We made two stops on Hook Island. The first was Stonehaven Bay on the west side, and the second was West Butterfly Bay on the north side. During our stay on Hook Island, the tradewinds were blowing pretty strong, 20 knots or so, and the nearby landscape funnels these winds around. It was worse in…
Airlie Beach (pronounced Air-lee) is the coastal town that serves as the jump-off point for the Whitsundays. It’s the budget town to Hamilton Island’s luxury, and it’s targeted more for backpackers. Marina & Anchorage The Whitsundays have dozens of charter boats available through GlobeSailor for sailing vacations, and most of them are based in Airlie…
The Whitsunday Islands are mostly empty, with a few resorts here and there, with the exception of it’s main hub: Hamilton Island. Hamilton Island is owned by the Oatley family (as in Bob Oatley) and is leased by the Australian government. It’s mostly a holiday spot, with only 1,200 residents living on the island, but…
Plotting world circumnavigation routes is a lot easier than it sounds. There are cruising boats LITERALLY all over the world. There are boats in the Northwest passage (up and over Canada), in the Antarctic, and everywhere in between. There are a few key things to take into consideration, but 95%* of circumnavigation routes follow the same general…
As we’ve been cruising the world, we have discovered that in most places our charts are fairly accurate. However, there are some places completely inaccurate charts. One of the most obvious ones on our first year across the Pacific was Beveridge Reef, a small atoll just east of Niue. Some Chart Basics All electronic charts…
As our time traveling up the coast of Australia is coming to a close, we’re limited in how much time we can spend along the way. But for 6 nights, we enjoyed two completely different bays on Whitsunday Island. About the Whitsundays The Whitsundays are a group of 74 islands in the Great Barrier Reef,…
While at The Boat Works in Coomera, we tackled a lot of projects. Some of them we do yearly, while a few are things we’d never done before. Starry Horizons is now over 3 years old, and although she’s still young for a boat, as she gets more broken in, there’s more work to be…
Our next stop after Great Keppel Island was Middle Percy Island (sometimes called Middle Island, in the Percy Island group).  Middle Percy is the largest island around, and only has one small anchorage that serves as protection from the prevailing winds – West Bay. West Bay was empty when we arrived on June _.  It’s…