THURSDAY 15 AUGUST     FORREST BEACH

I took Couey for another beach walk in the morning. John, who was up relatively early, came too, so dog was much happier.

John went to Macknade bowls. They were having a “Pink” fund raiser day, so he borrowed my pink T shirt to wear. It did not look as big on him as I had expected, but he wasn’t very happy when I commented to that effect. He did not enjoy the day; said that the various novelty aspects that the women had thought up “ruined the bowls”. He got back about 6.15pm.

My shoulder reconstruction had ruled me out of playing bowls. There is a silver lining in most things.

During the afternoon I tried to download books to my e-reader, from my library’s free borrowing site. No success. I wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong. It was all still quite unfamiliar and I couldn’t remember how I fluked it, the first time. The manual, which itself was a book on the reader, was really hard to navigate around, and so not much help. I found it all very frustrating. I do not cope well when machines refuse to co-operate with me.

Once again, we went to tea at the hotel. Thursdays were the $10 steak and schnitzel meal deal nights, and we hadn’t tried that, to date. My pepper steak was alright – a bit bland, and I wasn’t sure what cut it was, but it was huge and I couldn’t eat it all. John liked his schnitzel, and finished off my steak. We’d done that now, and probably wouldn’t repeat it.

There was a big party group in for tea at the hotel, celebrating someone’s birthday. They do a surprisingly large meals trade, at this hotel. For this party, there were tables set out on the lawn in front of the outdoor terrace, as well as some on the terrace itself, though much of that area was taken up with the tables of we ordinary diners. The terrace was a most pleasant place to be, especially when there was some cloud over the islands, which reflected the sunset behind us. One needed to apply heaps of aerogard, though. The swampy areas nearby guaranteed lots of mosquitoes and midges, once the sun was going down, as well as sometimes earlier.

What we had noticed, as a major difference from our last visit in 2009, was that there was no longer the regular arrival of “tinny” boats at the beach by the hotel, carrying people from Palm Island come to buy alcohol to take back to the islands. We had been surprised by this trade at the time, believing that the islands were “dry”. There was now a prominently displayed notice in the bottle shop stating that there are to be no alcohol sales to Palm Islanders. I had noticed, in a recent Sunday Brisbane newspaper, an item about the trial in Townsville of the mayor of Palm Island, on charges relating to an attempt to take alcohol from Forrest Beach to Palm Island, back last January. In 2009 we had commented to each other how lucrative the boat trade appeared to be for the hotel.