Whitsunday Sailing - Where Buoy Meets Gull

I promised that I would get this up, soon, but I'm a little bummed because I had already typed up this first part SOMEWHERE, and now I can't find it ANYwhere! It's quite frustrating. But...I promised, so I'm putting up at least this first bit today. If you want to follow along as I go, then it's probably best for you to "subscribe" or whatever it is you do with blogs to get notification as to when I continue - OK?

These are our buddies, Connie and Larry - taken in 2009. I don't have a more recent photo and I didn't get ANY of them while they were here! Bummer. Maybe Larry will share some with me...hint hint!

2010. September

Tuesday’s adventures – setting off

The reason we are even ON this adventure is because our friends, Larry and Connie, came over from the States for a visit. THEY are sailors, and WE are sailors, but we’ve never sailed together. So we decided to contact Whitsunday Rent-a-yacht and hire a sailboat for a few days at the end of their trip. Unfortunately, Larry had a family emergency and they had to leave before the sail! Bummer! So we called the company and asked them if we could get our money back. Of course, they said no, as it was too close to the scheduled departure. BUT, they said, if they were somehow able to “sell” our time to someone else, then we would get our money back (minus the $100 processing fee.) So we encouraged them to sell the boat and went about our normal routine. We were scheduled to leave on Tuesday for a Thursday sail for six days and five nights. I emailed them on the weekend, but they responded that they had had no success yet. On Monday, one of them gave Chris a call and said they thought they had someone interested, but they had to pin down the details and we should get back to them on Tuesday. On Tuesday, about 10:00 I mentioned to Chris that perhaps he wanted to ring them. He said, “Actually, they told me to call in the afternoon.” We both assumed that we would NOT be going. So about noon I finally convinced him that it would be good to call, as it IS over 1000 kilometers to get up there!

They not only had NOT sold the boat, they were mystified as to why we would ever even think that they were going to! So we frantically rushed around the house, making "piles" of stuff that we thought we might want to take. Luckily, I had made some lists earlier. However, we had planned on being provisioned by their company, and now, they claimed it was too late for that - our departure was too imminent! You've GOT to be kidding me! That meant that not ONLY did I have to pack clothes and swim stuff and toiletries and entertainment but that I would have to plan and pack FOOD for six days! And I'm talking salt and pepper, and cooking oil, and EVERYTHING that you just take for granted to have on hand in your kitchen! THAT made me seriously depressed. I didn't want to deal with it. I rang back the company and whined at them, but the gal I spoke to was not sympathetic or helpful at all. She said she didn't know anything about it - they did all the provisioning on line. So when I hung up from her, I WENT on line, found the provisioning site, and ordered anyway! We did get a confirmation email, but under the section that said "details of your order" it was blank. Therefore, we really had no idea if we were being provisioned or not. There was no phone number on the website - I didn't want to call back the charter company and obviously, we couldn't sit around and wait for more emails. So we decided to stick some peanut butter and bread, some two-minute noodles, and a jar of my favorite garlic salt into a bag. We would make more lists on the way in case we had to do some last minute shopping. We threw everything into bags and backpacks and hustled out the door, hoping we hadn't forgotten anything REALLY important.

We wanted to get quite a bit of road under our tires, but we had had a late start. So we made it all the way to Benaraby, after the turnoff to Tannum Sands and before the town of Calliope - niether of which are bustling metropolises. However, our GPS (Sheila - named after the iconic Aussie Lassie) lied to us about the motels available, and we were lucky to actually FIND one - on our own - without Sheila's help. (Side note: Sheila is GREAT in the States, but over here, either the chip we have is WAY too old, or Aussies just aren't that accurate about their addresses - we've had MUCHO problemos!)

The hotel would even cook us up some dinner to be served in the room! That's the way Aussie motels in the bush do it, because they KNOW that there's no restaurants around! So we had a pretty good night's sleep and off again early in the morning! Chris actually asked to be woken up at 6:00 a.m. - which is quite a sacrifice for my late sleeper - so you KNOW we still had a long way to go - at least 10 hours!

OK - that's all I can handle for today. More soon.