The Cure for Work

After Mario and Carmel (friends from back home) boarded at Hamilton Island, we set off for Shaw Is. and anchored in Billbob Bay for the night. After sundowners on the beach with the other cruisers in the bay, we headed back for a great BBQ tea and long catch-up chat.
The wind was finally from the north and at around 15knots so up went the spinnaker for the next days sail to Goldsmith Is. We stopped at Linne Is. on the way so we could go ashore and collect Oysters (read eat as many as we could before feeling ill), lunch back on the boat with a cold beer, then a 10 minute motor into the bay on Goldsmith Is. for the night.
The next day also saw a spinnaker run to Brampton Is. with speeds of up to 12 knots- fantastic. We started from Goldsmith early so our arrival at Brampton at 0900 meant a walk around the island circuit track (8 km) was in order, hopefully having a coffee at the resort midway, however yachties are no longer welcome here so we kept going. This is a well defined track and traverses different forests/eco-systems depending on which point of the compass we were walking through. It was a great walk on this very hot morning, and our arrival back at the dinghy saw about 100m of sandy beach from it to the water,s edge. Just what we needed...oops.(Captain Gilligan strikes again) Fortunately, the sand was hard enough to take the dinghy wheels, and with Marios help we made water before long. Lunch then a Nanna Nap followed by sundowners with Glen and Michael from "Great Sandy" filled out the rest of the day.
We had decided to get an early start on Sunday as the weather was expected to change from NE to SE early in the afternoon. The storm hit at 0100 with lots of rain and a 15 knot wind now from the opposite direction, which meant we were on a windward shore! After a quick early breakfast we began retrieving the anchor at 0545, however it decided it wanted to stay down there. We must have wrapped the anchor chain around a coral bommie or some rocks or something when the wind had changed direction. After 45 minutes of manouvering all around and after finally letting out another 20 meters of chain and motoring in a wide clockwise circle with a loose chain we retrieved the lot with out any further fuss. Lucky this time as we were in 11 meters of water with no scuba tanks on board. By now the winds had become a constant 15 knots SE so we tacked for 2 hours before motor sailing the last part into Mackay Marina arriving there by 1100 hours.
Carmel and Mario now truly had the complete picture of what the cruising lifestyle was all about. The really good, the not so good, and the get me out of here anyway you can PLEASE!
Our friends said they had a ball and loved nearly every minute of their time aboard, (although they did book an earlier flight home.)
The next few days saw strong wind warnings so we decided to stay put in the marina and do work on the boat, washing, and re-provisioning for our next friend,s (Gary and Liz from Perth) arrival on Saturday, when we will decide to go further south to Yeppoon, or just locally returning back to Mackay, depending on the wind conditions forecast for the next week.