Discovering "Kimisti" after 40 years

In the late 70's when I was a kid, we were sailing around the Whitsunday Islands on our family yacht "Kimisti" which was named after myself and my sister Cristi.

Here I am sitting up near the mast on Kimisti, all those years ago. 

I also love this old photo of my sister Cristi and I and our little sailing dog Cindy.

At the time there were very few yachts cruising around the islands, but most of them painted their yacht name on the rocks in Nara Inlet.  There are yacht names painted everywhere in this anchorage, however nowadays of course this is illegal.

Here are the photos from mum & dad's photo album.

From this photo you can see how many other yacht names were painted there, and this is only one little section of rocks.... and actually dad painted it quite small compared with the others!

Its pretty bad now when you think of it from the viewpoint of someone who loves protecting nature.... but back then it was just another crazy thing my dad did.

 

So just last September it was my first time back to the Whitsundays in over 40 years.  It was so awesome for me to take my own kids sailing there too. 

Our first anchorage of the trip was Nara Inlet, and of course we had to go looking for "Kimisti" on the rocks...

Here is another photo from my parents album taken high up on the hill, overlooking the whole inlet.  There were only 2 yachts there in this photo.

I tried to recreate this photo a little, but of course, nowadays its a protected national park with dedicated hiking tracks, so we didn't venture up the top of the mountain like we did back then.  This time around there were about 20 yachts anchored there for the night.

So it took a while of slowly motoring the dinghy around the shoreline, but we were super excited to find it the next day.... My old dad was very impressed to hear that it is still there!

Here is the video we shot there....

Thank goodness we are all a little more environmentally switched on now!!

I sure hope I don't get hate mail !

One love x