Year One
Date: 3/7/2008 15:00
Weather: Gale conditions
Location: Cannon Vale 20'15 77S, 148'42 99E
Author: Peter

It's really windy again. To put it mildly what is going on with all this??? Kylie and I seem to go from one freak weather event to another. If this is only the beginning of climate change I really am starting to worry about the future. We registered 50 knots last night and I'm grateful our guests have left before they got to see this. Last night was a long night as we watched boats drag their anchors or moorings straight past us. At one stage we had the motor running and the anchor half up dodging a trimaran that was dragging fast. Boats were still letting go even this morning with the water police again having a busy time trying to stop and fix them up. Last night also saw four mayday calls, two of which were charter boats in Nara Inlet. A busy night and we hope everyone is still ok. Our anchor once again did not even budge but all the boats shifting around us made for a very interesting time along with listening in to some silly people on the radio who just don't know how to help themselves. Looking around now and we can still see expensive damaging going on as sails partially unfurl and flog themselves to death (I wish if they did not want them they would give them to me), mainsails un-flake dragging boats back and forth, and bimini's shredding themselves off the back of boats. I'm sure ducks would have flipped all over the place. In our area we could not help anyone as our duck was deflated and packed away before the low even hit. Apparently an unmanned hobie 16 just took off from the beach around midnight and has not been seen since. I wonder how many other tenders and boats are now adrift on their own. We expect the wind to drop back to between 25 and 33 knots sometime in the next 12 hours.
Here are some pics from the last huge storm that hit Airlie Beach(around March/May I think). Wish we had a trailer that mast would make a good scrap metal bonus!

Taking a step back, you will notice our previous blog was written by our guests, just for something different. During the past week and a bit we have just been going back and forth across the Whitsundays visiting allot of the same places and doing a lot of snorkeling or diving. I also got to see another manta ray at Manta Ray Bay(no surprise there), but much smaller than the last one. Our guests were great if not a little noisy, we got to meet Verena's boyfriend Luke and we hope that they all had a great time and want to come back and visit us soon.

The rain recently has been good as I got to give the deck its first real wash in 12 months. The deck looks so much cleaner, I now need some more rain so I can wash and wax the hull. We will remain here for a few more days to do some laundry when the sun comes back out before heading back out to the islands to do some exploring back down south a little.

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