Yeppoon to Airlie: the Highs and Lows

In Yeppoon, we stayed at a bed-and-breakfast owned by an Aussie (Lois) and a Kiwi (Richard). At breakfast we talked about living in Australia, politics (mostly Donald Trump) and travel. One of our maps showed a colony of flying foxes near Yeppoon. Richard said that they roost in trees along Figtree Creek and we went to look for them late in the afternoon. The tide was ebbing and boats along the tidal creek were resting on their keels in the mud. An old guy in faded shorts and worn tee shirt introduced himself as Dave; he was tall and slim, and as weathered as his clothes. He said he’s lived in a steel-hulled boat tied to a jetty for two decades, one of the 40 or so boats I could see. The Jetty Club was sponsoring a photo contest with a $500 first prize and he said I could take pictures from his jetty.

Boats in Figtree Creek at low tide

Dive Heron - Part 2

Cristian Poulson created the first resort on Heron Island in the 1930s. Poulson was a fisherman and ran a turtle soup cannery on the island in the 1920s. Turtle harvesting and processing was seasonal work and, as the turtle population declined, Poulson made more money taking tourists to the island in the off season. In 1930, he took over a failed effort to establish a resort on Heron Island. In 1932 he opened his resort in the converted turtle factory. It took visitors 6-8 hours to reach the island in sail-powered motor launches; there was no harbor and passengers were ferried ashore across the reef flat in small boats. Researchers and educators used the resort in the 1930s and the island was declared a national park in 1943. In the 1940s, glass-bottom boats towed by motor boats allowed visitors to view the coral reef. Passengers huddled under a blanket to view the reef through a glass panel.

Catch of the day from the 1960s (link)

Dive Heron - Part 1

We left Bargara for Gladstone, three hours north, where we caught the ferry, a 34-m (112-ft) catamaran, for Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef. We were going to spend a week at the Delaware North resort (link). Heron Island is in the Capricorn-Bunker Group of islands in the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. They form the Capricornia Cay National Park, so named because the 15 islands straddle the Tropic of Capricorn where temperate and tropical waters meet. From a distance, Heron Island is a small (0.29 square kilometers, 0.11 square miles), undistinguished, sand cay (key) covered with vegetation, but it sits on the leeward edge of a thriving 27 square kilometers (10 square miles) coral reef platform.

Approaching Heron Island

Beyond Brisbane

From Brisbane we drove north to Rainbow Beach, which is named for the brightly-colored cliffs rising behind the narrow beach. This small, busy town on the Coral Sea caters to campers, fishermen, kayakers, surfers and beachgoers. Before 1969, it could only be reached by boat. After the road was built, the name was changed from Black Beach to Rainbow Beach (link).

Rainbow Beach

How We Goin’ Mate?

“Every picture tells a story don’t it” (Rod Stewart). The picture below tells a couple stories. The yellow warning sign with a kangaroo tells you that we’re in Australia (and that kangaroos are on the roads, especially at night). The truck in the picture is on the left side of the road and the story it tells is more complex, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Rural road in Queensland

Twenty-four hours after we left northern Colorado, we walked out of the international terminal in Brisbane’s airport in the state of Queensland. We dragged our bags to the taxi stand and a driver greeted us with “How we goin’ mate?” To which I could have replied “All good,” except that I said we’re going to Taigum. My first lesson in Australian. He wanted to know how we were doing, not where we were going. He had a mini-van and I rode in the front; I needed to get a feel for driving on the other side of the road.

View from a Kayak

I spent the morning kayaking around the islands and channels of Aransas and Redfish bays dodging speeding boats carrying fishermen and fighting a wind gusting 15-20 miles per hour out of the southeast. I launched my kayak at the public boat ramp. On the return trip, I had to avoid pickup trucks with trailers backing down the ramp to load their boats. I lifted my kayak onto the sidewalk next to the ramp and a man called out “Hey, Mr. Kayak, how was it out there?” “Windy” I replied. He was small and slim, with a sunburned face, and white hair sticking out beneath a tattered baseball cap. “The water’s warmed up; it must be in the 60s” I continued. He was sitting at a picnic table next to the ramp. There were several fillet knives laid out in front of him and he was sharpening one on a rectangular stone. It was hard to tell how old he was; his weathered face added at least a decade to his age.

Channel leading to Aransas Bay from Little Bay

Winter Texans (Part 2)

This is our second "Winter Texan" post (link), but our third post on our time in the Coastal Bend. Here we turn our attention to the coastal waters. Marine recreational fishing is a popular pastime in the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico and a significant economic driver. In 2011, an estimated 5.3 million anglers made 22.3 million trips into the Gulf of Mexico harvesting over 62 million fishes (76 million pounds) and spending $1.5 billion on trips (gas, food, lodging, bait, guide fees, etc.) and $8.3 billion on durable goods (fishing tackle and clothing, licenses, boats, vehicles and second homes).

Sight-fishing for fish feeding on the flats in St. Charles Bay

In Texas in 2011, 751,000 anglers made 2.2 million trips. They spent an estimated $402 million on trips and $1 billion on durable goods generating 13,300 jobs. Non-residents were 10% of all Texas anglers (link). 

Winter Texans (Part 1)

We rented a house on the Gulf Coast of Texas for a month and ended up staying for three months. We knew the birding would be good and the diving bad, but there were national seashores and wildlife refuges to visit, and coastal bays and estuaries to kayak. And while we had explored West Texas from El Paso to Big Bend National Park on the Rio Grande, we had not spent time in the Coastal Bend.

Rande and the Big Blue Crab, a local Rockport landmark on Little Bay

Beachcomber’s Paradise

After leaving Washington, we headed for the Coastal Bend of Texas for the rest of the winter. I had been to Corpus Christi a couple times on business and the area looked interesting. The northern Gulf of Mexico is well-known for recreational fishing and the coastal marshes and woodlands are birding meccas. We were ready to leave the cold and wet Pacific Northwest. We rented a house in Rockport, about a half-hour east of Corpus (as the locals refer to it), and became honorary “winter Texans” (the Texas equivalent of "snowbirds" of the Southwest). Here’s the first of a couple posts on the interesting things we learned in this corner of the Lone Star State.

Small (coppice) dune on the beach at Padre Island National Seashore

Working Boats

I have a thing about workboats. Whenever we're near the ocean, I like to prowl the local harbor with a camera. Workboats are one of my favorite photographic subjects, whether they’re pangas hauled out on a beach or trawlers tied to a dock. As a kid, I learned to paddle a canoe and row a dinghy on the Delaware River in northern New Jersey. When I was a teenager, our family vacationed on Lake Ontario where my father and I fished out of an aluminum skiff with a small outboard motor, which he taught me to operate and let me run it into town by myself. As a marine scientist, I worked on commercial fishing boats and research ships from dories and seine skiffs to coastal and offshore oceanographic vessels. While we lived in southern California, I co-owned a 24-ft Skipjack with two diving buddies; we took it to the Channel Islands most weekends from May to October to hunt white seabass and yellowtail. Now I’m relegated to a sit-on-top kayak that I carry on the roof of the truck. Maybe, when we’re settled, there will be a bigger boat in my future.

Cruising yacht in Point Hudson Marina, Port Townsend, Washington

The Road North (Part 2)

…runs through mountains and along rivers and took us from northern New Mexico to Washington state. We drove north from Taos into the San Luis Valley in Colorado and then over La Veta Pass to Interstate 25 to northern Colorado, a route we've traveled many times. Our household goods are in storage there and we stopped to swap our summer clothes for warmer jackets and rain gear.

Sawtooth Scenic Byway, Idaho

For the rest of the trip, we planned to visit parts of the country we hadn’t seen before on roads we hadn’t driven before, mostly blue highways. That term appears in the first line of the 1982 book of the same name by William Least Heat-Moon: “On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue.” He was separated from his wife, had lost his teaching job and wanted to change his life. He outfitted a van for camping and drove 13,000 miles around the country on blue highways writing about people he met and places he visited.

The Road North (Part 1)

…runs through New Mexico. In late August, I left Loreto in Baja California Sur and drove 1,100 miles to Taos where Rande had spent the summer. Our plan was to drive to Whidbey Island in northern Puget Sound to visit her family, but first I had to deal with an ear problem. On what turned out to be my last dive of the summer in the Sea of Cortés, I had what diver’s call reverse squeeze – a sharp pain in one ear as I returned to the surface. I couldn’t equalize (reduce) the air pressure in my ear with the pressure of the surrounding water. 

Rio Grande south of Taos, New Mexico

The next day, I went to the emergency clinic in Loreto and learned that I had an infection in one ear. The doctor, a young woman who spoke some English, gave me a prescription for antibiotic ear drops and told me to stay out of the water for two weeks. My summer of diving was over. Before leaving Mexico, I made an appointment online for an ear specialist in northern New Mexico. When I arrived at his office in Taos a week later, the infection was gone, but he sent me to a clinic in Los Alamos to test for a tear in the eardrum. They pressurized the outer ear and waited; a decline in pressure indicates a tear. I passed the test; I could go back in the water.