Australia - Pacific Crossing Notes: A Sailor's Guide to the Coconut Milk Run - page 449

North to Cairns
North of the Whitsundays, the coast takes a northwest bend, making for a more pleasant
wind angle under prevailing southeasterlies. Sailors in Maine go Down East; in Queens-
land, it's Up West as we set a course of 300° toward the setting sun for yet another
overnight passage. The rolly downwind sailing reminded us of our trade wind passage from
the Galapagos Islands to the Marquesas - except that we had a continent on one side, the
world's longest reef on the other, and only eighty feet of water under the keel.
Once underway under a new moon, we were reminded of how much light the stars provide
- including our old friend the Big Dipper, peeking above the horizon. Thanks to the stars
and several beacons, we had the visual reference of the mainland coastline and low-lying
islands - a welcome sanity check for sailors like us who are never truly comfortable relying
on electronic charts. We'd been warned against night sailing off shipping ports like Glad-
stone and Townsville, but the only real traffic we encountered was off Abbott Point, where
seven ships lay at anchor waiting to load up with coal.
Daylight hours were peppered with Coast Guard bulletins coming through on the VHF, in-
cluding weather bulletins and warnings of live ammunition exercises at Rattlesnake Island.
But we on Namani carried on unperturbed in our own quiet bubble, just the three of us and
the faithful boat that had carried us two-thirds of the way around the world since our earli-
est days in the Mediterranean. The days of that bubble were numbered, so we made sure to
appreciate every quiet minute, every peaceful view.
Halfway between the Whitsundays and Cairns lies an island group known as the Palm
Isles, the perfect place for a last stopover. We passed one small resort and a research station
before grabbing one of two visitor's moorings in Pioneer Bay on Orpheus Island. After the
relative crowds of the Whitsundays, it was a pleasure to have an anchorage to ourselves
once again, and we enjoyed our solitude for another two days.
That left a mere 120 miles to our final destination. We couldn't have asked for much more
for our last overnight passage aboard Namani : calm seas and steady wind to fill the sails,
plus a tropical landscape to fill our senses. We drank it all in, eking everything we could
out of the dying wind before switching the motor on in the wee hours of morning. In con-
trast to the relatively open waters of our previous passages, this one had Namani tiptoeing
past tiny islets and reefs in an area where the Great Barrier Reef creeps close to the coast.
Detailed charts and a series of beacons guided us through the night until we honed in on