10′ 35S by 142′ 14E – Yes, we know. We said we were going to Thursday Island. Thursday Island is a small island in the middle of a group of islands. Horn Island is the next island over and has a better anchorage than Thursday Island, so we are anchoring at Horn. Kind of like when we went to Luganville but were anchored across the channel at Aore Island.
Yesterday, almost as soon as we finished writing the blog post saying the ride was good, it got worse. We are getting close to Continue reading
Pete and Fern picked us up at 07:30 to go on the Cook’s Look hike up the mountain to the left of us. In 1770, Captain Cook mapped the Queensland coastline. He was trying to make his way to the open ocean and couldn’t find a pass through the reefs. He sailed to Lizard Island, anchoring in Watson’s Bay, and scaled the mountain. At the top of the Continue reading
Port Douglas was founded in 1877 as the port town for the Hodgkins River gold fields. In the 1880’s Cairns was chosen as the terminal for the new rail line from Kuranda and another mountain town called Mareeba. With the rail traffic going to Cairns, Port Douglas never grew bigger than a sleepy village. In the 1980’s a developer built a luxury resort that attracted tourists. More money was invested into making the town a nice tourist destination, and tourism is now Port Douglas’s primary income source.
We had decided yesterday that Christi should go under the boat. We thought the problem may have come from lanolin grease blocking the area where the shaft is supposed to leak, so she was going to go down and try to wipe any grease away from that area. When we checked in, the dock master told us they get small crocs in the marina from time to time, so Continue reading
At 0800 the travel lift rolled over to us and the crew worked on getting the straps around Kosmos. The straps can be unhooked in the middle, so they rolled the machine on top of Kosmos with the straps undone and hooked them together around the blocks we were resting on. With us inside Kosmos, the lift picked us up and drove us back to the slip. Once we were centered over the water, we were slowly lowered down. And we floated. Phew. A good thing indeed.
We had an appointment at the fuel dock in the marina at 09:30 for fuel. We did circles in the river to kill time. The freshly repacked shaft was getting hot. Too hot. Not good.
We had already decided Continue reading
We had a busy couple of days while Kosmos was still out of the water. We got to play with zinc, propane, flax, lanolin, and Swiss cheese. Continue reading