Start Loc: Hope Islands (15o 43.85'S, 145o 27.37'E)
Narrative: We dropped the mooring buoy at 9:29am and motored through the reef away from Hope Island East. We decided we would head north to Cairns Reef and do a bit of fishing, before heading in to Cooktown. I motored the 5nm or so to the reef even though we had a SE breeze of 10kts, simply to put some charge in the batteries. The fridge and freezer are both working harder now the ambient temperature is a little higher; they are running longer and using more power. Coupled with the fact that we have had on and off cloud cover and rain over the last few days and the solar panels can't keep up, it means we need to run the engine more to charge the batteries. Well over half the engine time yesterday was not spent getting from A to B.
We were trolling two lures behind us, and as we came up to the passage between Bee Reef and Cairns Reef I decided to move closer to Bee Reef and troll along the face. Almost straight away we had a strike on one of the lures and reeled in a small, but nice, 55cm shark mackerel. It will give us a good feed. We ended up anchoring just after 10:30am at the north end of the east face of Bee Reef, in 18m of water. We put some lines in the water but there was no action, so we had lunch and moved on again at 12:18pm.
The winds were still SE but had strengthened to 15-20kts. Seas were about 1.5m. We set full head sail and ran NW, passing to the east of Cowlishaw and Dawson Reefs, making around 6.5kts over ground. The following sea rolled us around a bit, but it was not unpleasant sailing.
As we rounded the headland and Cooktown came into view, we furled the head sail. The working sheet was let a bit loose and the sail started flapping as Heather furled. The lazy sheet ended up whipping around and getting Heather under the chin, leaving a somewhat nasty rope burn; nothing too serious, but painful. We could not see the leads as there were several boats anchored in front of them, so we just stayed between the channel markers. We anchored in Endeavour River at 2:55pm just past the first lead in good holding sand. The 3.4m of water we anchored in means that on tomorrow night's low tide we will have about 30cm under the keel.
After anchoring, we took the dinghy ashore. Heather and the kids went to the park while I walked down the road to "The Lure Shop" and picked up a new remote speaker for the VHF. The old one died a week or so ago. We confirmed the model number we were after on the internet and emailed GME, who put us onto The Lure Shop as a supplier in Cooktown. We rang them so they could get one in before we arrived, but it turned out they had what we wanted on the shelf. I installed it when we got back to the boat, and we can again hear the VHF while we are in the cockpit.
We will spend tomorrow here as well. We will do the tourist thing and have a look at the Cook Museum and a better general look around, as well as pick up a few items such as fresh bread and milk. On Sunday we will top up water at the public jetty before heading off on our final northerly stage to Lizard Island.
End Loc: Cooktown (15o 27.68'S, 145o 14.78'E)
Distance run: 23nm (cumulative: 1778nm)
Engine hours: 1 hr, 37 min (cumulative: 15 hr, 12 min)