Start Loc: Scraggy Point, Hinchinbrook Island (18o 17.43'S, 146o 06.24'E)
Narrative: After another calm night at anchor, we left Scraggy Point at 9:40am. There was no wind to speak of, and we motored across the channel to Port Hinchinbrook Marina, arriving at 10:20am. While the mess of boats and pontoons in the corner had been removed, there was only the piles and few boats. We motored straight around to the jetty at Cardwell. It has no protection on its piles so we decided to do a recon by dinghy, anchoring just off the jetty at 10:55am.
Water was the only reason we needed to go along side. The advice we had must be out of date as there is no longer water available at the jetty. We walked across the highway to the servo, bought bread and milk and 20L of ULP for the outboards, and filled the 25L water jerry. (We keep a 25L jerry as an emergency reserve, and knowing we could refill at the servo we had just emptied it into the forward water tank.) After stowing all that on the boat and putting another 25L in the forward water tank, Cam and I went ashore again, filled up the water jerry, and dumped rubbish.
Heather and Haydee had lunch ready for us when we got back, so we scoffed that and raised anchor again at 12:30pm. Winds were NE at 10-15kts by this stage, but our course was NE too, so we motored past Hecate Point on Hinchinbrook and into Missionary Bay. There are eight creeks in the SE corner of Missionary Bay, numbered instead of named, all deep but with a large area of mud flats across the entrance. We were approaching on an ebb tide but we still had 2.5m of tide so I wasn't overly concerned. We approached the yellow special mark in the SE corner of the bay on a bearing of 155 degrees magnetic, with the peak of Goold Island dead astern. We found the shallowest water north of the special, reading 2.5m. Once we were on the line between the special mark and the starboard lateral at the mouth of Number Six Creek, we turned towards the starboard lateral. It was generally 4m of water on the way to the lateral. From there we strongly favoured the south bank (4.5m of water 10m off the bank) until we reached the cross over to Number Seven Creek. It was all safe water through the cross over and the couple of hundred metres or so up Number Seven Creek before we anchored in 6.5m of water at 3:25pm.
Once we were set up, we took the dinghy with the 15hp further up the river to find the Ramsay Bay Boardwalk. We found it, and walked the 10 minutes or so to Ramsay Bay on the east side of Hinchinbrook. It was a nice beach, albeit with a bit of rubbish washed up, and Heather and I enjoyed a cooling off swim while the kids played in the small 'surf' on their boogie boards. The cold beer when we got back to the boat was a good way to end the day.
We will leave at about 10:00am tomorrow as at 10:15am we will have 2m of rising tide and hence plenty of water to get back out. We will head up to Dunk Island for the night.
End Loc: Number Seven Creek, Missionary Bay, Hinchinbrook Island (18o 17.66'S, 146o 15.01'E)
Distance run: 24nm (cumulative: 1493nm)
Engine hours: 4 hr, 15 min (cumulative: 185 hr 56 min)