After a crazy few days when we hurriedly prepared for Wade’s brother Murray and his wife Maree to join us for several weeks on board Anui, we left Cairns for the start of our Far North Queensland Reef Adventure.

Preparation for departure

Provisioning for 4 people for 4-6 weeks, laundry, refueling, picking up parcels left at different spots in Cairns, replanting our herb garden after our existing plants were looking a bit sad, tidying up the boat and doing the usual mould clean up after a month in the wet tropics… It is always hectic and hard on the poor bodies in the heat, walking 10 kms a day loaded like pack mules. This is definitely when we miss the convenience of a car but are grateful for the physical exercise! As you will see from the satellite map below, there is not a lot of opportunities to re-provision once we leave Cairns!

And then there were the unexpected tasks: a visit to the vet for Bengie who is showing her age (thank you to Simon of Windsong II for being our taxi), picking up a replacement dome lens for the Olympus after an unfortunate crash into the reef while getting over/under images! Chloe at Digital Diver even gave Chris a “frequent offender discount”, relating to the multiple times kissing of the reef occurred over the years. The last French kiss at Milln Reef was just a bit too passionate and evidence could no longer be cloned out with Lightroom!

But we did it all, even managing to do our tax and prepare for a change of tenants at Chris’s house with all the paperwork, because we don’t know how much internet or phone coverage we will have during the weeks ahead.

We said goodbye to cruising friends and new acquaintances… all the best to Windsong II, Take It Easy, Discovery II. We are all heading in different directions… who knows when we will see each other again, but that’s the cruising life. You enjoy meeting up, you share intense times together, and you say “see you later”.

Another adventure is starting

Yesterday we breathed a sigh of relief and left Cairns with our family on board, thankful for a few quiet days and perfect conditions to head back to our beloved outer reef. It is always exciting to take our guests to beautiful places and share our reef addiction. We started our reef hops with Flynn Reef on the very outer reef, where the coral was patchy, but the fish colourful.

We are heading north slowly, with the intention of visiting Lizard Island and possibly a few reefs beyond that in the coming weeks.

It will be a fantastic opportunity to reef hop along the iconic Ribbon Reefs which run on the very outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef, right next to the Continental Shelf. We hope the regeneration we have seen at Milln Reef, will continue further up.

So do join us for our Far North Queensland Reef Adventure! As usual, you can check out where we are in real time on our PredinctWind satellite tracker.