We were all excited to take the dinghy across to Inskip Point for a beach walk after our hectic previous day. As we were coming through 'the mad mile' we had a phone call from Tin Can Coast Guard (a woman by this stage) who said 'you're probably at the bad bit by now, just remember it looks worse than it is. When you come in anchor just inside, you can take your tender over later to Inskip, it's a great doggie beach, your little doggies will love it.' What a kind and reassuring service!
Land Ahoy!
Well, we all did love it. It is the point of Rainbow Beach and has a basic camp site in the scrub. We spent all of the next day here and Sue and Roger (SV Northwind) joined us for sundowners. That is one of the things that we love about cruising, you can catch up with other cruisers in different locations. We met Sue and Roger in Southport and spent many an hour having enjoyable chats over sundowners.
SV Northwind
The following day we headed south to Tin Can Bay and just managed to get our anchor set before we had a storm that caused a white out...now that was freaky! We spent an enjoyable few days here (mostly, some of it was spent trying to find banks etc to get cards replaced). There were lots of dolphins around and quite a few sprays.
We got up early one morning to watch the dolphins being fed. This apparently started in the 70's when a fisherman accidentally injured a dolphin and took it upon himself to hand feed it until it recovered (co-incidentally I was just interrupted by a dolphin swimming under Manatee and Ruby running out on deck to hang off the bow sprit and chat to it). The third generation of that original dolphin come in every morning to be hand fed, although it did feel like an obligation of sorts, the female eager to get away as soon as 'the show' was over.
Allegedly injured dolphins (mainly shark attack) come in to be fed and recover as well. They are Indo-Pacific Humpback dolphins which have smallish dorsal fins and are big, these two weighing in at 145kg. Surprisingly they also had big teeth that made more than one toddler cry when they were being 'encouraged' to feed the dolphins. AK heard a local fisherman in the crowd explain that they were superb hunters, being very efficient at rounding up fish into the shallows as a team.
After Tin Can we headed north up the Straits, back over to Fraser Island where our first anchorage was 'Gary's'.
The glassy waters of the Sandy Straits
The anchorage is called 'Gary's' after a Butchela man who lived in this area (a lagoon is also given his name) around 1900 who continued living a traditional lifestyle and welcoming visitors to his camp. It is very popular with cruisers as it is protected with a beach at low tide.
Manatee at Gary's
We decided to have some 'adult time' so left the girls on the boat and went for a walk along the fire trails on Fraser. Four hours later we had not seen any dingoes, although we saw lots of tracks which we followed only to find when we back tracked that dingo prints were on top of our footprints. That picnic lunch sitting on the trail was probably not the smartest thing to do!
Intrepid explorers in the bush
No comments:
Post a Comment