The sail from Low Isles wasn’t. We motored the whole way and headed up the channel late in the afternoon, a hopeless time of day to spot coral. After close examination of the chart it was more of a straight line approach if we bypassed the southern end entry and continued north, then came back down to the island. We still had coral both sides. All we had to do was get the gap right.
Sometimes the job is made easier if another boat is already anchored, but there wasn’t a single boat in sight. For once we had the place to ourselves. I was driving and eyeballing landmarks and Sandy was on coral watch with the binoculars when she suddenly spotted two blue cone shaped mooring buoys.
These are put down by Marine Parks Management to protect coral and unlike many other courtesy moorings, these are heavy duty. We’ve used them a few times and they have tags giving maximum boat size, usually 20 metres. At 18 we are well within range.
With our anchoring problem nicely taken care of all we needed to do was get there. I think we’ve picked up more experience than we realize and with all 13 senses finely tuned, that’s Sandy and my 5 each, and then 6th sense x 2, and the depth sounder, we picked our way to the mooring without incident.
The island is a beautiful, typical coral cay with enough trees to hide a few camp sites, all empty and two large flocks of egrets in the branches enjoying the last of the day. We dropped the dinghy and carefully motored ashore. The water was crystal clear and the coral was varied and colourful. We could see heaps of fish and Sandy spotted 2 small sharks, at least a couple of feet long.
We strolled around most of the island and Sandy took a magnificent sunset shot of Wind Wanderer with the sun golden on the water. One of the best ever.
On the other side of the island we found a white porcelain bottle that had been washed up. It had marine shell life attached to it so it had at least been in the water long enough for that. It also had some blue etching on it so we carefully cleaned it and could make out some of the image was Oriental. Ming dynasty for sure! We slowly twisted off the top, childhood images of genies escaping flashing through our minds. We could get a bigger boat out of this, with uniformed crew!
The top screwed off quite easily, thanks to the plastic insert in bottle and lid and the smell of fermented something, probably saki left little doubt that if there was a genie inside he certainly wouldn’t have been in any condition to grant wishes. Wind Wanderer will be home for some time yet.
We kept the bottle anyway, just like we did the thin stone tool we found on Lady Musgrave Island. At least that could be very old and was possibly used as a fish scaler.
The evening was still and as the stars started appearing we sat out on the back deck sipping sundowners and wondering why more days couldn’t be this perfect.
Until next time...