After nearly losing The Endeavour and all her crew on a reef, Lt James Cook needed to find a route out of the Great Barrier Reef into open ocean. While repairs continued at Cooktown, Cook went 20 nautical miles offshore to Lizard Island and from the mountain top was able to see a safe passage through the coral reefs. We also climbed the mountain on Lizard Island to Cook’s Lookout, a 90 minute hike to the 358m peak. It marked the end of our “pilgrimage” following Cook’s voyage up the east coast of Australia, from Point Hicks in Victoria, past Botany Bay in NSW and finally to Lizard Island in far north Queensland.
It has been a 2,100 nautical mile (3,900 km) voyage from Melbourne to Lizard Island. It has taken Paul and Phil two years to prepare and we’re so pleased to have reached our northern-most destination, overcoming challenges and having plenty of laughs throughout our adventure. We celebrated with Carpe Diem—Paul, Helen, Cathy and Harry—but they forgot to tell us the theme was “island wear”.
We had a quick trip from Cooktown to Lizard Island on Sunday 18 June. We anchored in Watsons Bay next to the resort and were immediately greeted by reef sharks circling the boat. Plans to swim off the back of the boat were cancelled.
Having travelled for 9 days, we were looking forward to relaxing at anchor for the week. We sat on the beach, read our books, swam in the bay, snorkelled to look at the colourful tropical fish in the coral, hiked up the mountain and walked to Blue Lagoon on the other side of the Island. The warm, tropical beauty was in stark contrast to winter in Melbourne.
This part of the world is dominated the by south-easterly trade winds. Not until Lizard Island did I appreciate how strong and relentless the trade winds are. And the mountains on the Island seemed to funnel the winds through Watsons Bay in particular, often blowing at 20-30 knots. This meant that we couldn’t sit at the back of the boat for happy hour or sail out to the Cod Hole, a famous dive spot on the outer Barrier Reef. It also tested our anchor, which had trouble holding in the strongest winds. We had to set our anchor, or a second anchor, 17 times during our stay because it dragged: not much fun at 3:00am in pitch darkness and howling winds. (Sorry Rosie, that wasn’t in the brochure.)
We bid farewell to David and Rosie at Lizard Island. They had cruised north with us for 12 days from Airlie Beach—thanks guys, we thoroughly enjoyed having you on board. As their light aircraft flew back to Cairns they would have had sensational views of the Great Barrier Reef. We then welcomed Dan and Gigi who flew in to Lizard Island on Saturday 24 June to join us for the cruise south back to Airlie Beach. They were able to spend a day enjoying what Lizard Island has to offer before we set sail south.
(Sorry for the delay posting this log of our stay at Lizard Island. Mobile internet access was unreliable.)
Debonnaire 