In the Wake of Matthew Flinders
19 July 2014 | Stanley Island
With 20-25 kts, Diomedea maintained very high averages for the 80 mile run up the coast. We rounded Cape Melville dodging massive ships in the remarkably narrow shipping lane running between the cape and the nearby Pipon Reefs. Melville is a stunningly rugged place of piled boulders up to about 600m above sea level. Extraordinary. After the gybe our course was WNW to Flinders and Stanley Islands, right next to King Island. No, we have not gone troppo and imagine ourselves in Bass Strait. This very northern Flinders island has an impressive conical peak, looking almost volcanic in origin. It is separated from the more vertiginous red crags of Stanley Island by the Owen channel. We are anchored in Stokes Bay and it is wild, remote, and gorgeous. And we are banned from the shore once again, this time not by rangers, but by crocodiles. Diomedea is in company with several rally boats here and Robbie from Southern Star was able to acquire 10kg of fresh prawns from a nearby shrimp boat. This fed the fleet for the evening as we had a dinghy raft up not far from the beach in the orange glow of the setting sun. Andrea and I feel particularly privileged to visit such a wilderness, one that very few Australians would ever see. Presumably there are other Flinders-named points of geographical interest as one moves anticlockwise around the Australian coastline but I doubt we shall visit them.
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