Turtles nesting in Lady Musgrave

Labels: 60 - Turtles nesting in Lady Musgrave

Turtles nesting in Lady Musgrave

26/11/2019 - We are so lucky to have a good weather window to go to the very Southern part of the Great Barrier Reef. Well 'good' weather window means in this case, no wind 😏 And we decide to go from Bundaberg to Pancake creek first, so we can catch have a better angle to Lady Musgrave tomorrow. Perfect arrival just at dawn! A bit tricky around the corner and I have my mum a bit on edge and carefully on watch for those rocks.

Small entrance and I'm trying to distinguish different depths but it's a river mouth, so you can't see anything really. Lucky we have very good charts!

27/11/2019 Mooring in rivers really isn't our thing. You swing around with the tides and often have the current against the wind, which makes it very uncomfortable (especially on bad buoys). We let go of our mooring during the night and set anchor, which was a little better, but still yèèkies. So we won't discover more of Pancake creek (which looks lovely otherwise), but go straight to Lady Musgrave 😎

This seems a good patch of fish, but we're just to far and sailing too nicely to go around for one 😏

And yess, we see land!

Along a very busy shipping lane!

The reef that surrounds this tiny island is huge!

And the entrance very very small. Especially since we 'forgot' to time the best moment to enter and so the current against was huge! Engines on full trottle and we entered doing just 1 knot of speed!

OEF we're inside the atoll!

There's not much shelter from this island, but we have a couple of fair winds ahead of us.

And already we have a turtle greeting us!

Step 1: finally we can get in the water again!!!

Grandmama and smallest granddaughter 😍

The water is not so clear due to the strong winds of the last few weeks, but still enough to discover the beautiful corals!

Look even Nemo is here!

28/11/2019 Step 2: chill on LouiseAnna and a short exploration of the island.

We're following turtle tracks everywhere!

29/11/2019 We decided, we needed to explore the island more profoundly and see if we couldn't find any turtles nesting. But besides tracks we find absolutely no turtles! Birds enough though! The closer you get to the treeline, the more they descend to attack! They do not like visitors!

Which is normal as there's at least one species that have their nests on the beach and the eggs are hatching!

We do not venture further inside the island, too many nests above our heads! 😏

It's very pretty to go around. See the many turtle tracks from last night?!

There's one! Looks like she got into the water not long ago!

View over Lady Elliot.

Anna's showing in which way the turtle went, we're looking for a track that only goes up 😎😌

Is she waiting to come on land?

Beautiful colours!

The ranger told us the best time to see the turtles would be before dusk. So we're off to some more swimming and spearhunting 😍

Geoffrey and I decide to do a photo contest Sony versus Gopro. These are the best 😎

Many fish circling around our boat!

And after a beautiful sunset ...

... and very short night, we head back on land. Just at the same time with the X-yacht and only other boat in this atoll. Shhhhhhhtttt, we're all very quiet (or still sleepy). I'm excited!!!

And just as we turn around the very first corner! LOOOOOOOKKKKK. There's a turtle still finishing up her nest! She seems exhausted and my fingers twitch to help her, but we have to leave her alone ... 😌😍

Just checking on her from the sidelines!

And then we notice just a bit lower a few more ladies trying to get to the water. They hardly move and we're afraid some have died, but they're just really tired!