18.45 146.31 Falcon Island 65 km

Quite amazing, sitting on a remote island with internet access and pushing myself to update the blog…see how far back I’m making it before falling asleep. The rest will be done in Cairns…

Leaving the highly civilzed Magnetic Island/ Nelly Bay at dawn, but traces in the sand reveal that already quite a few dogwalker must have passed my tentsite earlier…the beach I was camping on wasn’t that far away from the harbour and the holiday houses.

No crocs in sight, just a floating door-size wooden piece in the water…

The night was quite noisy, the ferry came in every hour until late, and two helicopters were delivering what- or whomever. Earplugs are so handy…

The paddle around the south-eastern cape showed beautiful huge rocks, until in the next bay I met up with a Mirage double kayak with two topless guys (no stinger worries as well…) in it on their early morning paddle over from Townsville. We chatted and paddled a bit, they have heard about my trip. But the kids were calling…and they headed off back to Townsville again.

Paddling alongside fat Mangroves until the north-west cape made me thinking there MUST be some crocs in there now…but a few small fishing boats were very close in there, obviously not worried.

The wreck filled over the years with mangroves looked quite like an amazing hide…

On the crosing over to Falcon Island I was passing a few other nice islands, some of them declared on my GPS-chart as military training area again. But oh well…it’s Saturday. I went through topless…it was a hot day again!

Brisk and Falcon Island are connected on low tide, I could hear the water on the other side, but not see it from my boat. Low tide showed quite some reef on the western side of both islands.

In the lee of Havannah Island and Esk Island were each three prawn trawlers waiting for their night’s shift. What a job!

Falcon Island had a wide sand spit on the northern side where I was landing. No croc slidemarks…besides the one my kayak makes itself. Maybe the next guys get scared…The sand was mixed with corals, floatsam and jetsam and quite some rubbish! It seems like it is used quite often as a campsite.

I put up tent inside the shady woods, on the regularly used campsite. Already thinking, camp as far off the water as possible…

There was even a wreck of a hut and a toilet house…not too inviting, I must admit…

No, I’ll dig my own deep toilet hole…