Start Loc: Brampton Island (20o 47.99'S, 149o 15.74'E)
Narrative: We have read that the Brampton Island Resort do not welcome visitors off boats, so we tried to call them on the VHF to see if there was a shop where we could buy some bread and milk. Getting no answer, we went ashore, pulled the dinghy up on the beach and walked into the resort area. It was deserted and looking run down. Our first impression was that it had gone the same way as the resort at Great Keppel. We only saw one bloke and we walked straight passed him, so if he was supposed to be caretaker/security he wasn't doing a good job. Some of the foreshore was washed away almost up to one set of bungalows, and the last date on the water sports board was 20 something January 2011. We surmised that maybe it had been evacuated and then damaged by Cyclone Yasi. It is easy to imagine them waiting for an insurance payout to fix it up and open again! We checked on the internet when we got back to the boat, and on the homepage it states that the resort is closed from 24th January for redevelopment. That being the case, there has not been much redevelopment done in the last seven months!
We had lunch back on the boat, then raised the anchor and left Brampton at 1:35pm. The winds were SE at 15kts and we sailed basically west on a broad reach at about 5.5kts boat speed. We also had a knot of favourable tide. Seas were roughly 1m and swell was about 0.5m. As we came up the west side of Ingot and Goldsmith Islands, we had three knots of tide with us. All in all it was a very pleasant sail and we arrived at our anchorage on the west side of Goldsmith Island at 3:45pm. The bottom is shale and drops off quite steeply, so it took us three attempts to get the anchor to hold.
The Smith Islands are actually the Sir James Smith Group and are "smith" themed. The group includes larger islands such as Goldsmith, Tinsmith, Locksmith, Silversmith, Ladysmith, Blacksmith and Anchorsmith Islands. The lessor islands are similarly themed with Hammer, Anvil, Bellows, Farrier, Ingot and Solder Islands, supported by Coppersmith and Forge Rocks.
End Loc: Goldsmith Island (20o 41.04'S, 149o 08.44'E)
Distance run: 12 nm (cumulative: 800nm)
Engine hours: 3 hr, 48 min (cumulative: 87 hr 05 min)