Author: Ning Xue

25/08/2020

We went onshore on Tongue Point in the morning, there is an outlook overlooking the entire Hill Inlet. The cover pictures of the Whitsundays brochures must were taken from here. When the tide was low, revealing the winding waterway, reminiscent of the aboriginal mythology Rainbow Serpent. Ngaro mythology says there were no islands in the world. The Rainbow Serpent passed by and laid some eggs that become islands… Some boats were anchored inside the inlet.  They must have driven in at high tide when it was calm.

Then we set sails and pulled up anchor to pass Tongue Point and head south to White Haven Beach. We sailed against headwind plus there were shallows to the left and sandy beaches to the right, and some rocks blocking the way in the middle. We had to tack a few times to reach the destination. Luckily we only had one bottle of ginger beer fall down and roll around, and the rest of the items remained there.

My first impression of White Haven Beach was that the sand was dazzlingly white. There were a couple getting married on the beach, even the lady’s wedding dress looked dull against the bright sand. The sand here has very high content of silica, which is caused by an ancient underground magma forming quartz-rich granite, which was then decomposed into fine sand and gathered here.

In the afternoon, we went ashore and had a walk. A little goanna straddled in the middle of the track and stretched its small arms to bask in the sun. It then sensed our movement and wiggled into the bushes again.

We walked up to the lookout and the scenery was infinite.

I made tacos for tea tonight, and I made a big mess while eating them. The sauce dripped all over my hands and my face. It is definitely not the food for a first date.

24/08/2020

At nine o’clock in the morning, we left Cid harbour heading towards White Haven. The wind was weak at the start. As soon as we passed the passage between Hook Island and Whitsunday Island, the southeast wind became strong. Swells made the boat quite rolly. At noon, we sailed behind the Border Island just to make and have lunch, and then came out again. We decided to shorten our trip to Tongue Point instead. We tacked a few times on the way. The boat leaned from one side to another, of course something in the cabin fell on the floor again. This time was the rice container. Rice was scattered over the floor everywhere, and it needed a good clean up.

A total of 5 hours and 17.5 nautical miles we sailed today.

In the evening, I caught a lizard fish to cook with eggplant and added a little bit of green curry to taste.

Reading back my previous journals, I found myself doing a good job, kept writing everyday(I didn’t publish all of them) for two months. I’ve never achieved this even when I was forced to write summer holiday diaries in primary school. A childhood story came to mind: One year my ‘gu nai nai’(a distant relative who stayed with my family and looked after me since I was a baby) was going back to her hometown to visit her family. Before she left, I kept asking when was she coming back. She handed me a stack of manuscript paper and said if I would write a diary or draw a picture on each piece of the paper every day for more than 30 days, she would be back. The first few days I did what she told, yet the following days I couldn’t think of anything to write(what a boring childhood I had…) so I just marked the page number every day, as long as I didn’t stop (I believed that once I stopped she won’t be back). I couldn’t remember how many pages were numbered but she finally came back and brought me a big goose egg… When I was young, I always thought that she could live with me for ever. Later, she got married and went to Hong Kong, which made it not very convenient to see her. I now live in another hemisphere. It is not easy to see her even more…

22/08/2020

I started a beautiful day by listening to Jazz on Saturday in bed in the morning. Then I made a PDF sales sheet for Dagmar, so the potential buyers could download and print it out. The pictures of the outside boat and text were roughly laid out. We just need some interior pictures to put in, but when thinking about the huge project of cleaning up the cabin for photo taking, we hesitated and skipped to the afternoon tea session directly.

In the afternoon, we went to another inlet, which coast was covered with hoop pines. The whole area is quite shallow, and we saw dugongs and a few turtles.

We started fishing again after sunset. J caught a decent size crescent grunter first. I thought I would catch a similar kind for dinner tonight. However, I didn’t catch anything and it’s already dark, I was giving up and pulling the line up. Suddenly I felt something on the hook. Sometimes it felt heavy and sometimes a bit loose, I thought it was another grunter. Yet it got heavier and heavier, I then realised it was not a small fish, the moment it came out of water I saw a very long silver fish! Its eyes were reflecting light of rose gold which I remembered, it was the kind of fish that escaped from my hook the other night. After catching it, I was so excited. I always catch fish bigger than expected to surprise myself. I measured it with a ruler and it was about 60cm long, which broke my personal record. This fish had long fangs in its mouth and looked fierce. It is definitely not a vegetarian. Later, I looked it up on the Internet. It is called wolf herring. Besides its long sharp teeth, It has a long and narrow silver body and a bluish back. It can grow up to one meter long. It feeds on small fish… I am ashamed to say most of my knowledge about certain fish was gained after I caught them, then I had the opportunity to observe them carefully and admire its perfect structure and beautiful appearance. Read a quote from Oscar Wilde: “Yet each man kills the thing he loves”, I think I am the other way around: I come to admire the thing I killed.

The only trouble was that the fish was too long to fit in the pan and plate, so I had to chop it into 3 parts and cooked in two ways. The fish was very delicious and tender, despite there were lots of thin bones, which made it harder to eat. We couldn’t finish it within one meal so we saved half of it for the next meal.