Long Beach, GKI - lovely!
13 October 2013 | Great Keppel Island
Warm and humid, cloud increasing
I know, yet another beach picture but...we have just spent a few glorious days at Long Beach, the southerly anchorage on Great Keppel Island. Now we think this beach rivals Whitehaven – it is white, white sand and has perhaps the clearest calmest blue green water we have seen (even in constant 15-20 kt northerlies). Just wonderful to walk along, swim in and view from the top of the sand hills. It is interesting that on the other side of the island, Leekes Beach has much yellower sand.
On Saturday we walked along the beach and explored. We took a track to the other side – called Monkey Beach – giving fantastic elevated views of both beaches. On Sunday we walked to the resort side to have a look. Skipper declared he knew the track (from Google earth of course!) so off we went – first up the steepest sand hill which he tried but failed to convince me was part of the track. Of course it wasn’t – as we discovered 45 minutes later after going past the island’s defunct rubbish dip, dried up dam and sandy interior in steaming hot midday sun. Wandering and climbing through the so called track, he continued to try (unsuccessfully) to convince me that these were ‘tracks’ – they were in fact dried up creek and mangrove beds! We eventually found another track that finally led us to the resort area and beach where we enjoyed our picnic lunch we had bought with us.
The ‘resort’ area is used by day-trippers from the mainland and there seems to be a few BYO cabins for rent still operating. It is just another sad tale of a Queensland island resort and shows how tastes, money and people have moved on to other places. While there are plans for a massive resort development it will take many years to build and many many more to make it pay I suspect. But it is an island that has natural beach beauty so who knows, in a decade or two it might just be working.
We took the ‘right’ track back to Long Beach and enjoyed a well deserved and very enjoyable swim. It truly is a good looking beach – it has to be one of our top 3 favourites!
Long Beach has been a great spot for us to also plan where to next – we have spent some time reviewing the weather, watching the coming southerly changes (two different ones!), matching up tides to journey times, and working out a plan A, B and C! that accommodated all these things. You almost need a spreadsheet for it all to line up! We really wanted to get to Northwest island or Heron Island area –part of the lower Great Barrier Reef. We were fortunate to have the right conditions on the way up to get out to Lady Musgrave island which is south of these other islands.
But here we now are on Monday travelling the 7 or so hours to Gladstone instead! There just isn’t enough of a calm and favourable wind/weather window to allow us to get out to the Reef islands and back safely, and still make progress south, before the next southerly change.
So we will do what we have done so far – enjoy as much of the land in these different places as we have the sea!