Peter Cawdron's Blog, page 7

One small step

Today marks the 49th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. What was one small step for Neil Armstrong was indeed a giant leap for all of humanity. Our ability to harness science as technology allowed us to reach into space with Gagarin and to the surface of the Moon with Armstrong, Aldrin & Collins.

Since then, the temptation has been to look at the stagnation of crewed spaceflight as defeat. A common complaint is, why didn’t we go on to Mars? For the past half a century, we’ve barely left a low earth orbit so it looks like NASA’s finest hour was in the 60s and early 70s, but that isn’t the whole story.

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NASA/ESA, etc make the impossible look mundane, the astonishing look routine. For all the talk of putting men and women on Mars, the reality is we’re incredibly fragile, needy, bulky creatures. Keeping us alive is both costly and risky. The sheer distances involved are phenomenal, far beyond what most people realize.

Consider this…

Distance
Miles (avg)
Kilometers (avg)
As a percentage of journey to Mars


Earth to Mars
140,000,000
225,000,000



Earth to Moon
240,000
380,000
0.1714%


Earth to International Space Station
255
410
0.0002%

If we scale these distances and compare it to a road-trip from New York to Los Angeles, look at where our Apollo adventure gets us, and where we are on the International Space Station.

Distance
Miles (avg)
Kilometers (avg)
As a percentage of journey to LA


New York to LA (by road)
2,790
4,500



Equivalent journey to Moon
5
7
Not outside of NYC


Equivalent journey to ISS
27 feet
8.2 meters
Not outside the building

To make it a little more visual, let’s consider visualise this…

Here’s our epic road trip to LA

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Here’s our Apollo journey to scale, which is barely a trip between two museums in New York.

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It’s basically an uber trip for tourists, right? It took 400,000 engineers and scientists to get just three of us downtown!

And our journey to the International Space Station, which is still a PHENOMENAL feat of engineering…

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Yeah, that doesn’t even get us from the reception area in the Hayden Planetarium out to Central Park West!

One day, we’ll walk on the surface of Mars, but it will take an astonishing amount of precision and planning, and yet look at what we’ve done with robotic explorers. New Horizons flew by Pluto last year. On our scale, that’s the equivalent of circling Earth roughly twelve times! Compared to wandering through the hallways of the Hayden Planetarium or even our trip to the downtown museum, that is remarkable, phenomenal, astonishing, breathtaking (I’m running out of superlatives). And it was done with pinpoint precision.

Imagine how exciting it would be to hit a hole-in-one on a golf course. Now, imagine hitting that hole-in-one from the other side of the planet, with your golfball orbiting the planet twelve times before rolling into the hole.

We may not have walked on Mars (yet), but what NASA/ESA and others have accomplished over the past fifty years since Armstrong and Aldrin took those small steps have continued to be gigantic leaps forward. Our exploration of the stars and planets has transformed our understanding of our origins.

We’d all love to see more Buck Rogers and space clippers like those depicted in 2001:A Space Odyssey, but that’s the icing on the scientific cake. What we are seeing with the likes of Hubble, Cassini, Curiosity and soon Tess and the James Webb Space Telescope is the equivalent of running a marathon following that one small step.

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Ad astra per aspera.

Hitchhiking with Neil deGrasse Tyson

How cool would it be to catch a ride with Neil deGrasse Tyson on the way to work? Well, you can. Using a 360 camera, you’re in the front seat with Neil, listening to him and his buddies chat on their way to work.

Although these are all on YouTube, the links are screwy, and you’ll end up jumping from part II to Part V, and then miss Part VII, etc, so I’ve listed them here sequentially to make the ride a little smoother

Retrograde is on sale!

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RETROGRADE is currently on sale for $2.99 as an ebook in the US and £1.89 in the UK, and available through the following online stores

Amazon
Apple iBooks
Barnes & Noble
Google Play
Kobo

And the verdict of readers from all around the world?

I felt like I was there

More than five stars are due this story

By the end of each of his novels that I’ve read, I’ve felt like I’d made new friends

the decisions made in this story are beautiful and ugly. Humanity at it’s finest and at its worst as well

If you’re curious, you can see what other readers have said about this novel on GoodReads

 

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Surviving on Mars

Recently, I got to catch up with Dr. Lazendic-Galloway from Monash University over coffee. We spent several hours delving into everything from her personal speciality, supernova remnants, to the subject of living on Mars.

Along with Professor Tina Overton, Dr. Lazendic-Galloway runs a free, public, online learning course called How to Survive on Mars, which covers the science essential to living on another planet. If you enjoyed The Martian, you’ll love How to Survive on Mars as, over the course of four weeks, it delivers instructional videos and learning assignments in short segments that will enrich your understanding of Mars and the challenges faced by explorers from Earth.

Dr. Lazendic-Galloway graciously agreed to review my novel Retrograde.

~~~~~~

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How to Survive on Mars

As an astrophysicist, it is not surprising that I like science fiction. But while I can watch any sci-fi movie, I’m picky when it comes to sci-fi books. I like to read only “hard” sci-fi, where realistic science is applied to make a plot more interesting. It’s too easy to make a story work if you ignore physical laws or facts and make your own rules. It takes more imagination and skill to create a good story using the constraints (and also possibilities) of laws of physics. I met Peter through my massive online open course (MOOC) “How to survive on Mars”, and besides an interest in Mars, we share the same attachment to hard science fiction.

Retrograde is a type of book that, once you start reading, you won’t be able to put down!

The story revolves around an international colony on Mars made of scientists, engineers and doctors, who must face the outbreak of war on Earth. The colonist must deal with this situation for which they never trained. With no ability to communicate with their mission controllers on Earth, the colonists have to make all the decisions by themselves, without knowing who started the war. And while everyone is trying to get a grasp on the situation, strange things start to happen within the colony and we start to wonder: who is the enemy?

Like Andy Weir’s The Martian, Retrograde is heaven for geeks like me. It uses realistic Martian settings and the application of real science wherever possible. In addition, it has Agatha-Christiean murder-mystery-like story plot that will keep you guessing right until the end. You will be transported to an exotic world of lava tube caves and hydroponics, where every component of the life support system is carefully planned and maintained. You will experience how it is to run or sleep in a lower gravity on Mars.  There is a nice variety of characters, in gender and race, which are believable and portray scientist and space explorers very well, in my experience. The book discusses current issues regarding space exploration and searching for life on Mars, but also touches on other important issues like gender equity in science and the equitable access of all nations to space colonization.

Overall, the book has a seductive dystopian atmosphere, but it does leave a space for a hope. My favorite sentence from the book says it all: “We’ve got to stop thinking like Earthlings and start thinking like Martians.”

So if you’d like to learn more about Mars colonization and one possible future that humanity might face, I highly recommend Retrograde.

Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway,

astrophysicist

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Learn How to Survive on Mars with Professor Tina Overton and Dr. Lazendic-Galloway

 

 

 

 

The Fast and the Furious in Spacetime

The theory of relativity is counterintuitive. It defies our every day experiences with wild notions such as time dilation and length contraction.

It’s difficult to grasp the speed of light as a hard limit on how fast something can move. Why can’t I go faster? If I’m cruising down the freeway, a little more gas allows me to go as fast as I want. Eventually, my car reaches its engineering limit, but, hey, jump in a Tesla Roadster and I can go faster again. Why isn’t the same thing possible when it comes to spaceships?

“Punch it, Chewy.”

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Movie: Star Wars

Science fiction loves to toy with the concept of FTL—Faster Than Light travel, with stories such as Star Trek and Star Wars suggesting it’s simply a technical challenge to be solved, like breaking the sound barrier in an aircraft, but the theory of relativity reveals something astonishing about the nature of our universe, a fundamental aspect that defines reality—space and time aren’t two separate concepts, but rather one thing—spacetime. Reality is governed by (at least) four dimensions, not three. Up & down, left & right, forwards & backwards, past & future.

Why can’t we go faster than the speed of light? Dr. Sundance Bilson-Thompson of the University of Adelaide explains on Quora that the answer is quite simple. We can’t go faster than the speed of light because we’re already traveling AT the exact speed of light as we pass through four-dimensional spacetime. Regardless of what we do, we can never travel any faster or slower than the speed of light.

Wait? What???

Yes, we can’t go any faster or slower than the speed of light when viewed from the perspective of all four dimensions.

Perhaps an analogy in three dimensions will help.

Let’s have a race.

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Movie: The Fast and the Furious

Stay with me, and we’ll use The Fast and the Furious to explain relativity.

Mr. T. is going to race Dominic to settle once and for all whether The A-Team or The Fast and the Furious have the best drivers.

The rules are simple. Neither driver is allowed to speed. Both will drive at exactly 100mph, so this will be all about skill.

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On your marks. Get set. Go.

As neither driver trusts the other, they’ve fitted their cars with police radar guns, allowing them to monitor each others speed. In addition to the speed cameras, they have web cams inside each others vehicles watching the speedometer. With two ways of verifying their speed, there’s no way either of them can cheat.

As the race unfolds Dominic pulls ahead.

Mr. T. accuses him of cheating, but Dominic swears he’s only ever been traveling at 100mph.

Mr. T. calls Dominic a liar because he too has only ever been traveling at 100mph. Even though he climbed a mountain, he kept his van on exactly 100mph. Mr. T. is convinced the only way Dominic could get ahead of him is if he was going faster. Is he right?

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Mr. T. takes a shortcut over the mountains

When Mr. T. looks at the web cam inside Dominic’s car he sees the speedometer reading exactly 100mph, the same speed he’s doing, but if he points his radar gun at Dominic he gets a speed of 110mph. Confused, he asks Dominic what he can see looking back at the A-Team van.

Dominic looks at the web camera showing Mr. T’s speed and sees that he’s also traveling at 100mph, but with his radar gun, he measures Mr. T’s speed as only 90mph.

What’s happening? How can both measurements be correct when they’re clearly different?

The answer is… both vehicles have maintained a speed of 100mph throughout the entire race. Neither slowed down, but as Mr. T. travelled up hill (without losing ANY speed) he traded forward motion for vertical motion. He began moving in another dimension—up. He’s traveling 100mph, but on an angle relative to Dominic. From Mr. T’s perspective, he’s still moving at 100mph, but when he measures Dominic’s speed down on the open plain, it’s clear Dominic is moving faster relative to him even though Dominic too is only going at 100mph.

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High school trigonometry is much more fun with Mr. T.

Some high school trigonometry explains what has happened. Both vehicles left from the same point (O) and they’ve both travelled the EXACT same distance in a straight line (O-A for Mr. T and O-D for Dominic), but when viewed in only one dimension, Mr. T has fallen back to point B. It’s as though he’s only traveled the distance O-B, making it look like he’s fallen behind (or Dominic has pulled ahead). In reality, they’ve both travelled EXACTLY the same distance, but for Mr. T. one dimension has been traded for another. By going up hill, Mr. T. has effectively reduced his horizontal motion.

This is what happens when it comes to relativity. Motion in one dimension is traded for another, only instead of the trade occurring between spacial dimensions like horizontal or vertical, relativity involves trading with time.

Instead of racing along at 100mph we are all racing along at one second per second. Sounds strange to think of time itself as a speed, but it’s just another dimension in which we can move—and we are in motion within time.

So long as everyone’s “racing” along in the same direction (which in this context means sitting still next to you as time races along), there’s nothing to see. We’re tied for first place. But should one of us start moving off in any other physical direction, all of a sudden we’re trading our speed through time for our speed in a physical dimension.

Fly away from me in a spaceship and you’ll swear time moves at exactly the same pace for you as it did when you were sitting next to me, just like Mr. T. seeing his speedometer reading 100mph. But when I measure your motion, just like Dominic, I’ll see you moving slower—not physically, but in time—I’ll see time slow down for you.

In the same way as Mr. T. watches Dominic race ahead along the open plain, you’ll look back at me and see time appear to speed up. Sounds crazy, but it’s been experimentally tested and holds true. The faster you fly away from me, the more pronounce the effect becomes, giving rise to the concept that if you left Earth in a spaceship traveling close to the speed of light you could return one year later to find that twenty years had passed on Earth.

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Fancy a trip?

The key point is that both of us—you in your super fast rocket and me waiting here on Earth for twenty years—have ALWAYS travelled through four dimensional spacetime at EXACTLY the same overall speed. Like Dominic and Mr. T. we simply traded speed in one dimension for another. The net result, though, is always the same—always equal. A whole bunch of time and a little space equals a whole bunch of space and a little time.

Spacetime is elastic, stretching and squeezing so that the net result is you’re always moving at the speed of light in all four dimensions, regardless of what you’re doing in any one dimension. Speed up in this dimension, relative to me, and I’ll see you slow down in the dimension of time to equal things out.

Now it becomes obvious why you could never travel faster than light. Once you get that fast, there’s no time left to trade. You’ve hit the speed limit and maxed out.

But why is the speed of light a hard limit?

If we rephrase the question in the light of Einstein’s most famous equation: E=mc2, the answer becomes obvious.

Can light go faster than light? No. The notion itself is obviously absurd. But we think of matter as different, special, even though it’s not—the equivalence between matter and energy (ala E=mc2) means it too could never go faster than light.

Speed is distance traveled over time taken. Miles per hour. Kilometers per second. If you trade all of your motion through time for motion through space (ie, travel at the speed of light) then there’s no time in which to record your speed. You have the miles but no per hour.

Light travels at the speed of reality (which for convenience we call the speed of light) because it has no mass. Looking at Einstein’s equation, it’s all E and no M.

Remember, regardless of what speed you’re doing relative to someone else, light is ALWAYS traveling away from you at 299,792,458 meters per second. You, Dominic and Mr. T. will always agree on that speed regardless of where you are and how fast you’re going. 299,792,458 meters per second is you traveling through four-dimensional spacetime at one second per second. Others may see time slow down or speed up for you, but you’ll never see that yourself. For you, it’s absolutely constant.

Spacetime is the wonderfully weird way in which the universe unfolds. It may seem counterintuitive, but it is actually astonishingly consistent and describes the way the cosmos works with astounding precision.

Strange, but true.

 

 

 

 

Strange Survivors

Strange Survivors is a non-fiction book by Professor Oné Pagán from West Chester University, and examines the way natural selection has lead to an astonishing variety of attack and defense mechanisms in the game of life.

Strange Survivors is an example of scicomm—a book designed to communicate science in a clear and interesting manner. It’s designed for the general public and could be read by anyone from Grade 10 upwards. It’s easy reading. Professor Pagán has a light, breezy style of writing that is conversational. You get the feeling he’s chatting with you over a cup of coffee in a university cafe between lectures.

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At first, I thought this book would be about the oddities of life, focusing on obscure examples that are interesting curiosities, but don’t really resonate as I’m unlikely to ever see any of them in anything outside of a book or a nature documentary. Professor Pagán, though, shows us that we’re ALL strange survivors in that, after 3.8 billion years we’ve survived. Every species on Earth has survived against the odds to reach this point in time, eclipsing every other extinct species. Even you, personally, are here against all odds. I won’t steal his thunder, but the odds of you being the child of your mother and father are stupendously low. In this way, Professor Pagán uses Strange Survivors to enrich our appreciation of the wonder of life.

Strange Survivors is a guided tour of modern biology, looking at the surprising role of physical properties like electricity in producing and sustaining life. Professor Pagán makes the point that no single molecule in your body is actually alive. They’re just molecules—of water, various salts, chains of carbon forming things like DNA, but none of them are actually alive, no more so than if you were looking at them in a petri dish under a microscope—and yet, here you are—a survivor!

Confused about quorum sensing among bacteria? Professor Pagán’s answer is, “Let’s imagine a hockey team. Their ultimate objective is to get the puck into the net. To do so…” And with that he reduces a complex subject to a sports analogy, making it easy to follow.

Enjoy milk in your coffee? Or on your cereal? So do ants, but not in the way you think. They domesticate and raise aphids in a similar manner to how we raise cattle, and they milk them for their sugary excretions. See? Us and ants—we’re both strange survivors.

Strange Survivors is technically accurate and isn’t shy with scientific terms, but never in a manner that’s intimidating or overbearing. This isn’t fiction—you have to think as you read, but the reward is an increased understanding of the astonishing variety of life on Earth and the strategies species use to survive.

The thing I enjoyed most about Strange Survivors is its desire to impart a sense of awe about the natural realm. We’re time poor in modern life, accustom to sound-bites and sensationalism, but more than ever there’s a need for books like Strange Survivors as they remind us that science is the foundation of modern society. Science isn’t some new high priesthood, carried out behind closed doors by people in white coats chanting scientific terms in a strange tongue. On the contrary, science is the pinnacle of human achievement and should be accessible to all—and Strange Survivors shows us that science is merely a means of understanding the world around us. It gives us a glimpse into the weird, wonderful and strange world of biology that we’re all a part of.

Strange Survivors is available in ebook, paperback and hardback from the end of February 2018, and can be preordered now.

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Disclosure: I received an advanced copy of Strange Survivors in exchange for an honest review.

 

Book plates

Being an Australian author, it’s horribly impractical and horrendously expensive to sign books for readers in the US and the UK, so I’ve done a limited print run of book plates for fans of my writing.

Book plates are A5 size stylized stickers I can sign and post anywhere in the world. They can then be stuck inside any of my novels to give you a unique personalized book.

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Signed copies of The Great Gatsby have sold for US$90,000

My autograph will never be in high demand, but while researching this I was impressed to learn that signed copies of J.K. Rowling‘s first edition of Harry Potter are worth $24,000, while her hand written copy of The Tales of Beedle The Bard sold at auction for an astonishing $4 million!!

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J.K. Rowling clearly had a LOT of fun with this

If you’d like a book plate, please leave a message on this page with…

your postal address
and the name of the book you have

I’ll write something about that book and mail the book plate to you. Your comment/address will not be made public, and will be deleted once I’ve popped your book plate in the mail.

All the best,

Peter

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron [The Best Sci-fi book I’ve read this year]

Here’s a review of my latest novel RETROGRADE

Raven & Beez

Retrograde’s blurb caught my attention quicker than cake and that’s saying something. It’s about a colony of humans from all walks of Earth settling on Mars for research. But how will things turn out when nuclear war devastates everyone back home?

This book revolved around such an interesting concept. A far as I know, The Martian by Andy Weir deals with a short-term journey to Mars gone wrong but this book deals with the long-term situation with not one but a whole group of 120 scientists, astronauts, medical staff, and engineers. 

The story is told from the POV of Liz, a US colonist. The book doesn’t shift POV’s and despite that, we were able to get a perfect idea of the situation in all the 4 modules on Mars, which included the US, the Russians, the Eurasians and the Chinese. I was amazed at how well this was done. To…

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Did life arise before Earth formed?

How did life arise on Earth?

It’s a good question and one that has intrigued people for thousands of years.

Every major religion has an origin story, but they’re not based on scientific evidence. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species explored how the variations within species arose, but stopped short of talking about the origin of life itself.

Even now, over a hundred and fifty years later, we’re not much closer to understanding how life first arose as the evidence is scant. There is, however, an interesting theory that life may be older than Earth itself.

The oldest evidence for life on Earth is trapped in rocks over four billion years old.

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Graphite deposits found in Zircon. Image credit: E A Bell et al, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2015.

Tiny graphite deposits trapped in zircon diamond fragments reveal carbon-12 ratios that suggest life existed 4.1 billion years ago, which is astonishing given the planet itself is only 4.5 billion years old. How could life arise so quickly in the hostile environment of early Earth?

We’ve looked at the phylogenetic tree of life and assumed the point of origin from where all species emanated occurred shortly after the formation of the planet, but the genomic evidence suggests otherwise.

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The phylogenetic tree of life shows the relationship between all species on Earth

The human genome contains roughly 23,000 genes, being built up from six billion nucleotide pairs, the biological alphabet of G, A, T & C (guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine). As impressive as that sounds, the humble tomato has almost 32,000 genes, far more than we have. Over billions of years of evolution, DNA has grown to astonishing levels of complexity.

When scientists look at the complexity of non-redundant functional nucleotides, an interesting relationship emerges between genome size and the evolution of various organisms.

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The complexity of organisms as measured by the length of functional non-redundant DNA in the genome increases with time. Image credit: Shirov & Gordon (2013), via https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381

On the surface, it’s not surprising to see genome complexity increase over time, but if we run the tape backwards, we find this relationship suggests that life is older than Earth itself, originating somewhere between nine and ten billion years ago.

There are some interesting implications to this finding, as discussed in a research paper published on Arxiv.

Earth was seeded by panspermia, where life arose elsewhere, was blown into space with the death of a star, and eventually arrived here on comets and asteroids
Life took a long time (almost 5 billion years or longer than Earth has been around) to reach the complexity of even simple bacteria like prokaryotes
The environments in which life originated and evolved to a pre-prokaryote stage may have been quite different from Earth
As the universe is 13.7 billion years old, carbon-based DNA life arose within 4 billion years of the Big Bang and may have spread remarkably wide
The slow progression of genomic complexity suggests there was no intelligent life in our universe prior to the origin of Earth, thus Earth could not have been deliberately seeded with life by intelligent aliens (Sorry Prometheus fans, no engineers)
The Drake equation for guesstimating the number of civilizations in the universe is likely wrong, as intelligent life would have only just begun appearing in the universe

Is it really such a surprise that life could have originated beyond Earth, billions of years before the planet formed?

Every element on Earth came into existence outside our solar system. The formation of our Sun simply dragged together the debris and detritus left over from a previous generation of stars.

All stars end their lives by throwing off their outer shells, and destroying their solar systems, suggesting a natural mechanism for panspermia (the seeding of life throughout the universe).

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The lifecycle of a star

We’ve known for decades this process included inorganic material, like gold, silver and platinum, but now it seems it may have also included the frozen remnants of microbial life on other worlds.

If this theory is correct, then we may well find evidence for life on Mars, and perhaps living organisms on Europa and Enceladus, as they would have been seeded at the same point in time as Earth. Such life would be distantly related to us, having branched away from all terrestrial lifeforms before prokaryotic bacteria evolved on Earth. Also, it means other stars that formed from the same stellar nursery some five billion years ago, may harbor distant DNA cousins.

It’s a speculative theory, but based on an interesting observation, and accounts for the astonishingly quick rise of life on Earth. Regardless of whether it’s correct, the challenge we face when it comes to abiogenesis is in understanding how sub-prokaryotic life developed in the first place. The advantage of this theory is it gives life plenty of time to develop, which is actually more plausible than the rapid development necessary if life first arose on Earth.

In billions of years time, the Sun will blow off its outer shell and decimate Earth, and panspermia will begin again. Will other lifeforms arise from our celestial ruins? Will they develop intelligence and figure out the genomic path that lead to their formation, and perhaps gain a glimpse of life on this planet?

As much as I love writing science fiction, it is science itself that is often stranger and wilder than anything I can imagine.

 

 

Bareboat sailing in the Whitsundays

My wife and I both turned 50 this year, so to celebrate, we thought we’d do a combined birthday bash in the Whitsundays with the kids.

Bareboat sailing is exactly what it sounds like. You hire a bare boat and sail yourself around the Queensland Whitsunday islands.

As a close friend will attest, my previous sailing efforts during my teens resulted in capsizing and sinking a training yacht (something I probably should have disclosed to the rest of the family beforehand). In all seriousness, though, I undertook a basic sailing course a few months before our holiday, and we then opted for an additional half-a-day sailing refresher before heading out on our own (something I highly recommend).

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We were sailing an 11 meter catamaran (36 feet), which had plenty of space for the six of us. Downstairs in the sleeping quarters, galley and toilets was cramped but comfortable, while the deck area in between was spacious and well sheltered, and quickly became the hub for our activity.

We flew in the day before, stayed in a local motel, and went shopping for groceries and beer. Our plan was to divide the trip in two, with a stop on Hamilton Island to restock supplies, which worked really well for us. There’s an IGA grocery there that’s reasonably priced considering everything’s shipped from the mainland.

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At first, sailing was a bit stressful, but soon became comfortable, and by the end of the journey, we were quite competent with the catamaran. Cats are the Winnebagos of the sea. They’re easy to work with, very forgiving, and quite relaxed even in high winds. Our toughest day at sea was the second day when we crossed the main channel between the islands, where the seas were at 1.5 meters and winds gusted up to 28 km/hr (18 mph). In these conditions, the cat performed wonderful, riding the waves with ease.

The key sailing skills needed are:

Understanding tacking (into the wind) & jibing (away from the wind)
Confidence in raising & lowering sails in rough conditions
Map reading and understanding how winds/tides impact sailing
Checking your GPS and depth finder constantly when in shallow waters (entering bays, waiting outside Hamilton Island, etc)
Anchoring and mooring

The rigging was set so there were only a few lines we had to work, and once we became comfortable with that, sailing was smooth. There was no need to adjust the sails while tacking, with only a little work required when jibing, and we had a blast sailing along with the wind in our hair.

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Early in the journey it was apparent to all of us that we weren’t old salts. We had a choice to make. We could madly sail around the Whitsundays trying to see all the key spots, or we could relax and enjoy ourselves. We opted for the latter, which was especially prudent as from weather forecasts we knew had at least 24 hrs of rain to deal with.

The hire company conducted ‘skids’ each morning and afternoon, where they provide information on weather, and ask about our plans, any challenges we had with the boat, etc, so we were always in contact with someone.

Each morning, we’d roll out the map, check the tides and catch the weather report, and then discuss our options and what could unfold that day and the next. We chose a conservative, relaxed holiday, and spent a lot of time snorkeling, kayaking, fishing, playing cards and drink a few brewskis.

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Our itinerary was:

Day 1 – sailing training in the bay by Airlie Beach, anchoring in Funnel Bay (windy, but only light waves, no swell at night)
Day 2 – Up to Blue Pearl Bay on Hayman Island, then down to Nadia Inlet for the night (astonishingly calm anchorage)
Day 3 – Rainy, had to choose between heading East around Whitsunday Island (more scenic, but rough weather), or a short run to Cid Harbor (which turned out to be idllic even in a storm)
Day 4 – Short sail to Hamilton Island (showers and laundry day)
Day 5 – Whitehaven beach (stunning), and moored overnight in Tongue Bay (amazing snorkeling, great walk to Hill Inlet)
Day 6 – Esk Island. Moored offshore, took the inflatable in, walked around the island. Water was astonishingly clear. Would be beautiful to snorkel.
Day 7 – Spent the sixth night at Hamilton again, as one of the crew cut a finger with a knife and required a tetanus shot. No one complained about staying at Hamilton again as it’s very relaxed. Headed back to Airlie Beach via Daydream Island

Cyclone Debbie hit the Whitsundays back in March of this year, and the devastation was obvious. Hayman Island was covered in dead trees, as was Whitehaven Beach, and a lot of the corals were smashed. Although we missed sailing the eastern sides of Hook Island and Whitsunday Island, we heard from others they were pretty badly battered by the storm. Even so, there was a rugged beauty to the Whitsundays, something that can’t be manufactured. Seeing the Milky Way from pitch black darkness of Whitsunday Island was astonishing, and we even caught sight of a few meteorites.

If you want to snorkel, time your arrival at places like Blue Pearl Bay or Tongue Bay with a low tide as the tides vary by up to 3 meters (10 feet), putting the reefs out of clear sight.

If you get the chance to sail the Whitsundays, go for it.

10/10 from me.