Haslewood Island to Long Island
Another lovely morning today. Since that last day on Hamilton Island, when
it was gusting at close to 40 knots, the weather has been essentially
Whitsundays perfect.
This week has disappeared in the blink of an
eye. Tomorrow we head back to Airlie
Beach for the end of another leg. For
the final night I wanted to find an anchorage closer to port, and that gave me
a chance I’d been looking for to return to Long Island. This is another place I haven’t visited in over 20 years – I guess it’s not one of those iconic Whitsundays
locations. It was once a key stop for
bareboaters in the days when all the charter companies were based nearby in
Shute Harbour. The island also hosted a
popular under-35s resort that went by many names during the time I knew it –
Whitsunday 100, Club Crocodile, Con Tiki, Long Island. Of course it’s closed now. My guess is that a resort that caters to
increasingly more budget markets eventually runs out of enough cash to renew
its infrastructure and simply dies in a downwards revenue spiral.
We were presented with the opportunity of sailing
from the outer, most eastern anchorage to one of the innermost islands, with
the apparent wind largely on our beam, in flat water and under a clear
sky. I’d been hoping for such conditions
especially to give Mike a great sail. We
took the long, eastern way around Haslewood and then south of Hamilton Island
to minimise the time the engine was running, and took around five hours to
cover the 25 miles involved.
I’ll mention here a sight that provided another sad
indication of the level of skill of some bareboaters (bear in mind I didn’t say
all bareboaters). When we came around Haslewood
we could just make out what appeared to be the stern of a large catamaran, many
miles ahead of us. We were doing maybe 6
knots in 10-12 knots of true wind, but we seemed to be coming up very quickly on
the cat. In the course of traversing the
southern shore of Whitsunday Island we caught, passed and left it miles in our wake,
until we could hardly see it. They
simply didn’t know the most basic principles of sail. Our sails were trimmed for a very easy beam
reach while theirs were hard on. Maybe
they thought sheets are like a throttle – the more they’re wound on the faster
you go. Even the sight of us surging past
them didn’t seem to make them think something was wrong. There’ll be many people who accuse me of
being rude and picky but it’s tragic that, like so much else, attention to the skills of seamanship are so readily dismissed simply to get guests out onto
boats and to collect their money. In a
broader assessment, I’d argue this is a foundational cause of what one of the
Hammo staff described to me as the not uncommon occurrence of bareboats being
put up onto reefs.
OK, in the words of Forrest Gump, that’s all I have
to say about that (hope I never end up on a reef now!)
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