KINDNESS LETS
THE Category 4 cyclone that battered the Whitsunday coast from Monday afternoon to late Tuesday night proved the milk of human kindness can never be underestimated.
Barely had a feeble sun poked its way through the post- Debbie dawn yesterday morning than the good Samaritans were out with their chainsaws, dealing with the trail of destruction left by Cyclone Debbie.
The 30- hour cyclone must surely go down as one of the most long- lasting in North Queensland’s history. It has left behind wreckage that will take months, if not years to heal.
At Shute Harbour boats lie under the water with only their masts showing, while others are stacked up on beaches as if thrown there by a tidal wave. Some are bellyup out in the bay.
The scenes at Airlie Beach’s Abell Point Marina, where boats are damaged, sunk and beached, was bad enough, but as one mariner said yesterday morning, “you wait ’ til you see Shute Harbour. It’s carnage there.”
He was right. In normal times there are few prettier sights than the bay at Shute Harbour.
Its turquoise waters, fringed by mangrove and back- dropped by rainforestcovered mountains, offer a spectacular introduction to the Whitsundays to the hundreds of thousands of tourists who each year use it as a jumping- off point to the islands, but not this week.
Yesterday the churned- up water was the graveyard of more than 20 yachts. At one point, 12 yachts in a row can be counted on their sides on the beach.
Others have been blown deep into the mangroves.
In scenes reminiscent of the yachting battleground that was the Port Hinchinbrook marina after Cyclone Yasi in 2011, yachts at Shute Harbour lie, stern to bow, like giant carcasses along the beaches and the mangrove foreshore.
In one case the twin masts of a stranded yacht can be seen protruding from the mangroves at the western end of the normally pictur- esque bay. They are scenes straight out of some sort of maritime apocalypse.
A former reef pontoon being transformed into a luxurious ablutions block at a cost of around $ 1.6 million broke its mooring and was adrift in the bay during the cyclone.
Yesterday morning could be seen beached it in among mangroves on the foreshore. The pontoon, when completed, was to be moored at the Abell Point Marina as part of a strategy to draw some of the world’s super yachts to Airlie Beach.
The long, drawn- out battle between Cyclone Debbie and the man- made environment is over and now the losses are being counted.
It wasn’t just man’s built environment that copped a brutal caning. Just like the rainforests from Cardwell to Babinda after Cyclones Larry and Yasi, the trees on the mountains here stand broken and stripped bare.
Cyclone Debbie continued to pound the Airlie Beach area up until about 10pm Tuesday. Some resi-