Early morning and after an overnight sail just two miles left to write an update for the blog before we arrive at the edge of our next reef. We have just witnessed a beautiful sunrise on the way to Royal Charlotte. Eric was busy filming on the foredeck, Kevin took the helm and Rachel got out her still camera for some special shots. On the land you rarely see a sunrise like this aside from the fact that most people are still sound asleep around this time of day. But not on board ALK where there is activity around the clock!
Yesterday we made 5 dives around Louisa in spite of the rain, before we left for an overnight sail to Royal Charlotte. My last dive with Kevin was in quite spectacular scenery. From the reef top a steep wall, indented with deep gullies and caves went down to 40/50m.
Kevin from the cave
Three giant trevallies swimming in formation came to welcome us to the deep before Kevin and I turned to the reef side to get some good wide angle shots. Meanwhile Eric kept track of us in the dinghy above. Louisa does not have a lagoon and the reef top is all hard and some soft corals. ALK was moored on the other side and three hours before low tide we had just enough water to get across the reef top with the dinghy. At low tide the entire reef is exposed, a very strange sight when most of the time there is only the sea around us! Where did this island suddenly come from?
Back from our dive it was time to pick up our mooring before darkness fell and Kevin went down with the last bar of air left in his tank with Eric assisting from the dinghy and Rachel and me on board to get line and chain on deck. When the deck was cleared we motored away from the reef and slowly got underway to Royal Charlotte. The compressor was started to fill the diving bottles and only then we finally had time for a beer! Meanwhile Rachel had prepared a wholesome fried rice which went down rapidly!
The day before there was frentic fishing activity on board ALK after the diving. Our fresh meats are finished so now we have to catch our own protein. When we brought up a small bright red soldierfish we had good bait to catch some serious fish. Kevin soon caught a good sized mangrove snapper and then the frenzy started...The next time we saw Kevin pulling the line up, it was something heavy. The line was cutting into his hands but he had no time to put on gloves! After a while he finally pulled his catch to the surface and it turned out to be a white tip reef shark of about one meter. We all felt bad about hooking a shark and Eric and I jumped in the dinghy to pull our baby into the dinghy so we could undo the hook and release her. We did not quite know how we were going to tackle that job but immediate action was required. However as we scrambled for some gloves the problem solved itself when the shark managed to rid himself of our line. We felt a little disappointed at not having the chance to show our bravery but on the other side we were glad the problem was solved!
Next it was Rachel's turn at the hand line and she soon landed another big mangrove snapper. The size scared her more than a bit and she needed assistance from the guys to get the fish on deck. But it did not scare her enough to put new bait on the hook and bring up a squirrelfish 15 min later! That was enough action for the evening as we had plenty of fish for the next day!
No comments:
Post a Comment