Day 29, Year 3: To Our Daughter-in-Law, Jo–Happy Gallery Opening
Date: Saturday, June 7, 2008
Weather: Windy Day at Anchor, SE 20-30 Knots
Location: Cooktown, Queensland, Australia

The last time we talked to our son and his wife, Jo, they said that Jo was having the grand opening of her art gallery on June 7th. We haven’t heard differently, so we are assuming this is happening. So to Jo, congratulations! We’ll be anxious to see gallery opening photos when we reach Darwin.

We had a day jam-packed with activities, all interesting. In a nutshell, we visited the James Cook Museum, did our grocery shopping and brought those things back to the boat, watched the Discovery 2008 parade, enjoyed lunch in town and then watched the truck pulling contest, walked quite a distance to the cemetery for an hour-long guided tour and history of some interesting characters, and then walked all the way back to town and further in another direction to the Botanical Gardens for another
hour-long guided tour, came back to Windbird to write and send this log, and then headed back to town for dinner with live jazz music on the waterfront. Whew! We even wear ourselves out when we write down what we have done. I have a nice little blister on one toe to prove I walked long distances today but we had great fun and learned a lot about Cooktown’s history. The cemetery walk sounds morbid, but actually it was very interesting. During the 1873 to 1890 period of time there was a gold rush
here and the population of Cooktown grew to 30,000 people. Almost 20,000 of those people were Chinese. Seeing how people were segregated for burial and how they were buried was fascinating. I’ll write some of the detail and put it in tomorrow’s log. The Botanical Garden tour was a little disappointing as there were just too many people and the guide had a very soft voice so it was hard to hear. So we made up for this by buying a “Plants of Tropical Queensland” book and “The Endeavor Journal
of Joseph Banks.” Hopefully between the two, I will be able to identify many of the plants and trees we are seeing in northern Queensland.

Tides have never been something that we have had to worry too much about in our voyage to this point, but all of a sudden, it is all about tides. Tides here do not follow what we think of as the normal six hours to high, then six hours to low, and then the repeat of that. Here you can have a low tide at 6 am in the morning and a high tide at 9 am. And the tides can be huge. We have had to learn about neap tides and spring tides and tidal streams. And this is going to be more and more important
as we head further north and over to Darwin. But for the moment, the importance of this is that we are going to have to leave here tomorrow by 1:00 in the afternoon. Otherwise, we are pretty much stuck here until Wednesday and we are too anxious to get to Lizard Island to enjoy the snorkeling and walks there to stay here. So we will go in for the landing of the Endeavor re-enactment in the morning and then hurriedly get back to Windbird and head out of here right at high tide. We will travel
about 20 nautical miles to Cape Bedford for tomorrow night and will be at Lizard Island by Monday evening. We are going to have PLENTY of wind, but it will be behind us so that is okay with us. So on we go.

080607 Day 29 Cooktown Parade Day