Turtle Bay
29 March 2015 | East Wallabi Island
I am now on a mooring in Turtle Bay in the most northern group of the Abrolhos Islands (Wallabi Group), I ended up this far north by accident.
After a few pleasant days in the southern group I headed to the central Easter Group and anchored off Morely Island in about 10 meters of water. I spent two days there but this group has few really safe anchorages and being the weekend all the moorings (Only a few in this group with some missing and others in disrepair) were taken. Many boats had troubles on the Friday night so I dived on the anchor on Saturday morning and all was ok. At 10pm (why always late at night!!) I started dragging anchor. It was a dark night and the breeze was up so I decided the best option was to get out of that group and sailed slowly (with very little sail up) North with the breeze to the Wallabi Group. It would have been foolish to try and re anchor as you could not see where the reef started in such darkness.
Turtle Bay offers superb protection from the west through to East. It is also good sand for anchoring, I arrived at 5am and thankfully there was a mooring spare with another yacht just heading off back to Geralton. Incidentally that yacht ran onto a reef 30 minutes later but was successfully pulled off.
One of my concerns during the night sail here was not re enacting the Batavia disaster as I was going to pass past Morning Reef at the same time they did back in 1629, fortunately I do not have many people on board to create a mutiny.
I was looking at additional time at the Abrolhos but with Easter coming there will be an influx from Geralton so I am now considering an early jump to Shark Bay as an option. Photo is Turtle Bay.