Initially the scenery on the Western side of QLD was very similar to much of the sail from Darwin to Gove. After Port Musgrave, we headed into the Jackson River for a walk along the sandy flat shores still ultra vigilant for croc-o-logs haunting the area. There was LOADS of rubbish on the shores: plastic bottles, and fishing nets, nets and more nets (no photo supplied). A good lesson for the kids re: waste.

We headed out of there toward Crab Island hoping to get to Seisia, but it proved to be a most frustrating sail due to the wind angle staying on the nose – no matter that our course had changed about 40 degrees… We also thought we had a motor drama as the port motor started to alarm and conked out – Stefan was convinced the water pump was the culprit as there was a very slow leak that wasn’t noticed earlier… Eek! What do you do when you are totally remote, 30 miles from the most Northern Point of Australia? 1. Lucky there’s 2 motors on a cat. 2. Lucky that putting some fuel in the tank and bleeding the diesel lines solved most of that problem (tank valve wasn’t swapped over for the 2nd fuel tank…) 😉 Water pump can wait a bit…

So after having a little overnighter at Crab Island biting our nails and nutting out the engine problems, we sailed (with no clue as to what was going on with the crazy tide???) around to the town of Seisia to wait for another weather window and tides to ’round the cape’ to the eastern side of QLD.