Day 11: Cooktown to Thursday Island, around a Cape and on to a Horn.

All of my fretting and studying of weather maps yesterday we for naught, the “gunna be worse tomorrow” thankfully didn’t arrive, there were hints of blue sky and only isolated rain… and so North we ventured. What you can see on the map below, is that three times I had to leave the coast, because those three bays, were raining quite heavily. What’s interesting is all three bays faced north east, and the rain and cumulous clouds building there looked like the bays attracted them… so I buffaloed then and followed the reef, which when the sun broke through was glowing and glistening hues of blue.

Goble and MacIntyre alighted on the waters to the north west of Thursday Island, where it was protected from the predominant SE winds… 100 years later today it was the same scenario, the locals tell me it is almost always strong Sou’ Easters with low cloud, welcome to the Islands! The water was quite protected and a nice long splash’n’go marked the occasion then into Horn Island, the major airport of the region, where I’ll now be for several days.

Horn Island is definitely an aviation town, with many young pilots and maintenance crew based here, flying the extensive network of small charter planes around the islands. Southern Sun certainly attracted some interest so we met up at the pub for dinner and some tall stories.

Anne arrived with Qantas tomorrow so a few days off with her looking around, if the weather co-operates we’ll go on a reccy flight north to check out the islands that go all the way to Papua New Guinea.

Cheerio, M