I'm going to call this Day 2&3 Port Douglas-Bali

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The reason for the Day 2&3 heading is we left on Saturday, travelled 10nm and stayed the night (Day 1).  Yesterday we ended up in Cooktown river for the night (Day 2).  Writing this today, Monday at 16:00 which is Day 3.

Now to the actual Day 3 blog........

Our stop last night was Cooktown river and we arrived into the entrance around 14:00. The charts show it as a very shallow river but there were yachts in there anchored in 3m of water so I knew it was ok for us as we draw about 1.3m. I drove in very slowly with the forward facing sonar on, best one I’ve ever used, as the charts were not particularly accurate. 
We got past the fuel wharf where the depth got to less than a meter below the keel so I stopped and backed out looking for another route to the deeper water.  As I was doing this one of the old salty locals came over his tender and showed us the way round the shallows to 3m depth.  Anchor down with excellent holding.  The water coming out of the river was a very dirty earth colour due the run off from the recent heavy rain but we had a very comfortable nights sleep as we were well shelter.  

Woke up this morning at 06:00 to no wind and really calm seas so started the engines, brought the anchor up which was spotless

so we must have been in sand and not mud as I first thought, and got an early start. 

Hmm, 11:00 and those conditions have gone!  We now have 1.5-2m seas on the nose and 25kts of wind!  We were doing 9-10kts but now down to 7kts just to make life a little bit more comfortable.  

Not sure we will be able to find anywhere out of the swell to anchor tonight as it’s NE which means it’s hitting directly into the shoreline, but we will see what happens with the weather later today. 

Well after a very bumpy ride we got to anchor off a nice long sandy beach by Murdoch Island.  Not 100% shelter by a lot smoother than the last few hours. 

Will try and get an early start tomorrow with the next planned stop at Flinders Island. 

Now going to practice my drone flying “skills”.  This will be done side the boat as I need to be confident before trying my hand at outdoors flying!


A little choppy!!





Tucked in trying to get away from the wind and the waves 





Very nice deserted sandy beach - probably with resident crocs!

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