Tuesday 6^th December

So, have I found out why is Yeppoon?  Well I have discovered that it started out as a sugar and pineapple growing centre, then became a bit of a tourist mecca.  And now it is the third fastest growing area in the whole of Australia.  Not quite sure why…but lots of new shopping centres are going up, lots of suburbs springing out of the ground.  Maybe land is cheap?  It is all quite pleasant, and there is a beautiful big wide beach.  Maybe a series of beaches.  And Great Keppel Island is only a ferry trip away.  But…and this is a very big but…while the beach is nice, the water is not.  It is warm (25, so the helpful blackboard warning us NOT to swim informed us), but very shallow and therefore there are lots of choppy waves and treacherous rips.  You can only swim between some very narrowly spaced flags, in the brown-ish churning water.  Not only but also…jellyfish!  We are moored at the end of a very long arm of this nice little marina, and the sea around us is absolutely thick with jellyfish.  Jellyfish soup!  Even if they weren’t poisonous it would be very creepy, to get in there amongst them.  They are actually very pretty, in an eerie way.  Well pretty if you like pale, opaque pulsating mushrooms with a faint blue rim and far too many fat squashy translucent tentacles.

I am longing for my happy snorkel days, but actually – don’t scoff – it is quite cold.  Last night I got out of bed and hunted around for my mohair blankie… Pete and I get lots of exercise walking to and from the facilities.  We are, as I said, at the far end of the marina, on White arm.  To get to it, we have to negotiate Yellow, Green, Grey and then turn off at White.  Can you imagine how often I got lost??  I would, for example, walk along cheerily with my big bag #2 of clean, dry washing, and find myself – oops – at the end of Grey arm, looking out sadly at 2XS across an expanse of brown and white (white being the jellyfish) water.  Back I would go, to the junction of White and Grey which I had missed.  And many variations on that theme… Even when I negotiated the maze correctly, it was still nearly ten minutes to get to the facilities.  Never mind, I still love a marina!  And this is a very nice one.  Hot showers, clean washing machines, delightful helpful staff in the office, courtesy car. 

I am aware that I am writing this partly in past tense, partly in present.  This is because we are hovering, ready to go, but not quite sure when.  It is chilly and rainy with an icy little wind blowing up and down the arms of the marina.  Inviting??  Well if the wind is in the right direction, it might  well be.  We have a long way to go and not all that much time to do it.  It is possible we could get to The Narrows, aka Cattle Crossing Area.  I am looking at the pages in Cruising the Coral Coast and it is, as the name would suggest, a narrow passage of about 20 nautical miles between Curtis Island and the mainland, accessible at high tide.  So we might set off and bob about at the entrance, waiting for high tide either tonight or early tomorrow morning, and then negotiate the passage and find ourselves at Seventeen Seventy (a small town on the outskirts of Gladstone) within a day or so of Bundaberg.  Who knows??  And who knows when we will be back in internet range.

Last night we were still very tired from our few days of sailing against the wind and the sea.  We sat over G & Ts contemplating dinner.  We each offered to cook, but not with any great enthusiasm, and we both knew there was an alternative- a little restaurant near the marina facilities.  Maybe we could get something reasonable to eat there…great idea!  We rushed off through the Grey, White, Yellow, Green maze and sat at a pretty table surrounded by twinkling fairy lights in the trees.  Our lovely waitress, Wendy (an unexpectedly old-fashioned name for a cool young thing) arrived with iced water, menu, wine list.  And it was all just wonderful, a top class meal!  Worth going to Yeppoon just to go to the Waterline Restaurant!  We shared an entrée of Moreton Bay bugs, served on some sort of esoteric Spanish sausage mixture, and then had fillet steak, cooked perfectly, with a few prawns on the side, and lots of veggies, including bundles of asparagus baked in prosciutto.  And our red wine was just perfect.  (Thank you Pete!)  We went back to 2XS very happy with our fine dining in an unexpected place.