Great Keppel Island is great! (AKA...... an adventure playground for kids)

We decided to leave Pancake Creek with the strong southeasterly trade wind that had settled in over this part of the Qld coast for the last 4-5 days. Its a typical winter wind where a big high pressure system sits over NSW directing a fresh to strong SE wind of about 20-25knots over the Queensland coast north of Brisbane. This seemed to be a great excuse to go north. So we reefed down all our sails and went for it. We wanted to see the Great Keppel island that mum and dad had heard about so much during their childhood and adolescence. There used to be TV ads all the time for holidays in the "Keppel Isles" so we wanted to see what was left.

The sail across Keppel Bay was fantastic, quite fast and rough, but we all hunkered down and did our bit to hang on and be safe. We got in to Great Keppel at about 730pm, very tired and promptly fell into our bunks for a well earned rest. We woke to the great sight of wide, clean, sandy beaches and a quite steep and well wooded island to explore. in Pancake Creek, we had made friends with a group of people on a boat from Brisbane who had just been to Keppel and they raved about the walks there (although Pete did say they were "challenging"). We decided on the lighthouse walk (mum and dad are lighthouse nuts!), a round trip of about 11.6km.

As we started we found that many of the track markers had been beautifully laid out on engraved and painted rocks by the local residents, the Svendsons. It was a real treat to see the time, effort and work that they had put into making our trekking so much fun. Thank you, Svendson family! We weren't really very well prepared for this walk, light shoes, not much water, dry rocky and steep terrain to negotiate.








It soon became very clear to us that this track has a special significance.

We came across this...

Robbie Poate was killed in Afghanistan in 2012. He used to hang out in Great Keppel. His family have set out a wonderful track through the forest here to honour Robbies life. Robbies track is peppered with shells, bits of coral and quirky rest areas.

We found that at every step we took we were somehow reminded of Robbies life here and the incredible loss that his family must be enduring at this moment. The photos we took along the track hopefully will give you as sense of what we felt and experienced. We would like to thank the Poate family for sharing their loss with us at this time. We truly feel privileged to have traversed this path.

We eventually made our way to the lighthouse, or as Stella said... "we walked all this way to see this!!!?"



The amazing thing we did see was a large population of feral goats. Not sure about the history of these guys but maybe they were set up as a source of meat for shipwrecked sailors at some stage?
This part of the island was quite dry and rocky (maybe due to goats over-grazing??) and by this stage we were down to our last 250ml of water, and it was hot!

We finally made it back to the beach and discovered another part of the playground!