Gypsy Cruising

20 July

Butterfly Bay to Stonehaven Anchorage

Butterfly Bay turned out to be a most enjoyable place to visit, and one that I'll return to on this cruise.  We're now starting to get to the point where David and Anne's return to Sydney is becoming a material issue in our planning.  We have two more days before we must be in Airlie Beach.

We'd like to visit Blue Pearl Bay, on the western shore of Hayman Island.  I've never been there and we're imagining the (probably unlikely) potential for us to walk around the new ultra luxury resort, or just do some snorkelling.  In any case, we departed this morning with the intention of rounding the northern point of Hayman and then coming down its western side.  The initial run northwards, with the wind, proved to be most enjoyable.  David and I managed to get some nice photos together at the wheel(s).

Leaving Butterfly Bay

David and me, 33 years older, maybe a little wiser, than the last time we were here together

Rounding the top of Hayman Island proved to be quite a shock, with very strong southerly winds greeting us on the other side.  Rather than the hoped for gentle anchorage, we got short seas and a blast of head winds.  To cap it off, the scenery proved to be most disappointing.  Hayman was unusually bare, except for the bits that had been built on to provide industrial services for the resort.  It didn't take us long to abandon ideas of staying the night there.

A small beach on the northern tip of Hayman Island - reminiscent of island from The Man with the Golden Gun

Langford Reef is just a short distance south of Hayman Island.  It has a lovely sand spit and drying reef at low tide, but the installation of permanent moorings there now seems to have given it a permanent quota of bareboat residents.  In the prevailing conditions I would have thought you'd need your head examined to even consider spending time there.  I guess bareboaters are driven more by the need to see everything in the allocated time than the desire for good quality anchorages.

We eventually picked a mooring up in Stonehaven Anchorage, even further south.  In the event I had a noisy, uncomfortable night from a combination of the mooring buoy banging on the hull and waves slapping at our stern.  David and Anne apparently fared better in the forward cabin.  I think I could skip Stonehaven for the rest of my life.