Start Loc: The Stepping Stones, Bait Reef (19o 48.69'S, 149o 03.85'E)
Narrative: We spent all of yesterday at Bait Reef. The plan was to snorkel in the morning and then ride the flood tide back south to Hook Island, but the wind was forecast to drop off and we were considering staying a bit longer. Then Lucey Blue came in and joined us at about 8:00am as the second boat. They are the only other cruising family we have encountered on our travels, so we decided we would stay a bit longer and take the opportunity to swap stories and advice. We snorkelled around the stepping stones again, and after lunch moved to another mooring to look at a different part of the reef. Apart from one commercial vessel with a load of tourists we saw no additional boats, and we had no qualms well exceeding the 2 hour time limit that applies to public moorings from 7:00am to 5:00pm. We ran the engine for 48 minutes.
With it being a weekend and the forecast being for calm winds, we expected more boats to arrive. We had another good snorkel and fed the fish in the morning. A couple of commercial vessels arrived, end then a couple of private boats. We went across to Lucey Blue, and then back to Seasprint for lunch. We dropped the mooring at 2:10pm, a little after low tide, motored back outside the reef, and set sail on a course of magnetic south. The winds were from the SE, consistently between 14-18kts. We sailed close hauled with two reefs in the main but full head sail, at a steady 5-6kts. The tidal assistance was initially only about 0.2kts, but as we got further into the flood tide increased to 2kts. I was reminded of the saying that only racers and fools sail into wind, but south is where we wanted to go. We were tracking to arrive at the north side of Hook Island at around 5:00pm. There are several suitable anchorages along the north side and we headed for Maureen’s Cove, roughly in the centre. The bays further east become smaller and more exposed, even in south easterlies. We preferred to pick up a mooring buoy. Each of the bays has a fringing reef which you can’t anchor over or inside to protect the coral, so you have to anchor outside the reef protection buoys. That generally has you anchoring in about 15m of water, which means that to maintain a decent chain to depth ratio we are letting out 55m of our 60m of chain. Maureen’s Cove is a bit shallower so you can anchor in 8-10m of water. Anyway, there were no moorings left in Maureen’s Cove (for our size boat) so we quickly checked Butterfly Bay and were lucky to pick up the last one. We were moored by 5:20pm.
End Loc: Butterfly Bay, Hook Island (20o 04.35'S, 148o 55.71'E)
Distance run: 18nm (cumulative: 1038nm)
Engine hours: 0 hr, 54 min (cumulative: 120 hr 33 min)