Sawmill Beach, Whitsunday Island
29 April 2008 | Whitsunday Island, Queensland
After bypassing a couple of the larger resorts like Hamilton Island we settled in this pretty little anchorage at Sawmill Beach on Whitsunday Island. It was the first time in a while that we had actually been in the company of a lot of other boats, we had been getting used to being the only ones in an anchorage, so coming into this one was a surprise. It's charter boat country up here and they were everywhere, Jay pointed out to me that many of the charter boat companies don't put their names on the boats now but you can tell a charter boat by the colour of their dinghy, they're all yellow.
Whitsunday Island is the largest of all of the Whitsunday Islands but there are no resorts there, it is all National Park that allows camping and they have set it up nicely to be able to do this with toilet facilities and water supplies. On the way back from our obligatory walk and yes, some of it was up hill much to my consternation, we came across a guy who had been camping there for a month. I think he may have been going stir crazy and we had trouble getting away from him, he just wanted to keep talking and talking.
The walk was beautiful though, the path took us through the forest and looked to have been fairly well maintained, the stone steps were reminiscent of our trips to Bali. We walked from Sawmill Beach to Dugong Beach, Sawmill Beach is apparently named after a Sawmill (go figure) that was up the hill from where we were anchored, I can only assume that Dugong Beach was named for the Dugongs that frequented it, unfortunately we didn't see any Dugongs. But the beach itself was gorgeous and apart from a couple of people further up we pretty much had it to ourselves.
No fish here to speak of, we seem to be going through some sort of a fish drought at the moment and I am starting to get a little worried that we may have lost our fish mojo. Oh well, next stop Nara Inlet.