13.29 143.43.  Morris Island.  55km 7 am to 4:30 pm. Lumpy sea with ugly strong quartering winds. Very warm water around the reefs.

It was quite windy all night, and next morning I had to pack my boat in a sandstorm…almost time to call that day off! But it was not too bad…but a day for wearing the PFD. The wind was ugly quartering, and my drift was shown on the GPS so I had to steer against it a bit.

Not a flying fish, but a flying bird…

A fish decided to jump on my luckily closed spray deck, stayed for a while steering at me and jumped off again, leaving my deck with a fishy smell…I am wondering what I would do if it would have jumped into my open cockpit? Could I grab the slimy thing and throw it out again? This was the second tim ei got hit by a fish…

I saw quite often flying fish, and some larger ones jumping as high as three meters over the surface! Or huge swarms I a “mass jump” with six or seven times out of the water – what for?

I had a hard time to eat breakfast as usual on the water, so I waited until reaching the edge of Magpie Reef with a sandbank, where I happily pulled up for my muesli and to urgently necessary adjusting my footrest. It is so nice to have dry ground every now and then in the middle of nowhere! The anchoring prawn trawler in the lee of the reef probably didn’t see me at all.

Burkitt, Hannah and Hay Island were mangrove islands I was quite happy to leave to the left, my destination for the day was Morris Island, on the north-western edge of the Morris Island Reef.

Morris Island was marked on my GPS chart with an 18m high palm tree as a landmark – and really, the only tall palm tree was sticking out like a lighthouse!

I’m actually quite happy to arrive in late afternoon’s mid to low tide, as access to the sand spit from the north has no reef, and the whole reef system on low tide is just worth some beach combing and exploring!

I made my way around the island, and found a beach-art tree and a grave under the second, lower palm tree. Just wonder who was buried there…

It was Easter Sunday, and I though on rounding the island I should have played the old game of collecting Easter Eggs, here it could have been a huge basket of thongs – on the next islands I’ll definitively do that!