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 Travel Buddy Logs - Ducky's Dastardly Deeds
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| Carnarvon, WA - again |
Hello kids!
You wouldn’t believe where we are right now! Instead of being tied up at the wharf in Geraldton and exploring a new place, we have made it all the way… back to Carnarvon!
What a voyage it has been! First we were roused out of bed at 3am to run a fire drill before we sailed. It was funny watching the crew put out an imaginary fire in the water!
We spent a lot of time at anchor on this voyage because it was too rough to sail and too rough to go on shore much so we had to make our own fun on board. On Melbourne Cup day, we didn’t have a radio and we had no idea which horses were racing, so we made our own race, the Nowhere-Near-Melbourne Cup! It was great fun. Kiah made the ‘horses’ (which didn’t look anything like horses!) and everyone made up their own horses name and coloured them in. Then the race was on! Lance from BlueWatch won with his horse ‘Holy Sheet’ and he loved his prize - a packet of lolly snakes!!! I helped Stacey colour in her horse, Harness, to look like one of the harnesses we wear on the ship for safety. Harness actually came second and I got to share Stacey’s box of Coco Pops, which was her prize!
The weather was so rough that we had to give up sailing to Geraldton and we have come back to Carnarvon. It was sad to say goodbye to all the kids from this voyage but since they are from Carnarvon we will get to see them again. In fact most of them have already come to visit us already!
We will sail south again in a couple of weeks, which means lots of time for drinking mango smoothies and eating choc-coated bananas! I’ll write again soon.
Lots of love,
Ducky
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| Carnarvon, WA |
Hi to all of you at Walloon!
It's Ducky the Dude delivering this dudacious and dastardly description of daring-do!
We've finally made it to Carnarvon in WA. Carnarvon is at the north end of Shark Bay where Monkey Mia is and we will be visiting Money Mia next week to see the dolphins. I've been looking out for sharks but haven't seen any yet. This is the home of Whale Sharks but it's the wrong time of the year for them - bummer.
Carnarvon is pretty cool. It is very different from places north like Port Hedland and Dampier, where there is a lot of mining for iron ore, salt farms and stuff. Carnarvon is where they grow lots of fruit - bananas, mangoes, other tropical fruit, tomatoes, etc. Although it's not mango season yet, all the travel buddies have pigging out on mango smoothies, mango icypoles, and chocolate coated bananas - de-yummy-licious!
We have had lots of adventures on the last couple of legs, mostly to do with the ship, as we have been doing lots of sailing. It has been very rough, with heaps of water washing over the decks, so there were lots of seasick crew (and travel buddies). We saw whales and a few dolphins and heaps and heaps of turtles (I think they were green turtles) and lots of birds like albatross and shearwater (muttonbirds).
The crew have had a few mishaps with the ship - we got a few tears in the sails, flooded the cable locker where the cables for the anchor live and we nearly ran out of fuel and had to stop at Cape Cuvier for 2 days to refuel. Cape Cuvier is a place where they make salt and there is a HUGE mountain of salt there. When the wind blows, it blows the salt around and it looks like snow!
The thing is we couldn’t moor at the wharf (it was too big) so the fuel was put into small containers and thrown off the jetty into the water! Mike and Peter then had to fish them out of the water and into our little zodiac dingy and bring them back to the ship, where we finally emptied them into our fuel tanks! Considering it was quite rough, it was quite an adventure for Mike and Peter.
Now we are in Carnarvon for a few days, making repairs to the sails, cleaning out the cable locker and doing lots of maintenance on the ship (all the travel buddies have been helping). After taking on more fuel, water and supplies (including milo and chocolate!) we will sail for Geraldton and more adventures! We plan to visit Monkey Mia and Dirk Hartog Island along the way.
Don't wait up,
Ducky the Dude!
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| Broome, Wa |
A big hi to you all!
We have had a great trip around the amazing Kimberley Coast with red rocky cliffs and blue water. The best bit wasn’t the view though - it was all the whales we saw!! Heaps and heaps of Humpback whales!!! Some were a long way away but some were really close. The first ones we saw, Jason, our engineer, thought it was a log in the water! It turned out to be a huge whale with a newborn calf and she was feeding it. We were so close. It was so cool.
We also made new friends on this trip. Four kids came on with their families - Hannah(10), Jack(6), Hannah and Jacqui(8 - twins)! They played with us everyday and took us to Bigge Island where we explored the caves with aboriginal paintings. One cave even had a bat in it! The kids got off in Derby, which was 4 days before we got to Broome, and all the travel buddies are missing them. The twins, Hannah and Jacqui, have sent their own travel buddy on board. His name is Chandler and he already knows heaps about sailing tall ships! We also have another travel buddy named Mitch who joined us in Darwin. He’s good value.
We’ve sort of arrived in Broome but we are still anchored in the harbour and haven’t been able to go to shore yet. We crashed into the wharf the day we arrived - tide pushed us into the wharf - and then the batteries to start our engine went flat so we have been stuck at anchor for 4 days! New batteries arrive today and so we will try to get to the wharf tomorrow morning at low tide, when it’s a bit calmer!
The Pearl Festival is on in Broome right now so I hope we can get off tomorrow and go and watch the parade through the town. There are supposed to be giant Chinese Dragons in the parade! They would be amazing to watch.
Talk to you again later,
Ducky Flinders
PS Don’t forget to have a look at our photo page to see what we’ve been up to. And check out the Newsletters that the crew have put together. There are some cool games to play in it, stories about us, and photos as well!
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| Wyndham, WA |
Hi to all you kids from Walloon!
Wow, guys what a trip! From Darwin to Wyndham is a wild part of the country. We barely saw another boat on the entire trip. I just wanted to share my favourite story with you all.
A place where we stopped, Wadeye, which is about 400kms from Darwin, has a deadly resident.
The Diminin people, who live in Wadeye, believe the four-metre saltwater crocodile with three legs that lives in the mud beneath the only boat ramp leading into town is sacred.
They believe the crocodile ended his journey at Wadeye after creating the estuaries that run into the remote area from the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf on the Northern Territory’s west coast.
The locals call the giant croc Karnanturturt.
They have only recently stopped feeding the beast live dogs and scraps of meat because the police were worried it was beginning to associate humans with food - a deadly combination if you are lost in the maze of mangrove-lined creeks while on a fishing expedition in a tinny.
I talked to a man called Desmond Longmirr, who has lived in the area all his life. His job besides working at the local school is keeping the role of the crocodile in the creation of the area sacred.
“Karnanturturt has been around for a very long time, longer than there have been people here,” he told me as we waded through the mangroves at low tide looking for signs of the monster.
Mr Longmirr told me the crocodile had once been human, but changed to escape an enemy around the area where the neighbouring town of Red Cliff is now found.
I encountered what looked suspiciously like Karnanturturt following a 16 km journey on an inflatable zodiac boat from Windeward Bound after dark this week with my new friend Barclay Crawford, a city slicker from Melbourne, who is 25 and still behaves like a little kid because he has never been in this part of the country before. After dragging the tiny outboard onshore through the mud, we thought we saw what looked like the crocodile’s head in the shadows of a shallow bend.
Mr Longmirr laughed yesterday when he was told the boat was dragged through the shallows at night and pointed to tracks the crocodile had made.
“He could eat someone, easy, no problem,” he said.
“But we cannot touch him, we can’t chase him away, he has been here longer than the people.”
What do you think of that?!!! Scary stuff, huh? Mind you, Barclay and I have been looking and looking for crocodiles ever since we heard that story. We’ve found some tracks but no crocs!
Catch you all again soon. Maybe Barclay and I will find another story to tell you.
See ya,
Ducky
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| Darwin, NT |
A big Hi to everyone at Walloon!
I hope you haven’t forgotten your little ol’ Ducky Flinders. Kiah, one of the crew members, has finally dragged all the travel buddies off the ship to write our emails to you. It means we miss out on going out sailing for the afternoon, but I guess that’s what having homework is all about (sometimes writing these emails are a bit like homework)!
Well, we are in Darwin and we’ve been here for 2 weeks. On Monday we are sailing off to Wyndham, which is the first town we get to when we cross the West Australian border! It’ll take us 2 weeks but there will be lots of time along the way to go exploring on deserted beaches, swimming and looking for turtles.
In Darwin we have been to the Mindall Markets lots of times (it’s on the beach and a great place to watch the sunset), saw a movie at the Deckchair Cinema and visited a big navy ship - it’s much, much bigger than our ship. And we have been out sailing in the harbour too. Last weekend the Leuwin, a tall ship from Perth, sailed with us as well AND they fired a cannon at us!
Last week we saw dolphins that swam past us and this week there have been heaps of huge jellyfish, about as big as me.
Don’t worry about me, I am having lots of fun and making lots of friends. We will have 7 high school kids on the next leg, so that will be great fun. And I haven’t been getting too seasick either!
Write back soon. It’s fun when I have emails to reply to.
Bye for now, Ducky Flinders
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| Weipa, NT |
Well, a quacking big hello to my 5a friends and Mrs Mills!
I am writing this while the ship is in Weipa for a few days. It makes a nice change to all the sailing we do, not that I’m sick of sailing yet… it’s so much fun! I get to help haul on lines (except that sometimes you have to ease lines as well) and I help steer the ship. The thing I am really good at is checking the bilges, to make sure the ship hasn’t got too much water inside (or else we would sink)! If the bilges get a bit full I have to tell Jason, our engineer, and he puts the pumps on to empty them.
I have made lots of new friends. All the other buddies on board are really cool. There’s Victoria and Neat’n - they are both bears - and Minty - he’s a dog with floppy ears - and Hobo from Ubobo and Gull and Freddo and… and… and… there are so many! Best of all, I like Trim. She often comes and leans against me when she wants a nap. I think that’s pretty neat.
I haven’t fallen in the water or got seasick… yet! It’s been very calm sailing since I got on board, the best way to start a long trip. Trim had an adventure the other day and did end up falling in the water! You should read Trim’s Log because she’s written all about it. I don’t think she liked her swim very much.
Tell Karen I still have her shirt and I won’t lose it. And say hello to Ducky Junior. I hope he’s being good. I’m still having lots of fun and I’ll have some more photos for you to look at soon.
Signing off with a quack,
Duckoon!!
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| Thursday Island, QLD |
Hi Grade 5 and Jamie-lee!
Yes I am certainly on the boat!
Yesterday I sailed all the way from Cairns to Port Douglas. The wind was blowing from the right place (so Captain Sarah says) and we went really fast.
We had the crew plus an extra 10 people just for the day and they all had a great time too. I saw people climbing up the mast to work the sails, and I even helped out by pulling on some of the lines. I had to roll my shirt up so it does not get wet!
The boat leans over a bit, I got used to that very quickly. No one got sea sick, and all of the other Ship Buddies we really nice. I was not the only new Buddy. I met Winston, the Wombat from Palm Island, and Gull (I don't know his real name yet) who sleep in the same cabin as me.
We didn't get into Port Douglas until 10 o'clock last night so it was a really big day.
Next time I write I should have a photo to send to you.
I will write again in a few days.
Your Buddy
Ducky Flinders
PS It’s now a week later and I am writing this on Thursday Island! This is the furthest north in Australia that we will get to travel and when we leave tomorrow we shall be sailing south into the Gulf of Carpentaria! Wow! I’m hoping we get to see some Dugong on the way, cause they are supposed to be everywhere around here.
The other day we did see some dolphins, about 5 of them, swimming off the front of our ship. It was brilliant, but they didn’t stay long enough so some of the other travel buddies missed out. I was really lucky.
I am sending you all a photo of me with all the other buddies visiting the statue of Captain Cook in Cooktown. There’ll be lots more to come!
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