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Published: December 14th 2010
boat shop
Blad and Rick work on one of his hullsQueensland
The 12 year drought over much of Australia is now officially broken. After one of the wettest springs on record, major floods have inundated some of the towns and valleys through which we traveled just a few weeks back, including Wagga Wagga, and Lake George.
We had only a couple of wet days in Victoria, but since we came north from Goulburn in New South Wales, it has rained almost every day!.
As a neighbor said to us today, “We call it the Sunshine Coast out of irony!”
We flew out of soaking Sydney bound for Maroochydore and the region of Noosa in SE Queensland. It’s neat to fly on local planes into little airports where you step down onto tarmac and stroll into baggage claim and your old shipmate is waiting there with a hug and a laugh to pick up the conversation from 36 years ago!
We drive along the coast road lined with sub tropical trees, catching glimpses of the South Pacific surf before turning inland to Tewantin
on the Noosa River. It’s a huge pleasure to see a harbor with mostly multi-hulled vessels at moorings. Richard and Blad sailed the Caribbean and Gulf
Stream on our trimaran – FREYA - back in the early seventies – epic voyages without a motor, and the three of us enjoy boat watching and comparison of virtues and vices of the fleet here.
Quick shopping then onward into hill country of several long extinct volcanic plugs – steep, rocky and forest shrouded. We swing onto a dirt road - Ringtail Creek
Lane where a big Grey Kangaroo hops alongside the car, and finally arrive at Richard and Dot’s house, which is to be our home for the next month.
It’s a veranda shaded bungalow in a garden of palms, and lemon, macadamia nut, banana, guava, and bamboo trees and dozens of tropical flowers and shrubs. Many parrots, rosellas, and cockatoos visit the feeder and honey eaters browse over the blossoms.
The swimming pool soon soaks away our travel sweat, and a fine ozzie beer eases us into dinner.
And in the dark of the night a bird calls many times, sounding just like a European Cuckoo -- except this is known as a Bookook Owl.
Richard is building an 11.7 meter catamaran. He and Blad manage to put in several hours work on several days and
finish the planking of the second hull.
They labored together on the final construction of Freya – way back – and the old, easy working ways find themselves again. B is happy to get epoxy under his nails, in a boat shed that smells of cedar and Australian pine.
Judi finds joy in the garden – weeding and harvesting veggies for the kitchen and tending these exotic flowerbeds. Dot works an hour away and is happy to come home to whatever dinner we all cook up.
Friday night we pack the land cruiser for a camping trip. It’s going to be a wet one, we know, because all of eastern Oz is under a heavy rainfall alert!
We are going to a boat launching party a couple of hundred kilometers up the coast. Busy highways, aggressive truckers, pretty towns, miles of sugar cane fields and macadamia groves then finally countryside with wild emus, bring us to a quiet little community at the mouth of Elliot.River.
Gerald Barrink has designed and built a very radical 40 foot catamaran.
About sixty yachts’ men and women have driven to Riverview (near Elliot Heads) to help the good ship ‘Cactus Island’
on her way to the great ocean.
The setting is perfect. The vessel has been placed on a white beach among the mangroves. The sun emerges from the days of overcast and rain.
Curlews are calling down the creek, and a sea-eagle circles high overhead. Sand bars, and a blue tidal estuary fades towards misty breakers and a cloudy horizon.
Gerald thanks all who helped with the build and the move to the water. Champagne is squirted (grand prix style) over the bow. We raise our glasses and cheer the ship and her creator. Then we walk back to the house to enjoy a party.
‘Cactus Island’ is going to wait for the tide to float her rather than be pushed or slid into her natural home.
A pot-luck spread of food and free flow of libations has the place humming as this crew of old yachties and shipwrights tell tall stories and gossip into the night.
We took a moonlight stroll around the neighborhood and down to a little jetty in the community park and got a sharp reminder of the alien glitches in the ecology of Oz………. Cane Toads.
Millions to billions of these big
toads hop all over Queensland. They were introduced to Australia in 1935 to try to control pest beetles on sugar cane, but they have no natural predators here and are themselves venomous to snakes that try to eat them. In turn they consume anything from worms, carrion, insects, other native frogs and amphibians to small snakes, enough to be changing whole regions’ ecology. On our walk we met a family, mum, dad, little daughter and maybe seven year old son. While mum held a flashlight on a toad, the boy whacked it with a golf club, and dad picked up the carcass with a pincer stick and dropped it in a bucket.
They do this every night. It’s a strange night out for a family. But once one sees the huge scale of this invasion one feels a need to whack a toad too.
It was pretty sobering talking about this encounter as we looked out on the moonlit river and breathed the frangipani scent on the breeze.
But finally we rolled into our snug tent on the lawn and drifted away to the sound of rock and roll and the rhythm of distant surf.
Next morning we
stroll back to the mangroves and there is the ship afloat, graceful as a swan, gently swinging in a light Pacific breeze.
The overnight guests have a wonderful al fresco breakfast together. The espresso machine worked overtime and more stories and sea dreams are woven into the collective memory.
We finally decamp and head out to the river mouth at Elliot Heads. It is a hot blue sky morning and we take advantage and plunge into the warm turquoise water of the South Pacific – our first ocean swim since we got to Oz. Pure white sand and a SE wind whistling in the casuarinas - happiness.
We take a long way home along country roads through flat sandy forested plains. We pass through Maryborough, a lovely river town with many classic ‘Queensland’ homes and once more we are impressed with the, very Australian, creative use of corrugated iron.
Boonooroo is our picnic stop. We sit at under trees overlooking the Great Sandy Strait a beautiful, seventy nautical mile long, sound lying between Frazer Island and the mainland. A flock of Australian Pelicans (with span up to 8 feet!) takes to the air, wings flickering black and white.
boat launch
waiting for the tide Dark bands of cloud and rain squalls speared by shafts of sunlight drift across the hills of the island, hills that are actually the largest sand dunes on earth, relics of the last ice age now covered in vast forests. We hope to get there in the next few weeks.
We drive on, on winding lanes through mangrove changing to dry scub forest of banksias and grass trees and then climb into pretty, hilly, farm country.
A gravel side road climbs very steep up Wolvi Mountain till we are among the misty clouds looking out over the crowns of rain forest. We clamber on high rocky outcrops and breathe exotic draughts of sweet resiny air.
Finally we roll home as darkness falls.
Monday morning ………
Blad is still not recovering as he should be by now. A visit to the doctor in Cooroy finds he doesn’t have a persistent cold but a bacterial sinusitis.
“Antibiotics will do the trick” …and indeed they do. He starts to feel better by supper time. We think he caught it from the air conditioning on the bus a while back.
Through the week it rains off and on. Some boat
work and gardening gets done. Various chores are completed. Christmas letters and cards get written and mailed.
Judi gets her hair cut and styled - a whole new look - much admired.
We take our first unaccompanied wilderness bush walk into the forest reserve land near the house. The narrow trail is very wet and overgrown, we sweep the long grasses with our sticks to discourage the snakes – we only saw one, a harmless tree-snake, a bit over a meter long. But we are very aware that we are now in the realm of the worlds most venomous. The trees are huge, parts are rainforest, with palm under-story and giant eucalypts with thick strangler vines twisted round the trunks and hanging lianas draping across the trail. When we reach a point where we should easily ford a shallow creek we find a shoulder deep flood languidly flowing among fallen logs! Courage ebbs and we return the way we came. But we at least we got our feet wet.
This was our ‘training hike’ for the next great thing.
………….
Thursday. Sunshine. At Last!
After some boat and garden work we drove out towards the
‘Great Sandy’ country beyond Pomona to Boreen Point.
This is a tiny old logging village on the shores of Cootharaba Lake, twenty kilometers up the Noosa River. It’s gentrified these days but very pretty and quiet.
There is a lovely white sandy beach along the lake where we walk in sunshine before sitting quaffing a cold one on the bouganvillia draped veranda of the old Apollonia Hotel(1865). On the way home we borrowed a couple of canoes for tomorrow then packed the land cruiser for an early start.
Friday dawns fair and bright.
We are on the road by 7.30 headed back to the Great Sandy Country and the Cooloola National Park via Kin Kin village and Foot Rot Flats!
The roads are narrow and windy, till finally we turn onto the gravel logging roads that lead into the National Park. Richard’s driving skills and four-wheel drive neatly negotiate potholes and mud ruts left by the rains, but it still takes an hour on rough tracks before we reach ‘Harry’s Hut Camp Site’ on the banks of the Noosa River, ten kilometers further up stream from the head of the lake we visited yesterday. This stretch of the
weeds
lily family. too beautiful river is known as the Everglades (after the Floridian swamps). The camp site is rustic and simple, with a small, old wooden dock. Harry was a recluse who lived back in these woods sixty years ago.
We load food, water and kit into our canoes, apply a lot of sunscreen and start to paddle upstream. The current is fairly strong because of the rains.
Despite the early start the sun is high in the sky and we work our passage beneath the shade of over hanging forest, hugging the banks of the wide meandering stream, as much as pos.
A lone osprey patrols along our course. But strangely there are none of the myriad birds we usually see. A light wind shakes the leaves but we cannot hear their rustle. We can hardly hear each other.
Cicadas can be truly deafening and their strident drumming comes from both sides of the river, often from specific trees. As one turns ones head from side to side the roar of the insects quavers between the dark green walls of the forest in quadraphonic waves of sound. Cicadas are completely unrelated to grasshoppers and crickets and produce sound from cymbal-like
disc organs that pop in and out against hollow abdomen. An individual adult can generate 120 – 150 db! Though they use the sound for a mating call, it has further evolved into a deafening deterrent to predatory birds! Some Australian species are listed as the noisiest insects on earth. We have met them today.
After a couple of hours paddling (with frequent stops to pass the drinking water) we reached another rustic dock at ‘Camp Three’.
We beached the boats and ate a couple of sandwiches and apples. A few honey-eaters twittered in the shady clearing. And the cicadas quieted as we moved away from the river bank.
The goal of this expedition is to reach the ‘Sand Patch’ that, on the map, lies 6-7 kilometers further into the park.
This whole region consists of thousands of square kilometers of ancient windblown beach sand that was carried by currents, northward, up the east coast of Oz over many glacial cycles in the last million years. In periods of low sea level, huge sandstorms blew off the continental shelf and generated immense dunes one to two hundred of meters high that are now forested hills. And over millennia
beach time
hot water and clear day of drought, fire and flood, between these coastal sand hills and the volcanic hills further inland, rivers and creeks have spread the sand into extensive forested plains dotted with shallow lakes.
It is very hot as we hike the sandy trail. The route begins to climb, getting steeper and eventually zigzagging through eucalypt, grass tree, and melaluca forest up a great ridge. Small lizards dart across the sand. Though the trees are leafy their trunks are heavily charred. A big bush fire roared through here last year.
About half way up Judi opts to wait in a shady glade while Rick and Blad try for the summit. I sit on a log after having cleared it for snakes. It’s quiet and white hot. I have a sweeping branch with me clearing the path for snakes and spiders and biting ants. The mind chatters. I rest and admire the gnarled branches and the flowers that have blossomed in this sandy landscape. I meander along the path a little way, then back to the log. It’s silent and then……… a tremendous crack and crash. Something falling? ……A koala coming for a visit? …… A carpet python nearby?.
R&B finally
reached the crest, about 180 meters above sea level. There was a cooler breeze blowing between the trees, but the trail wandered along the ridge
a fair distance more. There were views of dark forested hills and valleys, away and away into heat haze to the west, and to the east the ridge dropped steep to the
South Pacific.
The woodlands up here are open and very sandy; the tree trunks uncharred. A few hundred more meters and there is the Sand Patch.
Several hundred rolling hectares of pure desert spread in a windblown wave of giant dune clear over the ridge, the inland side sliding down slope burying bush and trees. The Pacific side, blown by gales, supplying the loose sand as plants strive to root without much hope. The heat is intense on the two guys as a single track of paw prints of a lone canine (fox, feral dog, dingo?) leads them out onto the sand. – Three mad dogs out in the noon-day sun.
We came to an ‘island’ of shade trees – a lookout over the lakes and plains the Noosa Valley but felt we had left Judi too long alone in the
woods walk
strangler vine gets a grip of the tree wilderness.
And so began the hot trek back off the ridge. Ii was all down hill, with the sun westering, and a cooling breeze, “Too easy ….mate!”
Just as I started to wonder ….. where are those guys? ………. a laughing jackass started its hysterical cries and the sweaty blokes came striding down into my glade.
Once reunited with J, just down the way we found the cause of that crash ………… a biggish branch had dropped from an old tree right on the trail. And by
chance someone had heard it!
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