


But we had that useless kind of seasickness that makes you unable to do anything properly - you can't even throw up when you need to.


"Right now," I said after choking down my dinner of one steamed sweet potato, "living in a house and going to a soul-destroying job every day sounds pretty good."


Eventually we got over it. We sailed into the night and left the seasickness behind. But the bug that has been stalking Alisa off and on for the last few months flared up again, and she had to return to her bunk only two hours after she relieved me on watch. Taking into account the state of the crew, we ditched our plan of sailing straight through for 36 or 48 hours and pulled into Great Sandy Strait, the first haven to the north. Here's me and Elias, in the cockpit at anchor the next day. See if you can tell which person slept the night through and which slept two hours:



We made it to Bundaberg the next day, taking advantage of our knowledge of the very well-lit entrance to arrive after dark. In Bundie Elias helped his great-uncle Ken collect eggs from the chooks:

We left Bundaberg after only a day. We're on a mission to meet up with our Iluka friends Miles and Melissa in the Whitsundays on August 24th, so no dallying for us. A long day took us to Pancake Creek, farther north than we have yet been in Oz. That night we celebrated my 41st birthday:

When it came time to make a wish, I thought to myself, "There's nothing else I want." And then I blew out the candles.

The next morning, since we were in Pancake Creek, we breakfasted on pancakes in the cockpit:

Later Elias helped me fix the compass light:

Northerly winds set in, so we stayed put in Pancake Creek. Luckily there were great tidal flats to walk:

And some birding to do:

And we went on a great "bushwalk" up the hill to the Bustard Head light, and over the hill for this view of what I am told is the second spot that James Cook went ashore in Oz:

We met some very nice people among the 15 or so boats that were anchored in Pancake Creek, mostly waiting for the northerlies to pass. We did notice, however, how overwhelmingly retirement-age the demographic was on other boats.

"Why are there no other kids on these boats?" Elias asked.

Pancake Creek was beautiful, though it's also an inscrutable beauty. We're learning the birds, but everything else is completely mysterious to us: the flora, the geology, the indigenous culture and history. So different from being in Alaska, where we lived long enough, and arrived early enough in our lives, to make ourselves feel so much at home. And at the same time that Australian natural history is so foreign, the human side of the country has this very non-exotic, proto-North American feel. Very strange combination...

So, our march north continues. We left Pancake Creek, and have crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, and so are back in the tropics that we have begun to love so much. Every yacht anchorage and every town that we stop in is a place where we've never been before, but also somewhere fairly familiar just because it is Australian, and so repeats what we've experienced elsewhere in Oz.

We're in a marina today, in to run some quick errands in town and to get a mechanic to take a look at the diesel. The winds are forecast to come up strong from the south tomorrow, so we're looking forward to some good traveling. Meanwhile, Alisa and I have both had a funny feeling of loneliness as we toodle up the Queensland coast. There are no other foreign-flagged yachts about, as they have mostly left Oz for the cyclone-free season in the tropics. So we're without the company of fellow voyaging sailors, a group of people who are always capable of surprising us with sudden good friendship. Aside from the close interaction among the family on board, our social life mostly consists of waves to other boats and brief conversations with strangers. We miss the state of belonging to some sort of community, even if it is the ever-so-loose community of vagabonding sailors.

So it's good to have the visit with our Iluka friends before us, and the goal of meeting them in the Whitsundays to spur us along.