Day 3 in Australia

The towns of Agnes Water and 1770 are quite small and it was a lot easier finding the wharf in the morning that it was finding the room the night before. From what I could tell the wharf was the town of 1770. We booked a trip on the Spirit of 1770 to take us to Lady Musgrave Island. You can see the trip in the GPS track below.



Lady Musgrave Island is a Coral Cay that is surrounded by a coral reef with a narrow passage for boats to get into the lagoon. It is made up entirely of dead coral so the beach is not very nice to walk on without shoes. We were taken to the island first to wander around or snorkel. We did a bit of both.

There are too many sea cucumbers to count on the bottom. You have to be careful where you step getting in and out of the water if you don't want to step on one. There are also large clams like this one, some over a foot in diameter.

While snorkelling from the island we swam over this huge ray. We never really got a good answer as to what variety of stingray this was, but we know it was huge. This picture was taken from quite a distance and we estimate the length from head to tail to be about 10 feet.

After lunch back at the boat we went snorkeling from the boat a bit further from the island. The boat was in a deeper channel, but the water over the reef was only a few feet deep. We saw a few turtles like the one above in the deeper areas. The water outside the lagoon was quite rough so the visibility was not very good. Unfortunately this means that the pictures aren't very good.

On our way back to the boat this fella swam by.and stopped for a cleaning. You can tell from the tip of his dorsal fin that he is a white tipped reef shark. He was at least 6 feet long. The currents pushed us right over him but the water was deep enough that he didn't notice us and the pictures didn't come out very well. Matthew likes to tell everyone that he went swiming with sharks.