Tuesday 5th September 2017
It is Just another short hop today from
Thomas Island to Stingray Bay on Goldsmith Island. The wind is forecast to be N
to NE again today with very little breeze when we raised our anchor at just
before 8 am, to run with the incoming tide south to Goldsmith.
Once again Stingray Bay is on the Southern
side of Goldsmith and is supposed to be another idyllic unspoiled anchorage. We
were there by 9.30am, and only 2 other boats are anchored well out from shore
in what is a large bay.
This USA Boat we have seen at a number of anchorages recently
The wind is blowing at around 10 knots from
the NW and the wind waves on the bay are such that we delay our dinghy ride
into the beach until it either settles or goes a bit further North. Within an
hour of arrival, conditions are better, so we motored into shore (which is
quite a long way).
We travelled over a very large area of reef
before entering a crystal clear and quite deep area well out from the shore. It
was a sandy bottom all of the way in. By now the tide had started receding, so
no need to pull the dinghy up the beach. We had a good look around on what are
effectively 2 beaches separated by a rugged rocky outcrop, so we motored around
to the other one after our beach walk on the first.
The few specks in the distance are our boats at anchor
The clarity of the water is amazing as we look out from the beach towards our yachts and Brampton Island in the background
On the shore the wind is not noticeable,
and we saw more schools of bait fish close in to the shore. We could also hear
voices coming from somewhere and when we looked up to the top of the peak in
the middle of the island we could see bushwalkers wandering around the ridge.
They must have come from the Northern side.
Bushwalkers coming over the ridge
Beautiful, Sandy Beach
After our two beach visits, we motored back
out over the reef and cut the engine and drifted for a while to see what we
could see. It is high tide, and the tides here are up to 4m so the reef has a
fair cover of water. We disturbed two turtles, but couldn’t get them to surface
for the camera.
There's a turtle there somewhere
The wind is now blowing 10-15 knots and we
are drifting along towards our boat at a reasonable pace. Once we passed over
the reef we motored the rest of the way. The wind is getting pretty gusty, and
whilst we have flat water here, the wind whistles through the valleys with
ease.
Hoping that it would drop out at low tide,
we planned to go back out for a drift over the reef with less water under us.
Unfortunately, if anything the wind strengthened, so we didn’t bother.
We spent the afternoon on the boat looking
out at todays view of Brampton Island tour South.
The view of Brampton Island from the cockpit isn't too hard to tyake
Tomorrows forecast is allover the place,
but it looks like it will go SE by midday, so a different type of anchorage
will be in order. Brampton is looking to be a good candidate if the forecast
holds.
It looks like our run of light and
predictable winds may be over for the time being.
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