Our silence for the past couple weeks is because we’ve had little of interest to report. As always is the case, the weeks leading up to our big crossings are consumed by various chores and prep work. This time we’re getting ready to spend almost a year in the developing world, so our “to do” list has been even more enormous than normal. In addition to the usual repairs and provisioning, we’ve been dealing with seemingly absurd amounts of bureaucracy, particularly obtaining our cruising permits and visas for Indonesia (which took over three months start to finish). We’re also heading into disease affected areas, so we’ve refreshed our vaccinations, stocked up on malaria meds, and rigged mosquito nets over the beds. We’re finally feeling prepared, and with cyclone season now ending, we’re ready to say goodbye to Australia and get on with our new adventure into Asia… a very exciting moment for us.

Over the past few months, Australia really did come to feel like home, and we can’t deny we felt some temptation to simply stay here and begin a whole new life. That’s the funny thing about this sort of around the world journey… as people gain new experiences in different places, their priorities change, and soon the original purpose of the voyage gives way to new ones developed along the way. So when we tally up the stories we hear from other drunken sailors like us, we see very few journeys that even resemble the starting plan, and that makes more sense to us now than we could possibly have imagined two years ago. For us though, the original purpose of our journey, to explore the world, remains firmly in tact. So today we sail on for better or worse, and in doing so we watch our hypothetical Australian lives evaporate into the ether, albeit with a pinch of regret.

Our departure from Australia on April 16th comes two days after our Australian visas expired. We can pass the blame for that on to Cyclone Ita, which has just torn down the Queensland coast and forced us into a safe anchorage for several days, causing us to miss our departure deadline. Under admiralty law, most countries would forgive any illegal stay caused by “storm or tempest” and in our case here today, it appears Australia will respect this ancient maritime tradition.

Our attention now turns to the almost 2000 mile passage between us and West Timor in southern Indonesia. The challenge with this passage, other than the occasional cyclone, is the Great Barrier Reef which is a sprawling submerged obstacle extending all the way past the the top of mainland Australia. Our strategy is to forego the calm protected waters inside the reef and instead sail outside the reef in the open Pacific for most of the way up the coast. The winds are stronger out there, there’s less ship traffic, and we won’t need to worry about zigzagging through the thousands of reefs and islands that make up the Great Barrier Reef. We remain utterly baffled by the early explorers who navigated these waters without charts, GPS, or weather forecasts.

So it’s time to cast away from the customs dock and become reacquainted with our old friend, the Sea. We’re hoping for a twelve-day passage, but with the weather here still very unpredictable it’s anybody’s guess.

The Great Barrier Reef is one of those places that everybody knows about but, surprisingly, hardly anybody’s been to, mainly because its remote position nearly 100 miles off the east coast of Australia makes it an awkward place to access. The entire reef sits below the surface of the water, meaning there’s no dry land, no beaches, no trees, and of course no buildings…. anywhere, so the attraction is fairly limited unless you’re into diving, snorkeling, or remote adventuring. Even most sailors prefer to stay away from the place because of the navigational challenges. With hardly any visible navigational aids, even a momentary lapse of concentration could easily lead to the dreaded noise of thick fiberglass shattering across a coral reef… the shipwrecks here are too numerous to count. Add to this the unpredictable weather, the extreme tidal fluctuations making depths difficult to determine, the intense tidal currents flowing throughout every channel, nook, and cranny, sometimes reaching 10 knots or more, and it starts to make sense why the place feels almost completely deserted.

For the few that do make it to the reef, the rewards include some of the best reef diving and snorkeling in the world. The best diving is to be found around the three-reef cluster of Bait, Hardy, and Hook Reefs, so the tour companies here have setup a floating complex that looks like something from the movie Waterworld – floating restaurant and hotel, barges for helicopter landing pads, even a water landing strip for seaplanes in the protection of the Hardy Reef lagoon. If global warming ever sinks the world beneath the ocean’s surface, perhaps this is what the future holds for us.

But everything that’s truly interesting on the Great Barrier Reef happens beneath the surface. Here’s where we were grateful for our experiences with Tarzan last year…. thanks to him we’ve become comfortable exploring these reefs and are free diving much deeper than we were back when we were mere “snorkelers” in the Caribbean islands. It’s not just the diversity of the moving sea life that are the big attraction (everything from tropical fish and sharks to rays and turtles), but also the extraordinary coral formations that often appear to be born from design. The “Stepping Stones”, for example, are a series of 18 coral pillars reaching up from the depth of the ocean floor to within inches of the water’s surface – a theist and an atheist would settle no debates out here.

Before we headed out to the Reef, we picked up our Californian friend, Shane, who’s curiosity about the Earth’s most remote and unusual places rivals our own. With the weather being hit and miss during this time of the year, we were lucky to get a few days of relative calm to explore like we’ve just done. But with an incoming storm now threatening to send swells across the surface of the shallow reefs (20 knots of wind is about the limit for comfort and safety out here), our time out here has reached its natural limit.

We’ve made huge progress in preparing for our clean water filter delivery mission to Indonesia in May, and we’re thoroughly grateful for the overwhelming kindness and generosity of our friends, family, and blog followers, who collectively have already funded 33 of our 50 filter goal – Thank you!! We’ll be placing the order for your filters in the next week or so and will be delivering them in late May or early June as we sail through the Indonesian islands. And the good news and for anyone still considering participating is that we still have room for 17 more filters… for more info on our mission, please click here.

So with the wind now starting to lift, the rig beginning to howl, and the chop becoming irritating, we’re pulling the anchor and trading our new Waterworld for something a lot more tangible: the Australian mainland.

It seems that every place we come across has developed its own unique character traits and often unforgettable identity…. drawing charicatures of our sailing destinations would be a simple task. The Whitsundays is certainly no exception. Like St Tropez in the Med and St. Bart’s in the Caribbean, the Whitsundays is another playground for the rich and famous, which brings a certain amount of obscenity to the experience. It’s also the case that Australia’s economy has continued to boom right through the so called “global financial crisis”, which means the tourist trade continues to bring “normal” people out to this area for the diving, beaches, nightlife, and island hopping. And while we normally hate being around a bunch of tourists, we make an exception for Aussies because frankly, things are just a lot more fun when Aussies are around.

So the cyclone blew through last week without major incident and left in its wake five days of nearly flawless weather, which left us free to explore the lower end of the Whitsundays group. The steep tides and swift currents can make sailing and anchoring a challenge, but not enough to be a real hassle. The diversity in such a small area here is remarkable, with Hamilton island being a developed ritzy resort island with 5 star dining, golfing, go kart racing, and winding turquoise swimming pools, and the adjacent Whitsunday Island being an almost untouched national park with hiking trails and seemingly endless white sand beaches.

With cyclone season winding down, we should start seeing clear weather for leaving Australia in about a month. So we’re planning our route for coming months and noting we’ll soon be heading into some of the most poverty stricken parts of southern Asia, which sit surprisingly close to Australia’s northern coast. It’s difficult to understand how it came to be that just 1750 miles from our current position here among the megayachts and helicopters, villages in Indonesia still don’t even have access to clean drinking water and other basic needs. So instead of just sailing through and observing the problems like we usually do, we’re going to try to become a small part of the solution. Our plan is to deliver clean water drinking filters to villages in some of Indonesia’s most poverty stricken islands where Waves for Water, a charity devoted to the problem of contaminated water, has told us there’s a major need. We’re now running a small fundraising campaign in conjunction with Waves for Water, and hoping some generous people will chip in for filters, which we will then deliver to the villagers in May as we sail through those islands. Each $50 water filter will enable 100 villagers to drink clean water for the next five years, and we think that’s a pretty impressive result. If you’d like to participate or know anyone who might, please click here to learn more about our mission.

With our parents heading home to LA tomorrow after two of our more interesting weeks on the water, we’ve got no time to waste. The sun is now rising into the sky and shining down on the world famous 6-kilometer Whitehaven Beach, where we dropped the anchor last night. With the Great Barrier Reef just 50 miles east of here, it’s no surprise that the helicopters are already buzzing above us, and we expect they’ll landing on Whitehaven Beach in front of us any moment now. It’s indeed a crazy world.

There’s a saying that goes “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only different types of good weather.” That’s exactly the type of delusional optimistic thinking that any around the world sailing voyage will put a permanent end to. As we’ve probably said before, evaluating your actual situation as it really is, without optimistic or pessimistic bias, is one of the most essential skills needed for traversing the seas. Weather is the primary cause of unexpected trouble, and when combined with optimistic thinking you have a perfect recipe for disaster.

So we’ve been hopping around the infamous Whitsunday Islands in Australia’s Coral Coast wrestling with weather that can only possibly belong in one category: Bad. The timing is a little unfortunate because Mom and Pop, always looking for some more adventure, joined us about a week ago, and this time they might be getting even more than they bargained for. That’s because we’re in the direct path of tropical low which is forecast to become a cyclone later this evening. Being firm non-believers in the “all weather is good” approach to cyclone forecasting, we’ve been checking our GRIB files and the Australian Met office website several times daily since we left Bundaberg, so the cyclone’s likely arrival isn’t a surprise. We’ve hunkered down in a marina in Airlie Beach and are ready for whatever comes our way, within reason, over the next 36 hours.

We luckily had a few amazing days of island hopping while the low was still forming out over the Pacific somewhere, and we’ve found the Whitsundays to meet the high expectations we had coming in – the island group is small, but its reputation extends worldwide. Once the weather clears in a few days we’ll have time to finish our circuit before Mom and Dad leave – they won’t miss anything, other than some relaxation time on the anchor. In it’s place they get the excitement of living through a circular storm, and being the thrill seekers they are, it seems to us they’re perfectly happy about the situation.

Winds are now gusting above 50 knots for the first time, the highest we’ve ever experienced personally, but that record will certainly crumble between now and tomorrow night when the storm blows through. The boat is secured so firmly to the dock, that if the boat blows away, the dock will surely go with it. We’re waiting now to see how deeply the depression develops and if it will officially be declared a cyclone that will directly impact our area. If that happens, emergency procedures will be activated and we’ll be asked to leave the marina for higher ground…. Mom and Dad, we suspect, can hardly wait for that.