One man's love affair

Cruising The Whitsundays

David Colfelt of renowned guidebook 100 Magic Miles fame talks from the heart about his 30-year love affair with this amazing region, which he first visited with wife Carolyn in September 1978.

Priding yourself on your ability to pilot a small vessel knowing more or less where you are most of the time, it comes as a rude surprise to see a rock 75m ahead to starboard and that rock is not on the chart. Are you sure you know where you are?

The two of us had spent a fun but heavy night with our friends on Soulaimon in Waite Bay and were proceeding at about 7.30am, on a beautiful Sunday morning in September 1978, along the southern side of Whitsunday Island heading towards Fitzalan Passage. I quickly went below to check the location of Surprise Rock, the only rock in the vicinity that sometimes exposes, which I thought should have been about one mile to our south. Did I have that good a time last night?

We passed the rock leaving it about 10m to starboard, the waves lapping over its green slimy surface, a few barnacles visible just beneath the surface. In disbelief we then turned the Mottle 33 around to have another look, thinking we'd better let the hydrographic office know about this hazard to navigation and to take some bearings to fix its position. We were very close to the rock again when it exploded from the water Ð a humpback whale in full breach, crashing back into the sea. For the next 10 minutes it raised its tail high out of the water and brought it crashing down onto the surface, giving a report like a cannon.

Bamm! Bamm! Bamm! OK, OK, we get the message, and we turned tail. Below again, I scrambled to find a long lens for the camera, and while trying to control the shakes snapped off almost a whole role of film as this magnificent beast did its display of raw power, ending it all with a series of full breaches as it disappeared in the distance to the east.

When the film was processed we had another surprise: in the only properly focussed frame, a second, tiny whale tail was beside the first one like a ditto mark; it was a mum and her calf. Now we understood the reason for the performance.

When the affair began
Our affair with the Whitsundays began almost 30 years ago, in September 1978. I was editor of the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia's Offshore magazine at the time and had received a few months earlier an advertisement from John Landau in the Whitsunday Yachting World Sydney office for their new bareboat charter operation in the Whitsundays. At the time there were no bareboat charter companies at all in Australia, so this was news. And in the Whitsundays! The Whitsundays have had a special place in the hearts of European sailors ever since James Cook passed through in June 1770, describing "Whitsunday's Passage" as "one continued safe harbour". I had heard superlatives about the Whitsundays from the old salts in Coasters Retreat at the CYCA, and this ad grabbed my eye. Until then cruising the Whitsundays meant sailing there on your own or a mate's boat, but you had to leave the boat there until the end of the southeast tradewinds season (unless you were prepared to do the 825 miles back to Sydney on the wind most of the way!).

We booked a charter for September 1978 on one of the two brand-new Mottle 33s the company was offering. These boats were ideal for the purpose, 33-feet long with centre cockpit, and they were equipped better than many private yachts, with stereo players, freezers and hot showers, and they were built to pass the rigid Queensland registration regulations for commercial craft. Whitsunday Yachting World had taken a page out of the well-established USA charter companies, CSY and The Moorings, and the attention to detail in their outfitting was impressive.

We flew into Mackay where we transferred to a Trans Australia Airlines twin-engine puddle jumper and did the final leg up the passage over a gob-smacking scene of jewel-like islands set in a turquoise sea, the colours vibrating on your retinas. Landing at the grass Whitsunday airstrip, we were met by Whitsunday Yachting World's man on the ground in Shute Harbour, David Bradley, tall, confident and softly spoken. We rattled over the dirt road in his clapped-out Kombi van to our briefing location at Coral Point Lodge, with its magnificent views over Shute Harbour.

And so began our adventure. The main nautical chart for the area (AUS 252) was based on surveys completed in the last century, and it was intended for use by large vessels, not small private yachts. In many respects it was just plain inaccurate and simply inadequate for the task of getting one around amongst reefs and coral heads scattered throughout many anchorages. We did have some crude sketches created by Yvonne and Bernie Katchor, who had come to the Whitsundays in the early 1970s in their yacht Nari, and had settled at Shute Harbour. These were helpful but pretty rough.

Seduced
For the next seven days and nights we were thoroughly seduced by the Whitsundays. The mid-September weather offered a mixture of winds and weather ranging from brisk southeast trades of 20-25 knots to balmy north-easterlies 10-12 knots. The unspoilt islands allowed the deception that one was actually discovering them, setting foot and dropping anchor where no-one ever had been before. The swift currents and amazing tides and the lack of good, accurate information about the anchorages kept a high level of adrenaline pumping in the bloodstream, heightening the sense of adventure. We had been briefed on the troWe had the added excitement of an electrical fire in the engine and had to sail back to base in Shute Harbour for a new alternator. David Bradley compensated us for our loss of time by shouting us to a trip to the outer reefs. Those were the days before the advent of the fast catamarans carrying 400 people to the Barrier Reef proper (about 35 nautical miles from the mainland) in 2.5 hours.

The only way to visit the Reef on a day visit then was by float plane, which landed in the lagoon at Hardy Reef, allowing a couple of hours to explore the reef on foot. Our guides suggested we have a snorkel in a blue hole, but green as we were and a little spooked about sharks, we passed up the opportunity. Sharks are something that the uninitiated in Queensland waters often worry about, but, fortunately, the shallow waters of continental shelf provide ample food for the hungriest sharks, so they are not the slightest bit interested in human meat. As long as you don't impersonate a wounded fish when in the water, sharks in the Whitsundays shouldn't be a worry.

How the book 100 Magic Miles came to be
We returned to Sydney bursting with enthusiasm for the Whitsundays and wrote an article about our trip for Australian Sailing magazine which was published in March 1979. The article drew a lot of interest, and Whitsunday Yachting World subsequently asked me to help them put together their charter manuals and a basic cruising guide to the area. In the course of this project it became obvious that there was scope for a commercial publication, a full-blown cruising guide. So we did a 50:50 deal, myself writing and putting the book together (with a lot of input from David Bradley and his staff regarding the anchorages; I also interviewed and New bareboat charter companies began to set up business in the Whitsundays.

Bernie and Yvonne Katchor were next in with Whitsunday Rent-a-Yacht, followed by a Sydney consortium who set up Queensland Yacht Charters, Tony Kelly with Australian Bareboat Charters, Mandalay Sailing, to mention some of the early ones. The industry was new and inexperienced, and there was back-bighting competition and cost-cutting, and many companies came and went. Whitsunday Yachting World itself, having set the standards for the industry, ran into financial stress because they owned all their own boats, contrary to conventional wisdom in the industry of hiring out boats owned by third parties who were prepared to take any losses because they received tax write-offs. In 2008 the industry is mature; the Australian Tax Office has eliminated dubious charter agreements, and most of the companies have been in business for many years, all today offering a good standard of service.

Next stage
Whitsunday Yachting World was sold in 1983, and because I and the new owner could not agree on where the book was going, we parted company. My wife, Carrots, and I set about completely re-inventing it to bring it into line with contemporary standards and expectations. The original book was based on blow-ups of the admiralty charts, with all of their lack of detail. For the new book we licensed aerial photographs from the Lands Department, and my wife, who is a graphic artist, laboriously traced out the images for the new sketch maps in every detail Ð every sand bar, mud bank, coral reef or bommie. They weren't proper maps because they hadn't been corrected orthographically Ð i.e they sometimes contained displacement errors caused by the aeroplane's camera not being exactly overhead Ð but they had an immense amount of detail that was lacking in the admiralty charts and helped produce sketch maps very much more helpful in orientating oneself in an anchorage.

100 Magic Miles of the Great Barrier Reef Ð The Whitsunday Islands was published in 1985 and is now in its eighth edition. With each edition we have done the rounds of all the charter companies and local skippers, national parks rangers and the local harbourmaster in Mackay, getting tips on how to improve the book, reshaping this reef, adding that detail. At first there were lots of corrections to be made each time, but as the years rolled on they became fewer and fewer. We still get letters and emails from people who have discovered a submerged bommie here or there. So the book is really a composite effort; I am not really the author but rather the medium through which all of these hundreds of man-years of experience has been channelled.

Changes over the years
Keith Williams's Hamilton Island resort in the early 1980s had an immense impact on the Whitsundays.

Resorts that had existed in their homely comfort for years were suddenly shown up for the somewhat folksy, slightly time-worn establishments that many of them were. Hamilton Island showed everyone where the new goalposts were. Hayman was the first to follow suit; it closed its doors in 1985 and began what was to be a 25 million dollar facelift and ended up being a 400 million dollar rebuild, no expense spared. Others followed suit. Lindeman Island was completely redesigned. A new resort and health spa was constructed on the northern end of Daydream Island. Happy Bay was rebuilt and became a place for exuberant youth where "if the pace doesn't kill you, a falling coconut will". Tiny Palm Bay just south of Happy Bay, which had been a rundown little hideaway with the odd wallaby hopping through the dining area, has become a five-star establishment.

By no means did everyone welcome the high-rise building on Hamilton Island, which sticks out like a sore thumb, a Gold Coast icon gleaming amidst unspoilt, national park, bush-covered islands. But the construction of the airport there has revolutionised travel to the Whitsundays, and the island has become a marine centre in its own right. It injected a new energy into the Whitsundays. Hamilton Island race week is now the most popular out-and-out racing competition on the Australian calendar with literally hundreds of the hottest racing machines in the country vying for the prizes.

Airlie Beach, the mainland resort town that traditionally was the mainland base of tourism to the islands, has grown at a staggering pace, with the construction of 100s of condominiums and the largest marina in the area. Construction has started on another marina complex in Muddy Bay, which will eventually have condominiums and shopping facilities as well. Another marina is planned for Shute Harbour. Just how the Whitsundays will withstand all this pressure is something to ponder, but, to our great fortune, our forebears in the 1930s thought to make all but seven of the islands national parks, so their future is probably assured.

Visitors to the islands in private or bareboat yachts still report on "trips to Paradise" and the Whitsundays are now well and truly on the map of best cruising areas of the world. Of course, the Aboriginal people knew all about this coastal paradise at least 8000 years before James Cook passed through, marking the territory for addition to the British Empire. We have introduced our children to the area, they share our enthusiasm for it, and our book benefits from their input. This year marks the 30th anniversary of our involvement with the islands, and we look forward with anticipation to watching the next 10 years unfold.

Other publications
David and Carolyn Colfelt have done two other books about the Great Barrier Reef, The Whitsundays Book and Barrier Reef Traveller. For more information on these and 100 Magic Miles, visit their web site 100magicmiles.com