It’s not the place to be in wind but it’s almost glass out so we took the risk and got that little bit closer to Mackay. Tomorrow’s predicted to be a total glass out, so stopping here instead of Curlew Island and it cuts off a couple of motoring hours tomorrow.

The Swains was beautiful but we yearn for sand between our toes. Time to head to the Percy’s and experience a must do by visiting the Percy Island Yacht Club.

I’ll admit it, we’ve been nervous about getting the Gennaker up and flying, but today we did it. What a difference it made. In light winds we would normally have all three sails out and would be constantly tweaking the sails but we pulled up our socks and got the asymmetrical out. It was set and forget once we had trimmed the lines and such a beautiful sail. 8 knots of wind doing a relaxing 4.5 - 5 knots

Light down wind sailing. We tried wing on wing with the two headsails. Apparent wind was between 7-10 knots so we took our time and enjoyed the rolly sail. We really need to learn how to use our Gennaker sail. One day we will.

On the move to our next reef. But we went trolling with our lures to see what was on the bite and got our first Spanish mac. 2 were pulled into the boat pretty quickly and then we just thought we would find some whales before setting off to the next anchorage. Several pods were spotted and we kept our distance as best we could. It was a motor day but we did get the sails out once we had done our sight seeing.

This was a big one for me. My first overnight sail and roughly a 100 nm trip out to paradise. This really is paradise and I don’t use the word lightly. It’s what I imagine Minerva Reef to be like but smaller with a lot more atolls and reefs to explore. At high tide you look around and see nothing but the big blue, at low tide you see the fringes of the reef. 🪸 We day hop from one to another, amazed at the clarity and beauty. You may come here for fishing and fishing is serious off its head. Or you may like to dive and snorkel, there’s that here too. One day out here and we are at out quota so they are all catch and releases now. But the fishing has been our highlight.

We left North Keppel to head over to Great Keppel Island once again. It was a shit show with 2.5 metre waves and 20 knots on the nose. We were being thrown side to side, up and down . Thank god it was only a short trip. Def my worst to date.

Once we had re provisioned at Emu Park we set sail for North Keppel. Up went the sails and it was possibly our fastest most comfortable sail to date. The sunset over the land and it was just perfect.