Great Mercury

After coffee and breakfast in Matapoua Bay, we cruised around the corner towards the Mercury Islands. The wind got a little stronger than we were expecting from the forecast, but we managed to find shelter in Peachgrove Bay.

It wasn't long before Nathan, Jamie & Vela donned their snorkels and dive gear and headed over to the reef on the western end of the bay. The snorkeling was awesome, spotting eagle rays, snapper, maomao, parore, red moki, trevally, kahawai, goat fish, and a friendly blue cod. Vela sent a lovely shot with the spear gun through a leather jacket, killing it stone dead. Then Nathan took the spear gun further around the point, trying to hit a goat fish (they were all getting a bit too friendly, getting so close it actually made shooting them tricky).

Then a school of kahawai flew past Nathan, so he lined one up and nailed it. While he was dealing to that, a big bronze whaler (2m+) came steaming in, doing it's Top Gun fly-by impression. This signalled it was time to leave, so everyone swam steadily back to Starling (Nathan took a second to shoot a second leather jacket on the way back).

Once we were back on board, Vela fed us with a yummy invention of poached leather jacket and kahawai in an onion, ginger, garlic, and spring onion broth with a hint of chili to keep you on your toes. Meanwhile Dave, Ash, Oakley & Cooper headed to the beach in the dinghy to hang out in the shade. Oakley found a cool rope swing to hang off too.

While this was happening, Nathan spotted a dark shadow in the water behind us. We quickly realised it was a shark, and spent the next 30 minutes doing shark spotting. There were at least three cruising around the shallow bay, up to about a meter from the beach. Two of them were pretty big, 2m+ specimens, while the third was a little smaller.

After all the excitement it was time for a hazy and more cuddles with Cooper before we moved spots over to Korapuki Island to shelter from the strong Southeasterly change that was forecast to come through at midnight.Weiterlesen