The Other Woman

After leaving Lady Musgrave Island, we headed off to The other lady – Lady Elliot. Although not the best anchorage in the world, it got us 20nm closer to Hervey Bay, which we needed to do so we could make it the next day. AND it had a BAR!!! Something required to complete Kim’s island hopping experience.

The sail around the back of Lady Musgrave was spectacular – watching the waves crash across the reef and into the lagoon. It didn’t take us long to cover the 21nm to Lady Elliot and we were soon ready to anchor. Allan Lucas’ cruising guide is a bit out of date as you can no longer anchor in 7m of water as this is now a no anchor zone. We eventually found somewhere out a bit in 20m of water and down the anchor went. It kept going down and down as the anchor windlass completely gave up the ghost and dropped the whole 100m of chain. Pulling that up manually from 20m down was going to be fun.

Very safely anchored up, we headed for shore over reefs with colorful parrot fish feeding in the shallows. We had to walk to the other side of the island to find the resort (and the bar) through hundreds and hundreds of nesting birds, whizzing round our heads as they collected nesting material. It seemed that a leave was a highly valued piece of building material way out here.

Just before the resort we had to cross the airfield, which was a combination of grass and coral – it’s got to be the first airfield ever that I’ve seen with the sprinklers on being watered.

After calling in at reception, we made our way to one of the most scenic bars you could ever imagine. It looked out over the beach and the coral reef, which was beautifully colored by the setting sun. The resort itself looked wonderfully relaxed, a combination of divers, families and quite a few of the younger crowd.

And then there were the seabirds nesting everywhere. The resort had put out cones in places to stop people walking over nests that were right in the middle of a path. There were quite a few chicks around – some wandering around looking lost.

After having our drink and watching the sun go down, we had a quick walk along the beach to see the full moon come up and then back to our rather rolly anchorage for the night.