Feb 14, 2026: Cooktown, Australia

Today we went on a short river cruise up the Endeavour River at Cooktown, Australia. Our ship put down an anchor in the bay. It was about a 30 minute tender ride into Cooktown and then we walked a short distance to hop onto the little river boat. The Captain did a nice job with his talk as he included history, some local news and a bit of comedy. We got a bottle of cold water right as we boarded, then about half way thru the river cruise we were served cake and iced coffee or iced tea. It was delicious.

I wasn’t going to go but then Jennifer got on the 7am tour so I booked it too. Thank goodness we were out early as it is very hot and humid and it really would not have been much fun to be out later. When we returned from the river cruise it was already too hot for us so we went directly back to the nice cool, air conditioned ship.

It wasn’t intentional but this year we’ve visited a number of places Captain Cook sailed. Captain James Cook (1728–1779) was a renowned British Royal Navy captain, explorer, and cartographer. He is famous for charting New Zealand, mapping the Australian east coast, discovering the Hawaiian Islands, and being the first to cross the Antarctic Circle. He made 3 voyages each about 3 years long. Apparently he originally got along well with natives on his journeys but as he aged he treated them worse and worse and finally he was killed by natives in Hawaii.

A summary of the safety briefing- Captain said “The life vests are on the ceiling and you all know how to put them on. And you can certainly see the exit route(pointing to the open windows)
One main export- live spiny lobster. Divers go down and hunt for them, the boat has a air tank on it for the divers. It’s a young man’s job and they wear special gloves to protect their hands from the spines
The other export is live Coral Trout. The fishermen go out for days in these tiny boats and put in single lines to catch the fish. They put the live fish into tanks on a big boat. They are then taken to the town for export. The ‘ugly’ ones they kill and eat in town.
A big storm came in just as we were leaving- we heard later that over 7 inches fell in a 2 hours further down the coast
Dunes of almost pure silicon sand- another highly desirable local export