I now understand that old sailors’ maxim: “A gentleman never sails to windward”, although I think they were more concerned about spilling the drinks. It’s certainly a lot more work sailing into the wind, requiring more tacking, hauling on ropes and grinding away at winches. My hands, gone soft and smooth after years of city living, have callouses again which appeared so fast I think they were just lying dormant under the skin.

Cairns was a welcome respite after the slog from Cape York. The genoa and staysail needed repairs, so the moment we tied up, we pulled the sails down and rang a number we found on the internet. (Folding up a sail the size of a basketball court on a deck the size of, well, a boat, is an interesting exercise).  Sailmaker John Fisher arrived soon after the call, and 15 minutes later disappeared with Lex and the sails, back to his workshop. He said although they were a bit old, they still had a few thousand miles left in them, were well made and worth repairing (the sails, not Lex. Although he’s pretty well made too) He then lent Lex, who’d left his wallet behind, $20 for the taxi back and had the beautifully stitched sails back to us by midday the following day!

Lex and I can sail Tramontana easily on our own, but having that third person on board made things a little more comfortable, especially during long passages. Graham had to leave us in Cairns, so we advertised for a replacement, hoping to snag someone with sailing experience. Instead, we took on two young German backpackers. Sabrina and Annika had no sailing experience at all, but were very keen to learn and jumped in to help at every opportunity. In a short time, they were practically indispensable. It’s also easier to tie up and cast off from docks with a couple more people on the boat, instead of just me trying to be in three places at once!

From Cairns we did a short run to Fitzroy Island and anchored off the resort. An old friend of ours owns it and has been busy refurbishing it over the last four years. Result is a lovely quiet place to stay, with a great restaurant and bar. The island is all dense native forest with a few tiny secluded beaches reached by bush tracks. No cars. It’s named after Captain Fitzroy, who spent five years with Charles Darwin on the Beagle in the 1820s. I read a brilliant book about Fitzroy recently, called “This Thing of Darkness”, by Harry Thompson chronicling, in (accurately researched) novel form, the voyage of the Beagle from Fitzroy’s POV. Wonderful stuff – try to read it! Fitzroy also invented weather forecasting as we now know it.

From Fitzroy Island to mystical Orpheus, if only for an overnight anchored off the research station, then a 30 hour sail and a full moon to light the way, to George Point just around the corner from Airlie Beach, passing Magnetic Island and the parking lot of huge ships. Dawn found us slipping through more of them near Abbot Point, that contentious coal port development proposal by the Qld govt. Sailing the reefs and these pristine waters makes you shudder at the thought of just one of these coal-carrying behemoths dumping its load in an accident. Irreparable damage, unthinkable destruction. The ships are gigantic, and the intention is to have 3000 of them a year passing through the Abbott Point loading facility alone.

Coal ship near Magnetic Island

Next morning we tied up at the very flash Abell Point marina, and spent a few days at our friends’ house in Airlie. Marita and Bill run their place as a very luxurious holiday B&B. Lovely change from the boat! Airlie is very much a young people’s town, full of travellers and revellers, with a lot of lively pubs and bars, and overlooks one of the most strikingly beautiful bays you’ll ever see. The town itself hugs the bay, book-ended by busy marinas, and creeps up the surrounding hills into the bush, but the bush still dominates the scene from the water.

Marita and Bill’s house overlooking Airlie Beach

Annika and Sabrina elected to continue to Brisbane with us – Airlie had been an optional disembarkation, but they were enjoying the experience. Leaving Airlie Beach, we had a quiet overnight sail to Middle Percy Island. If there’s a competition for the most typically beautiful tropical island, this one would be right up there. Surveyed by Flinders in 1802, Middle Percy is the largest of the Northumberland Group, and has been settled since the 1860s. Various people have lived there growing coffee and raising cattle and sheep. In the 1920s a Canadian family arrived and bought the lease, clearing more land and running sheep until 1964 when a wandering aristocratic Englishman arrived. Andrew Martin had left his family back in England to sail around the world. He found Middle Percy Island, declared it paradise and, failing to convince his family back in Devon of its charms, stayed there for the next forty years without them. We’d first heard about Andrew Martin and Middle Percy Island from a Darwin friend who landed there in the late 60s as a wide-eyed 18 year old, after reading about Andrew’s intentions to establish an island paradise and seeking volunteers to help. She found it was like most Utopian dreams – eventually turned into a nightmare – and left after a few months of extreme isolation, hard work and subsistence living, but still speaks about her time there with great affection – and some head-shaking!

Andrew Martin never realised his Utopia, but the island became legendary amongst yachties as a wonderful anchorage with a quirky host. He planted coconuts and built a shed on the beach for visitors to use, and sold them goat meat, fruit and honey. The bush grew back, and goats replaced the sheep somewhere along the line. Eventually he became mentally ill, and was cheated out of his lease by a conman for $10. Andrew’s younger cousin Cathryn, who some years before had come out from England to see where her strange relative lived and stayed in Queensland, took up the fight on his behalf, and managed to get the lease back several years after he died. She and her partner live there still, having spent the last four years restoring the island to the yachties’ haven it once was. The famous A-frame on the beach is still there, festooned with hundreds and hundreds of bits of timber, flotsam and jetsam with yacht names and dates. We found a couple of boat names we knew, and bought a jar of the local honey, leaving the money in the honesty box.

The present leaseholders carry on the hospitality tradition, and often entertain visiting yachts with a goat curry in the fire pit on the beach. We missed out by just a few hours on the last one! John Morris, Cathryn’s partner, met us at the A-frame and drove us up to the homestead for a cup of tea and a chat with two of the other inhabitants, Don and Ernst. It’s heartening to realise there are still places in the world where people can live aside from the mainstream, choosing just how much interaction with it they want. They’re far enough from the mainland and the tourist corridors to avoid development and close enough that the trip to town by boat is long but not (usually) arduous – their own private paradise, although these days the inevitable government bodies have a lot of say over what can happen there. One of the current inhabitants has lived on Middle Percy for 14 years, the rest a few years less. Makes one muse about what constitutes paradise – and it’s certainly a subjective issue. Our crew members were entranced by the text-book tropical island, but felt that, contrary to Ernst’s declaration that he was living a real life as opposed to what he could be doing on the mainland, it was no life at all. Just five people! they said, appalled. One man’s paradise is another’s nightmare.

Either way, it was a wonderful place to visit, one of the most comfortable anchorages we’d encountered, and had the bonus of some delightfully different people to meet.

 West Bay, Middle Percy Island