Thursday Island has long been an important Australian port, pearling station and customs post, the main border with Papua New Guinea across the straits to the north. Many round-the-world yachts have cleared through here, including the very first. This is The Federal Hotel. An early entry in their visitor’s book reads: “Joshua Slocum. Boston to […]
Tag / australia
Cairns to the Cape
Escapade has been resting on a swinging mooring on the Trinity Inlet, just upstream from Cairns. After our annual slice of Guernsey summer I was back on the boat preparing for the next voyage. There’s about 500 miles of sailing between Cairns and Cape York, Australia’s northern tip. I’m planning to day-sail all the way […]
Shore Leave
We’ve been sailing past those green hills for hundreds of miles, now we’re keen to see a bit of the hinterland. Escapade is on a quiet river mooring upstream from Cairns and we have hit the open road in a whacking great land yacht. Our circuit of the sunlit uplands took us out to waterfall […]
Above and Beyond
Chasing waterfalls After a windy grey start at 6am we sailed in to Zoe Bay a bit overpowered, making our usual entrance at 15kts with spray flying up through the trampolines. Then in the lee of the headland all was calm, jib rolled, main dropped, the sun came out and we anchored in 2m of […]
The Land of Plenty
Good Queensland Casual We are enjoying an old copy of ‘100 Magic Miles’, the classic sailor’s guide to the Whitsundays, first published 1985. Ours is the fifth edition from 1997, found in a Mackay Op Shop by our new friends Michael and Shylie. It’s full of great pilotage information, but some of the advice seems […]
Are we having fun yet?
So here we are, half way round the world, almost ten years since we set off from France. For me the joy of sailing and living on Escapade is as strong as ever. For my patient wife Dawn, not so much. Dawn has spent the last couple of years wondering when I will finally […]
Travelling to the land down under.
Notes from the captain’s log, December 2023. Day 2 I’m lounging in the cockpit, it’s a warm afternoon and I’m slightly groggy from lack of sleep. We’re a couple of hundred miles west of New Caledonia, empty ocean, nothing out here. The SE breeze died this morning at 2am, we have been motoring across a […]
Nouvelle Calédonie
02.11.2023 Another new country already! Not really Escapade style to be moving so fast. But here are the red hills and pine clad shores of New Caledonia. Our passage planning worked out perfectly and we arrived at the entrance to the Havannah Pass at 6am with the sun rising and the tide flushing us in. […]
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