Paddle power ... South Molle Island is the first stop on the Ngaro Sea Trail.
Andrew Bain battles choppy seas and climbs peaks on a cultural trail through the Whitsunday Passage.
In the Whitsunday Passage, the ocean has been stirred into a water fight. Two-metre swells roll between the islands and 25-knot winds hit us head-on. We reel about like driftwood, waves breaking over and through us. It is the roughest "walk" of my life.
I'm in the Whitsundays to explore the Ngaro Sea Trail, one of the newest of Queensland's so-called Great Walks. Most of this one is spent on the sea - sailing or kayaking between South Molle, Whitsunday and Hook islands and their various walking tracks.
We have come with kayaks and a five-day plan to loop out from Shute Harbour around Whitsunday Island, stopping to hike the Ngaro's five walking tracks as we go. But even as we begin, it's clear that the sea more than the trail will be our ultimate guide.
Every time I've been here [Shute Harbour] before, it's been like glass," says one of my paddling partners, Danny. But today it's more akin to shattered glass, with waves climbing over each other and the wind almost wrenching the paddle from my hands.
Our first night's goal, Henning Island, adjacent to Hamilton Island, is straight ahead but it will mean paddling 15 kilometres direct into this wind. We change plans almost before we've started. At the entrance to the harbour, we make the decision to veer slightly north, heading direct across the Whitsunday Passage to protected Cid Harbour, on the west coast of Whitsunday Island. But even this is fanciful.
At the southern tip of South Molle Island, less than five kilometres out from Shute Harbour, the tide runs fast against us. We stroke hard but we are going nowhere, paddling on the spot, as if on gymnasium rowing machines. Our day has barely begun and already we give it up, wind-blown and wind-defeated. We turn with the wind and cruise along South Molle's shores, making camp in suitably named Paddle Bay, beside the spit that joins South Molle to Mid Molle Island. We will see out the afternoon in the most fitting of Ngaro Sea Trail styles: bushwalking.
The Ngaro Sea Trail has no single defined route on South Molle Island. Instead, it's a web of tracks that radiate out from Paddle Bay to various island features: the highest peak, Mount Jeffreys; Balancing Rock, a huge boulder with more purchase than its name suggests; or a nine-kilometre island crossing to Sandy Bay.
Our goal is the northern summit of Spion Kop, rising sharply out of the ocean. The track wraps around the island resort and across grassy slopes to the rocky peak with its view over much of the Whitsunday Islands. Below us, the Whitsunday Passage is white-capped and wild. I'm glad to be on land, even if it's only delaying the inevitable.
The next morning we begin early in hope of beating the wind out of bed. For 90 minutes we grind across the passage, the wind still blowing (though with less fury), our kayaks rising and falling with the swell - one moment I might be talking to one of my kayaking partners beside me, the next he is two metres above me, then two metres below.
It's disorienting and difficult but once we reach Cid Island, it transforms into a different day. Sheltered here from the wind, we float, snack and drift across to Whitsunday Island, cruising between the turtles that pop up regularly and the dozens of yachts moored in Cid Harbour to escape the wind and waves.
We have given up hope of making it to the ocean side of Whitsunday Island - and the famed Whitehaven Beach - but, in this pocket of tropical calm, it doesn't seem to matter.
From Cid Harbour begins the second of our Ngaro Sea Trail's hikes, climbing out from Sawmill Beach beneath the few hoop pines that eluded the island's early loggers (and the destructive force of Cyclone Ului in March), as it ascends to the 437-metre summit of Whitsunday Peak.
The view is normally expansive - back to South Molle Island and the mainland - though on this day, cloud blows across the summit, so we can barely see the water below.
It has been our plan to paddle to the north of Whitsunday Island in the afternoon but by the time we dawdle through lunch back on Sawmill Beach it's 3pm. Instead, we paddle only the few hundred metres into the campsite on adjoining Dugong Beach. Slow becomes slower - we're two days into our journey and already one day behind schedule. The ocean is winning.
It's not until the middle of the next morning that we arrive at Whitsunday Island's northern end, where from Cairn Beach we set out on the most spectacular of the Ngaro Sea Trail's walking tracks. The wind has been at our backs through the morning, propelling us north along the island's coast, which is a tangle of forest and eroded rock.
The climb to Whitsunday Cairn is shorter (two kilometres) and steeper than the Whitsunday Peak trail, emerging on to a lichen-coated rock slab beneath the pock-marked rock tower known as Whitsunday Cairn, a feature visible across much of the island group. The view is also better, out across the most westerly of the Whitsunday Islands and back over Hook Island to the Molle islands. Arriving at the rock still wet from the kayaks, we are blow-dried by wind in minutes.
Back in the water, the flooding tide has created a virtual white-water course through the centre of Hook Passage. Through it, we rock and roll to Hook Island and towards our final objective: the walking track that's most integral to the Ngaro Sea Trail.
Inside Hook Island's Nara Inlet, which is lined with weathered, scoured rock looking as fragile as eggshells, we paddle against a secondary tide: the yachts exiting from one of the Whitsundays' most popular moorings. The boulders that line the inlet are scrawled in the painted graffiti of past visitors - a tradition now mercifully abandoned - though it's not the art we've come to see.
Towards the head of the inlet is the Ngaro Cultural Site, a rock shelter dotted with paintings from the Ngaro, the seafaring Aboriginal people who lived in the Whitsundays, paddling between the islands in a precursor to modern Ngaro Sea Trail visitors. Some of the paintings in the shelter have been dated to 2350 years ago, though evidence of Ngaro people at a nearby unpainted shelter dates back 9000 years, making it one of the oldest known Aboriginal sites on the east coast.
From the shelter, we paddle slowly back to our camp on Curlew Beach, where, suitably, a pair of eponymous birds screeches through the night. As we set about packing our kayaks for the return crossing of the Whitsunday Passage, two humpback whales cruise past. We paddle out behind them, a sea eagle flying overhead and a large ray gliding beneath my kayak. Ahead of us, the whales play, fins splashing, tails flashing, geysers of water spraying skyward.
The wind is still howling, the swell is still rolling and soon we will be lashed by rain and waves - we can see the grey menace coming - but right now I don't care.
Andrew Bain travelled courtesy of Tourism Queensland.
FAST FACTS
Getting there
Jetstar flies to Hamilton Island, where you catch a ferry to Airlie Beach. From Melbourne it is $216, and from Sydney, $206 (including the ferry). Virgin Blue charges $200 from Melbourne and $189 from Sydney, flying via Brisbane.
Paddling there
Hire kayaks from Salty Dog at Shute Harbour; a single kayak costs $50 a day for trips of four days or more. See saltydog.com.au.
For details of the Ngaro Sea Trail, see derm.qld.gov.au.
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