Border Island to Butterfly Bay
The top end of Hook Island is reputed to have the best displays of coral life in the whole Whitsundays. Unfortunately, much of this coral was devastated by Cyclone Debbie in 2017, and regrowth is occurring very slowly. Regardless, we've been looking forward to this part of the trip to see for ourselves what's here.
The sail today also gave us our first (and only) opportunity this leg to use the spinnaker. Conditions were possibly a little heavy to put the spinnaker up, at least for an inexperienced crew, but with winds not quite at 20 knots I thought it worth the effort. We had it up for close to an hour and it made short work of the distance to Hook.
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| Running under spinnaker towards the north east corner of Hook Island |
We got an up-close experience with a couple of whales - a mother and calf - in one of the bays off the north of Hook Island. Unfortunately we weren't fast enough with our cameras to get anything recorded.
Boats are no longer allowed to anchor in Butterfly Bay itself. Anchoring is allowed outside the bay, but in waters that are 12+ metres deep and not really ideal for us. Instead we picked up one of the moorings. This proved to be a mixed blessing. While secure, it ended up being a source of significant frustration through the night as the mooring buoy began banging itself along the hull. Being one of the outer moorings we also suffered from a bit of rolling.
We spent perhaps an hour snorkelling along the beach just near the boat. The coral was patchy and fish life minimal. [I've been back since, with better experiences when we were given advice on where to snorkel.]
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