We left early morning on 25th in the dark, to ensure we arrived off Lady Musgrave Island with sufficient light to see the bommies in the lagoon and as we pass through the entrance. The ETA was 3pm with a 6am start. Seas were a pleasant 1m and we had a great calm trip. As we left the coast behind, all land faded away yet we still couldn't see the island. For several hours we travelled North East towards the island but out of sight of all land, a first so far on the trip.
With a call of "land ho!", actually it was a very excited Nicholas yelling, "hey, there it is!' we saw the outline of the island materialize on the horizon and slowly it crept closer.
As we approached within approx. 5 nautical miles, Daddy stopped the boat, dropped the sail and yelled out that he had seen a sea snake. We retraced out steps and the curious creature came right alongside the yacht. It was a yellow colour with slightly darker yellow/grey circles over the length of its' body. It then dived down out of sight after affording us a few pictures.
We returned to our original course and as we arrived about 500m off the Western point, the call of "Dolphins" was heard and everyone rushed back on deck to watch a pod of dolphins jump and weave around the yacht. They didn't stay long, and we continued around the island passing from the Western and then Northern side on our way to the entrance which is barely 12m wide with strong currents (as the tide was on the way out) near the North East Cnr. Everyone was on deck with polaroid sunglasses on looking for the channel and shallow bommies. With good directions and a lot of pointing, we navigated the channel and crossed the beautiful lagoon heading West back towards the island.
We anchored at about 3.30pm about 800m from the island and 300m from the edge of the reef in 6.5m of water (at low tide). For company we had about 12 other vessels, 2 large commercial cats with day trippers, who all left for the mainland almost as soon as we anchored, and the rest small yachts and cats like ourselves.
We couldn't wait any longer, a quick change of clothes and we were all ready for our swim and snorkel. Tender launched, and we motored over to the nearest small horseshoe bay on the edge of the reef (about 100m across from one side of the horseshoe to the other) with a small coral drop off to a sandy bottom with depth ranging from 3m to about 6m. The water was crystal clear and we could see all the way through the clear blue tinged water to the bottom.
Before we had even anchored the tender, a small turtle popped its' head up for a curious look about 5m away.
We dived in and ... wow, was it awesome! Fish, fish, everywhere. And the turtle????? well they were a regular occurrence and we saw 3 turtles on that first afternoon alone. We saw, many fish, including angel fish, coral trout, spotted cod, long thin gar fish (at least they looked like them), and lots and lots of others.
With the sun disappearing, we headed quickly over towards the island for a quick look, but darkness fell, and after realizing the island has only a very small channel, and the water was still shallow, we abandoned the attempt that night and headed back to the yacht; we were very satisfied with the efforts and the kids couldn't stop talking about all the different things we had seen.
A quick dinner, a movie and off to bed.