While waiting for weather the crew of VS explored some of the Port Lincoln area. Its claim to historical fame rests largely on the 1802 visit of Matthew Flinders who was surveying the coast en route to Sydney from London. On the top of Stamford Hill is the Flinders Monument, erected in about 1844 by Sir John Franklin (he who became Governor of Tasmania and later died searching for the North West Passage in the Arctic at the other end of the world) who was a Midshipman in Flinders’ ship “Investigator”. From the inscription it is clear that Franklin revered Flinders which may explain the extraordinarily brief interval between discovery and monument.

Flinders climbed this low hill (144m - a mountain hereabouts) on 26 February, searching for signs of water. The whole crew nearly died of thirst but water was eventually found on a beach in the Bay a short while later. Here is the view from the monument looking east with VS anchored in the bay:

 

And here is two thirds of the crew (you may recall that we had been temporarily augmented by Ali’s long lost cousin Mark Chilton) at the monument:

A bit further south is Memory Cove named, like everything else round here, by Flinders (he came from Lincoln in the UK), from where VS set off for Esperance and points west. The Cove was so called in remembrance of eight of Flinders’ small crew who were drowned in a tiderace a few days after finding water. Here we go, Mark enjoying the flat water. Round the corner in the Southern Ocean it was a different story:

A nice evening at sea in a good breeze: