Cooktown

A hot dry place which gains it's notoriety from James Cook after hitting a reef and seriously damaging the Endeavour. This forced to bring the ship to land for some serious repairs. Our first place to check out was Grassy Hill Lookout which was were Cook had to plot his way out of the bay and avoid further damages.

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Finch Bay was our next visit, situated just behind the Botanical Gardens, a very attractive beach with an outgoing tide. This bought out the Mud Skippers and exposed a very likely habitat for Estuarine Crocodiles. We chose not to venture to deeply into these waterways!

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Black Mountain was a place to check out - as drove into Cooktown, we saw two mountains which were created some time ago by rock being forced up through the earths crust and eventually being broken down into huge boulders. Had to see to believe.

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Lastly we visited the local pier to checkout the fishing (sorry - no pictures as we were busy getting our hands dirty). A large Gropher, approximately 2 meters long was hiding among the piers structures stealing the locals catches. We watched and learned from the locals of what to catch and how to do it with live bait. They were catching 10 kilo Yellow Trevally, Giant Queenfish, Barramundi and Makeral. All of these species had to exceed 40 cm to be a legal catch. But back to the live bait, small Herring about the size of a lady's hand. If you had a bait net, you would hall in about 30 fish in a single cast with most being too large to keep! We grabbed a hand line with a jig and would catch 1 to 3 fish on a single cast and almost instantly hooked a catch. Fishermans Paradise, you betcha!