Mornays and Maintenance

28th Jun 2010

We dropped the mooring lines at 05:50 as we had a long day ahead and I wanted to make Pancake Creek, an anchorage south of Yeppoon, before dark. While I plan on 5 kts, we needed to average 6 kts to have any hope of this aspiration and this would mean a lot of motoring as the wind forecast was light. The backup plan was to overnight at Round Hill, some 20 nm short of Pancake and near the town of “1770”, (so named because Capt Cook called in here back in 1770). However, if we were to do this it would force us to deal with a very shoaly entrance to Round Hill and probably add a day to our passage to Rosslyn Bay but such is sailing!

As things turned out, we arrived at the entrance to Pancake at 16:30 with an hour of daylight to spare. Now as said, we achieved this by a lot of fairly boring motoring in light conditions so as a diversion during the course of the day; I rebuilt the lazy jacks, fixed a crook pulley on the steering, cooked a Mornay for lunch and even baked some scones for afternoon tea – how domestic is that!

But all this was worth it as Pancake Creek tuned out to be a nice place which gave us the opportunity for a row ashore and a swim before a pleasant night. (Left Is Pilgrim at anchor at sunset in Pancake Creek)