Thursday 18 December – We make it safely through the passage

We had most of the day to kill, as we had to make it through the passage just before high tide at 4:30pm, with the current against us to make it easier to control the steering. We got the new Stand Up Paddle board inflated that Phoebs had brought out. Rowan went on that, while Phoebs and I went in the canoe. Rowan had good incentive to stay on the board as one of the write ups of the area said there had been a croc attack here a few years ago! The current was strong enough that Phoebs and I didn’t want to go too far downstream, plus she has a heat rash on her face, it is boiling hot out on the water in the midday sun. Rowan did some final reconnoitring for coral bommies. We returned successfully to Polepole with nobody falling in! Rowan and I went and did one last thorough reconnoitre of the passage in JeldiJeldi. We found one bommie to avoid, and a few sand bars to skirt, it was a worthwhile exercise in the blistering heat. We had our dinghy anchor on a bit of rope measured out to 3ms so we could tell for sure where any issues were.

Just before 3pm with huge storm clouds on the horizon we decided to go through. Phoebs and I stood on the front hulls looking for shallow water, I had my headphones on so we could communicate easily. Rowan reckoned we had about 1 knot of current against us, he had timed it perfectly. Besides meeting a convoy of 3 tourist boats coming though mid passage it all went without a hitch. Out the other side we were lulled into a false sense of successful achievement when I spotted we were heading straight towards some shallow reefs quite far out that were not marked on the charts. Luckily we missed them all, 20 minutes later we entered a surreal landscape of thousands of buoys from a Pearl farm. Luckily our No Foreign Land App told us a route through the buoys hugging the land.

We finally navigated our way through all the obstacles, including more hidden and uncharted reefs the other side of the Pearl farm. We were heading to Pef Island where the Raja4divers Resort is. Rowan had managed to contact them, they said we were welcome to use the mooring balls but that the resort closes tomorrow for Christmas, so we can’t use any of the facilities. We can come through and snorkel the house reef and go for island walks tomorrow after 3pm. By the time we got onto the mooring ball it was nearly 5pm. We had a very easy tying up, the little anchorage was like a mill pond. It was a great evening sipping our sunset drinks on the trampoline listening to a wonderful variety of bird noises.