Day 24, Year 3: Cairns to Double Island
Day 24, Year 3: Cairns to Double Island
Date: Monday, June 2, 2008
Weather: Beautiful, Warm Day, But No Wind
Latitude: 16 degrees 43.652 minutes S
Longitude: 145 degrees 40.528 degrees E
Location: Double Island, Queensland, Australia
Ready or not, we moved on today. We still had many things we wanted to do in Cairns, but we were just too cheap to pay for another night in the marina. And unfortunately, anchoring out in Cairns is not safe because of the strong tides. So on we went. We made a last minute run into town to buy another bag of onions. Windbird can’t sail without onions onboard and since we are four to six weeks from the next store when we reach Darwin, we thought it best to buy more “just in case.” We had a 9:30
am appointment at the fuel dock and that was certainly an interesting experience. Donna and Gerry on Scot Free had a 9:00 am appointment and they called us to give us the heads up that no one would be on the fuel dock to take our lines. This is very unusual. In fact, we have never come to a fuel dock when someone wasn’t there to take our lines. And with the currents here, docking of any sort is very tricky. It took us a few tries, but we did get tied up and filled our center tank. We have three
fuel tanks and two are still full from our last fill-up in New Caledonia last season. We probably won’t need a lot of fuel from here to Darwin, but we were afraid to head into such a long run without full tanks. The cost was almost $8.00 a gallon, so just filling one tank cost over $400.00. Fuel in Indonesia will be much cheaper, so we don’t plan on getting fuel again until Kupang in West Timor. So after the harrowing experience of docking and the shock due to the price of fuel, we were ready
for a hassle-free day. But just as we pulled away from the dock, our steering went haywire. This is not a good thing to happen in a very busy harbor with high speed ferries and tourists boats zipping about everywhere and very shallow water just a few inches beyond the buoys. We could steer, but the wheel was so loose that we had to turn it very far to get it to react. We quickly turned on the auto pilot and Mark went below to figure out the problem. He came back fairly quickly with good news.
The steering cable had just slipped off the quadrant and needed to be put back in place and tightened up.
We motored the twelve or so miles to little Double Island and anchored by early afternoon. Donna and Gerry wanted to try out their new dinghy motor, so they launched their dinghy and came over to visit. While we were talking, we realized that we had not downloaded important tide information that we will need when we go “over the top” of Cape York and head toward Darwin. That led us to do a little group research into that phase of our journey and I think we all got just a little nervous at the
lack of information that we do have. We have some books and Donna and Gerry have others, but between us we still don’t have everything that we need. And, of course, Cairns was our last chance to get anything. Aqua Magic is still in Cairns, so we might have to contact them to ask them to pick up a few things for us.
But the afternoon was not all route planning. We did go out in Scot Free’s dinghy to help with the new engine break-in process and we went over to a fishing boat anchored near-by. We saw two men working on one of the “wings” or outriggers and asked what kind of fish they catch. They explained that the boats we see here that look like they have wings are all shrimp or prawn boats. They look identical to the ones in the Gulf of Mexico in Florida. So I guess some things are the same the world over.
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