Wednesday, 24 April 2013

24th April - Hinchinbrook Channel to Mission Beach


Wednesday 24th April

Yesterday, after my cold shower/no swim, I sat at the computer for a while, then read my book.  I finished Gone Girl… And no I could not have predicted how this grim tale would have reached any sort of logical conclusion.  Terrifying!  Gripping!!  At the back of the book there is an interview with Gillian Flynn and she sounds…so jolly, so nice, such fun!!!

By the way…and this is actually VERY good news.  (For me.  And isn’t it all about Me Me Me??  If you read Gone Girl you will discover somebody even more inclined in that direction…)  The news is…I can read!  On the boat!  Without vomiting!!  Wee hee!!!  I am thrilled to bits.  The downside is…Pete and I are going to run out of books very swiftly!! 

Pete read his book on the couch then did some computer stuff but I fear his computer is coming to the end of its days.  Stone Age Piece Of Crap, as Barbara’s son Gareth would have said, in his teen years.  (This computer is about four years old…scrapheap material!!)  The sun went down very slowly and surely, but it never for one second diminished in strength. 



I covered as many windows as possible with a variety of sarongs, but piercing rays of blistering heat came through; I found it almost impossible not to run – yes – shrieking dementedly to hurl myself into the crocodile-laden-sea…)



It is breathtakingly beautiful here.  I am not complaining…just explaining!!

One of the women I met at the theatre restaurant affair on Saturday, in the group from Carlyle Gardens, is the leading light in the craft group at the retirement village (they prefer to call it Retirement Resort, of course…) Elaine was a very nice woman, recently widowed, and very positive about her life.  Her craft group meet once a week and they do all manner of amazing and wonderful things.  They knit beautiful fleecy rugs for children in Nepal, little premmie babies who have hitherto been wrapped in newspaper, or horsehair, are now cocooned in feathery soft Australian wool blankies.  I told her that I belong to a knitting group too.  And we knit…for ourselves, and for each other’s and our own  grand children… I felt a bit chastened; maybe one day I will have time to knit extra thingies, for premmie babies in Nepal…(Absolutely can’t knit on the boat these latitudes…TOO HOT!!  Fingers all sticky!!!)

Today we made our way through glorious Hinchinbrook Channel; just magnificent.  Similar in beauty to Marovo Lagoon in the Western Province of the Solomons, and reminiscent, in a tropical way, of Bathurst Harbour in our own wonderful Tasmanian southwest.  Dreamy mythical mountains reaching down into the pristine sea…



Then up the coast, past even more lovely islands – the Family group, including Dunk Island.  We are just north of Dunk Island, anchored at a smaller beach next to Mission Beach.  Pete’s friend Peter Salmon was there to meet us, and we are now staying in Pete and Maddie’s wonderful tropical house. 



This afternoon Maddie took me on a small excursion.  First mission at Mission Beach was to go to the post office, where they have the very nicest post cards I have ever seen.  And second mission was to go and look at Pete and Maddie’s bush block, above Bingil Bay.  Maddie is a delicate, refined sort of woman…but she took the wrong turn and bounced us up a steep track which was very overgrown.  She gave a startled scream – fuck me dead! as we hurtled through the undergrowth.  I wasn’t in the least alarmed; I was too entranced with the jungle, and too busy looking for a cassowaries.

Oh and as a potscript…here is a sad and sorry photo of…the severed remote control for the anchor…


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