It will take us about 24-hours to get to Lizard Island, so we headed out a little before noon, figuring noon was the ideal time of day to arrive at Lizard Island. The seas were incredibly calm and it was a nice ride.

Eric was constantly checking the shaft. The collar of the shaft was still running too hot. He started running water from the hose on it to cool it off and pulled out some of the stuffing material. It was still running too hot, so he kept the water on it. After a while, the water pump overheated and shut off. We slowed down, hoping that would help. It didn’t. The shaft seemed to be OK temperature wise, but it was making friction on the collar and the collar was just too hot. After being underway about 2 ½ hours, we decided we had better play it safe and head to a port. Port Douglas was closest.

We radioed the marina there to let them know we were coming. The dock master said he was leaving for the day and assigned us a slip. According to our calculations, we would be coming in just at sunset, and the approach to the marina is shallow and narrow. Fortunately, the day we had gone diving Eric had paid attention to the layout of the marina and the channel in Port Douglas, so he was feeling pretty confident about navigating us in. He said he had a strange feeling that day that he should be observant.

Like Cairns, the marina in Port Douglas is at the mouth of a river. Port Douglas is a peninsula and the river is tucked around the west side, so it is not visible from a distance. As we neared the tip of the peninsula, at first all we could see were mountains plunging into the shoreline.

As we made our way to the west side of the peninsula, where the river would join the ocean a quarter of a mile up, we finally saw some buildings along the shore. The merge into the river was evident — like Cairns, one side is an endless chain of buildings and the other is mangrove trees lined with moorings.

The ride in was pretty, with the mountains in the background looking dramatic in various degrees of shadow in the fading light. Most of the sky around us was pink, but right where the sun was setting the sky was striped gold and blue, kind of like it was in Tahiti. The stripes were fatter and the color contrast not as spectacular as in Tahiti, but it was beautiful none-the-less. We have actually seen the stripe effect several times now.

We located our slip and pulled into it just as the light completely faded away. All seemed to go fine as we pulled in, until we realized that the slip was too short for us! We stick out of the end by a good six to eight feet. We have to leap over the side of the railing to get on and off. Christi feels like she is in grade school playing in the monkey bars. If the finger was even a foot shorter, we wouldn’t be able to get on and off at all. This picture was taken the next day, and you can clearly see that Eric is at the very end of the finger as he is climbing up the last edge of railing before the railing ends at the Portuguese bridge.

From our slip we could hear the birds screaming in the trees. We couldn’t hear the birds from the marina in Cairns. Once we were all situated, we went to a restaurant in the mall in front of the marina for dinner. The day we went diving we had been quickly herded down the walkway on the outside of the mall going both in and out, so we didn’t get a chance to look inside. It is nicely laid out and quite attractive, with the usual mall kind of stores inside. These pix were also taken the next day. The first is the exterior, the second is the interior of the mall.