Sunday 21st October

At Sea

19 46.069 S
148 18.118 E (at Midnight)

The night passed quietly, the weather was a little warmer and we weren’t being thrown around as much as we had been for the past few days. Neither of us slept particularly well overnight – the excitement of being almost there had really kicked in and we had to force ourselves to go to bed rather than watch the Queensland coast approach. Funnily enough only 2 more boats went past us during the night – both on Gerry’s watch. As the day light broke through we were seeing more and more small islands, most of which I had never heard of! The day was quite uneventful and pretty boring. The wind died away and we started up the mechanical wind and motor sailed for most of the day. It was close to lunch time before we started to recognize the islands that we were going by – we had hit the Whitsunday passage (which we know quite well having cut our sailing teeth around this area). I’m also happy to report that Airlie beach turned the sun on for us, we had glorious sunshine as soon as we were in sight of the place. For those of you who have ever seen the Queensland tourism adverts we thought that they should change the catch phrase from “Queensland, beautiful one day, perfect the next” to “ Queensland crappy one day, perfect the next” as this was what we were experiencing. The sea also changed colour off of the Whitsunday Islands; it became a clear pale aqua green – very pretty. It took us just about all day to clear the Whitsunday Islands, by late afternoon we were just off of Hayman Island – the last in the chain when a very large super yacht British defender roared out from behind the island and cut across in front of us. If we had been moving a fraction faster at the time we would have run over the dinghy that it was trailing behind it! This was one of many yachts that were out for a Sunday afternoon sail and we didn’t even pretend to be racing against any of them, after all we had just come from the other side of the world to here – we didn’t have anything to prove! The sun began to set just after we had cleared Hayman Island – it set over the land and was a beautiful sight for our last sunset at sea but there was no green flash – it is official guys – it does not happen despite all the stories we have been told. The night seemed never ending; we were now so close to home that we could taste it. We tried our best to sleep and even managed to for a while but we both seemed to have caught our second wind and just wanted to be up on deck until we arrived in Townsville.