Exploring The Capricornia Group

 As we dropped our sails to cross the bar into Pancake Creek we noticed 3 other boats there, a lot quieter than previous visits.  Next day 2 boats left and the third, a fishing boat, trawled back and forth along the creek then left as well... ahhh, the place to ourselves! 

Just us and the usual red-caped plovers on the sand bars, along with a few red-necked stints, one whimbrel and one silver gull (seagull).  Oh, and a committee of pelicans planning their fish-of-the-day, no doubt.

With calm seas forecast we then sailed up to Masthead Island, a new destination for us.  

The island is quite large and the coral cay surrounding it is massive.  On high tide we tried to kayak into the beach passing a sand bar full of terns, a few pied oystercatchers, 2 ruddy turnstones, 1 grey tattler and some lesser sand plovers, who mostly all ignored us. 

Beche de Mer, aka Trepang, aka sea cucumbers were all through the coral. 

The National Park campground, amidst the turtle hatchery, looked quite challenging for pitching a tent, with big empty turtle nests through the sand. 

On the beach reef egrets went about their hunting while thousands of noddies flew low across the water, back and forth to their nests, feeding their chicks.  

               

                            

As we hooked up a mooring at North West Island, another new destination for us, which had years earlier been a turtle hunting and mining site, now recovering well as a National Park, a Marine Parks boat came over to give us a fun pack, with information about Green Zones, Eye on the Reef App and No Smoking in National Parks (as if you would).  The MP Ranger said if we left a light on at night we might see turtle hatchlings swimming out to sea.  Along with lots of small fish, our light showed us many tiny turtles beginning their big lifetime of adventure – so cute!

It looked a bit tricky to kayak to the beach as high tide was late in the afternoon, so we dinghied in and found a wonderful walk from the camp site to the southern beach.  It meandered through pisonia trees full of noddy nests and shearwater burrows, so we had to take care where to walk.  

Despite the constant chatter of the noddies and their chicks we heard a wompoo fruit-dove (they are always hard to see in foliage).  The southern beach had many silver gulls, maybe waiting to catch a slow turtle hatchling, and a few reef egrets of white and grey morph.