We have discovered that Cairns is the ultimate party town. This place just rocks and rolls! Starting around 4 PM, the band at the bar next to our marina starts up and the din of people laughing, talking, clinking glasses starts to grow. By 6 PM things are in full swing across the road where a number of chic restaurant/bars are packed with crowds of 20 and 30 somethings. The girls are all very leggy with very, very short skirts and the guys are mucho macho. Everyone, and I mean everyone is just having one big great time.

Cairns is the season's ultimate young person's tourist destination this time of year in Australia. While the rest of the country puts up with the constant march of pressure centers to the south bringing up cold arctic air, Cairns, while cool to us, is warmer and many times escapes the rains the rest of the Queensland coasts get. While Cairns gets tons of rain during its summer, it makes up for it during the winter. During the months of June through October, its combined rainfall is much less than any of the individual months from December to April.

Our good friend Steward of S/V Imagine came into the marina today. We have not seen him since last year. He and a sailing buddy came in after sailing from Vanuatu. Steward's wife will be joining him once he gets to Darwin and they will also be sailing in the Sail Indonesia Rally starting the end of July.

Imagine came in with another boat, one that Steward has been buddy boating with. I can't remember the name of the other boat but it was struck by lightning shortly after leaving Vanuatu. The boat lost all of its electronics and they had to hand steer for 7 days to get here. Hand steering is very exhausting when there are just two people. You can only go for 2 to 3 hours before you tire. This means that over time, you become sleep deprived until you park the boat (i.e., heavy to) in the open ocean and get some sleep.

The boat did have one hand held VHF that worked but they could not recharge it because the recharger was fried in the lightning strike. Thus, they just stayed closed to Imagine and during the night used Imagines' lights to steer their course. To us, this just underscores the need to have a sextant on board with an updated nautical almanac. Even if you only take noon sights, you would be able to plot both your longitude and latitude once a day and then plot running fixes every two hours on your paper charts that you must carry with you just for this reason. We have all gotten so lazy with the advance of electronic charts and GPS which makes electronic navigation so darn easy. The skill of truly navigating one's way across the ocean using non electronic means is quickly falling to the way side.

I must admit that we are getting rusting in our skills of using the sextant. This is simply because we do not use it. However, we do have all of our course notes and books that, in a pinch, we could review and rub that rust off of our skills.