The forecast was looking good for our trip to the Montebello Islands. Winds around 10-15 kn – downwind (booyah!) for the next few days. It’s around 110NM from Exmouth to the Montebellos, and with the kids, we thought that might have been a little too far, plus there were a few smaller islands between that we wished to explore. We set out at the civilised hour of 8am to check out the Murion Islands. Unfortunately, we left the run a little late, missed the high tide, and thus it was a little too shallow to get in behind the reef that would have made a good anchorage. We made a speedy decision (getting better at those!) to plough on to Serrurier (Long) Island – which ended up being a good one.

Dropped the pick on the west side in about 3m of sand (as per cruising guide) and had a lovely calm night at anchor, with barely a breath of wind to speak of. Thus – this was what we woke up to in the morning:

Made me wonder if we should get radar fitted… Luckily, we don’t experience too many fogs on this coast. We had our morning coffee, and did a bit of schoolwork until the weather looked a bit like this:

Much better.

Stefan did a spot of diving on the northwest side of the island – and got a nice tuskfish for tea. The wind picked up from the southwest around 3ish, so we pulled up the anchor a couple of hours later, and headed around to the east side of the island, which was a great spot out of the chop. We were getting ready to do a night passage to the Monte’s, so to have a civilised dinner of fish and chips in the calm was the order of the evening. We pulled up the anchor at about 9pm, and got underway to the Monte’s, with a full moon lighting the way, and an easy 5-6kn under headsail…