A Quiet Day around the Marina

Wednesday 12^th August 2015

Another perfect day at Magnetic.  It is bright and sunny with a light Northerly breeze (great to see a few Northerlies lately).

We have a lazy morning with a bit of patching on the dinghy ( adhering some wear strips where the self tacker sheet rubs on the stern), being the main task for the morning.

After lunch we went for a walk around to the end of the South Western breakwall of the harbour, which is quite a long walk as it turned out. You have to wander through a couple of new housing subdivisions and cross a creek to get to the access point. Looks like house and land sales are pretty slow. Most of Magnetic Island appears to be for sale.

It is low tide and the beach has grown substantially exposing a huge expanse of rocky reef. The reef is very visible from the breakwall at low tide, and the water is crystal clear. There is a lone fisherman trying his luck casting a lure out into the reef from the wall. He didn’t appear to having a lot of success and lost one lure that I saw.

Three Hanse's at Magnetic marina (right to left), Koonya, Soleil and Mica with Peppers in the background

At the end of the wall (entrance to the harbour) you can clearly see where they quarried the stone for the breakwall on the other side of the entrance. It is now the site of the Grand Mercure Apartments at Bright Point. There is also a monument featuring part of the bow of a ship called the “Presto”, which was wrecked off Townsville in a cyclone and towed to Magnetic Island in the early days to create a crude breakwall. With building of a proper harbour the remains of the bow was reclaimed and mounted on the wall at the entrance to the harbour.

Grand Mercure Apartments on the other side of the harbour entrance

On the way back we spotted a rock wallaby standing on the rock wall, not particularly concerned about our presence.

We had dinner at Peppers restaurant tonight with Mark, Janet and Geoff and Jenny. Ruby is off to Townsville tomorrow for a week.