We woke up to a lovely sunny day. One of the ferries was getting loaded ready for its trip to Palm Island, the other was still tied up to its mooring buoy. I could see a truck, and a few utilities aboard.

After a few chores and MG work we took the dinghy under the sugar wharf and pulled the dinghys up the beach near the Lucinda General Store, deposited our garbage in the bin at the park then joined Nyeki and Beach Bum at the store for  a lazy coffee and hot chocolate. The store has a reasonable supply of goods which we thought later we might grab a few basics.

After finishing our coffee, we ambled through the caravan park and checked out their freezer where the residents store all the fish skeletons. They are not allowed to fillet their fish near the water and throw the skeletons in as it attracts the crocodiles. (we have now entered croc country).

You can help yourself to a bag of skeletons anytime you need crab bait for your crab pots assuming its for residents of the caravan park. We thought we would help them out and later took a small bag to load up our pots when we went further up the channel.

We wandered further up the typically queensland ,wide streets of Lucinda crossing the cane train tracks to the Lucinda Point Hotel. According to Debra and Wayne the pub has been renovated and looked  a lot better than when they were last here.

The five of us plus Morgan sat down and had a beer and ordered lunch.

John and I ordered a prawn and mango salad thinking as we were in north QLD it would be good. Well that’s the last time I order that particular dish, the prawns had been frozen and the mango was canned. The whole meal was flavourless. The other 3 ordered calamari and said it was nothing special. A couple of drinks later we  visited the bottle shop where John stocked up on red wine then we strolled back through the caravan park picking up our crab bait from the freezer then onto the store for milk.

Curlew resting in the shade in the caravan park

Back on Ovive we upped anchor and hoisted the screecher and sailed up the channel to Heycock Island. The islands cloud covered mountains towered over us as we made our way up the channel, it looked like scenery from Jurassic Park. Rainforest and eucalypt forest descended down to the mangrove lined channel. I read that botanists believe Hinchinbrook has the most diverse mangroves in the country. They have identified 31 species of mangroves. I must admit I thought there were about 4 species.

You can walk the length of the island along the Thorsborne trail which takes about 4 days. Might have been good in my younger days but I’m not up to carrying a heavy pack now.

We dropped our anchor halfway between Heycock and Hinchinbrook islands. There were about 4 other boats already anchored up in anticipation of the oncoming bad weather.

Heycock Island

Deb and Wayne were already in their dinghy and off  for a fish however they didn’t do any good. Only small Moses perch took the bait so lucky for them they were returned to the deep. Wayne found a couple of lures caught on the rocks on Heycock but was a bit wary of getting too close to shore in case of crocodiles lurking.

John put a line out from the back of Ovive but nothing was interested.

I spent the rest of the day working as we still had internet.