Quick Stop - Pancake Creek, Queensland, Australia
Harmonie
Don and Anne Myers
Sun 2 May 2010 02:38
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24:00.681S 151:44.227E
On April 27th, we left Bundaberg bright and early
and sailed, then when the wind dropped to less than 10 knots behind
us, motored a total of 11 hours and about 65 miles north up the
coast to Pancake Creek. The trip was uneventful until we reached the
entrance to Pancake Creek, which was not mapped accurately on our
electronic chart. The entrance was a little like being stuck between a
rock and a hard place in that there were menacing rocks on our port side and a
barely visible sand bank to starboard. In the end it was no problem
getting in given the advice we received from Storyteller, who was already
anchored in the shallow waters just beyond the entrance, the more accurate
old-fashioned chartlet in our pilot book, and a green buoy marking the sand
bank. Hmmm...so this is what navigation used to be like before chart
plotters and GPS...
Pancake Creek was a quiet, flat anchorage,
but other than that, unremarkable (in other words, nothing to take a photo
of). We stayed one night and left bright and early again the next morning
for another 10 hour ride further up the coast.
At this point, it might make sense to
explain that the distance between Brisbane in the middle of
the east coast of Australia, to Darwin in the middle of the north
coast, is huge at 2,000 miles. We scheduled two and a half
months for this part of the trip, but plan to take at least a few weeks off to
cruise around the Whitsunday Islands, which are about 500 miles north of
Brisbane. This plan leaves about two months to travel 2,000 miles at
an average of 30 miles a day. Thirty miles isn't much if you are
driving, but 30 miles at slow sailboat speed of 6 miles/hr means 5
hours of travel per day - not too shabby. This is why we are skating up
the coast to the Whitsundays as fast as the wind and weather will
allow. Once there, we will have traveled 500 miles or 25% of the distance
to Darwin, so we figure we will deserve to have a two-week break. After
that, we will resume our semi-quick pace and continue north.
More on our fast skate north and re-entry into the
tropics later.
Anne
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