My turn here goes……..

Navigated the shallows of Boonlye point at high tide and finally after the third transit I was calm for a change (Noel is always calm) even though we had caught up to the 110 boats taking part in the race we saw yesterday, a slow down saw most of them turn the shallow buoy by the time we did.  Arrived at Kingfisher bay in very calm conditions.

A quick trip ashore for garbage and recycling dump and of course a beer at the bar, we watch a spectacular sunset and great sleep giving us the energy to decide to hike Lake MacKenzie in the morning.  Lake MacKenzie is approximately 23 km hike that we had previously hiked with Pete and Deb a year ago, so armed with this knowledge we decided to shorten it up and take Maddie (dingy) down to the derelict pier and shave off about 4 kms of beach walking, we were quite surprised to see that the total hike ended up (according to the trusty app) 27kms, 2100 calories burnt and a little less than 4 hours.  Here is some shots to prove it:

Returning to Maddie on the beach she was definitely well beached and it was a harder work out getting her back to the water, thank goodness for the well prepared cooler of beer we had put in her for our return.  Hence to say we were cream crackered after that hike.

We had noticed that our service batteries were not holding a charge as well as normal, so after some troubleshooting we decided to head to Urangan and check out the prognosis with an electrician, confirmed some of the batteries were knackered, so only one choice replace all 8 service batteries…. kaaching.  Batteries were ordered and we got to hang out at Great Sandy Straits Marina, lovely spot and really enjoyed it, highly recommend a revisit one day (close to saying it was nearly worth the $85 / night) what can you do!!!!!

We sourced out a squash court and headed down for a hit, another great work out to be experienced.  By Thursday morning all batteries and fuses had been replaced, shopping completed and off we went from Urangan to anchor at Scarness anchorage overnight before setting off to Bundaberg on Friday.

Jacqui’s shout outs:

JORD – Thanks for visiting it was great spending time with you and see you soon.

PETE AND DEB – Hope it brought back some good memories from last year and looking forward to you guys spending time on MAD in August.