Finding myself awake in wee hours, I made another one of my less than successful attempts at night sky photography. That’s a tough bet at best from a floating boat, but I continue to try. It’s just too daunting a task for me to tote my camera and tripod ashore at oh-dark-thirty in the morning. I mention this only as a segue into another experience, one that cannot be recorded on my camera. It was somewhere around 3 am and I had just turned my attention from upwards to downwards at the stars’ shimmering reflection in the glassy surface of the bay.

At first I didn’t see that the reflected skyline was, in fact, not motionless. The hair stood up on the back of my neck as it morphed into a dim iridescent green swirl a good twenty feet across. Discounting it as too strong to be a tidal eddy from the outflow of Chatterbox Falls a hundred yards distant, my apprehension turned to wonder as I decided it was the myriad small wakes of a zillion tiny fish schooling below. Its diameter pulsed slightly as the mass moved away toward the docks, came back again, and finally disappeared into the dark beyond my sight. Amazing. Sky photos were pointless after that and I returned to the warmth of my bunk.

Though I debated moving to stern-tie in some other beautiful nook for an additional day, I decided to continue my trek to the enthralling environs of Desolation Sound on Tuesday. The 9:30 am slack would suit a plan to anchor at the Harmony Islands on Hotham Sound in the late afternoon or early evening in the southern reaches of Jervis Inlet.



Though it wasn’t a bad day, a clingy haze and a fish die-off that I’d missed on my trip up two days before made me glad for the lovely day I’d had headed north. I sailed for a little while, but in the end the wind is always channeled only up or down Jervis’ narrow gap. It didn’t oblige in strength or the direction I needed to go for long, so I motored most of the way.



The Harmony Islands are a pretty little spot, but tight. Luckily there were only a couple of other boats there, so I had free reign to practice my stern-to mooring skills without too many onlookers to be entertained by my amateurism. After quite a while of feeling my way around by depth sounder, I finally found a spot where I could drop my anchor in only about 40 feet of water, yet back up to about 50 feet of shore to run my stern line. That left me in about 50 feet of water, but broadside to a rock face less than ten yards off my port side. Success was mine, though I was still nervous. The fact that I could hear the anchor chain grind across the rocks 50 feet beneath me as Mabrouka settled in against the shifting tide didn’t help much.