We left the Pelsaert group and had hoped to dive the Coral ledges on our way out. Unfortunately, despite our early start - as we got within 10minutes of the mooring, we saw another bigger boat just about to pick it up. There’s no easy anchorage there, so we decided we’d head straight to the Easter group.

Our plan was to head to Leo island, and see if we could get onto the sand ledge there close to the island. However as we arrived at the narrow passage, it went very cloudy which made it impossible to see the unmarked route through. So we abandoned plan B and went with plan C - head to Morley island.

Morley Island is a great spot for the prevailing winds, though it is a deep anchorage. With all the moorings taken, we dropped the hook in 25metres of water and spent a few days there. We took the dinghy up to a dive called Roo’s tail - but once again the mooring was taken, so Nina and Laura did the dive whilst I snorkeled up top. We snorkeled the dive trail by Morley island itself and had another sealion swim out to see us. Once again, he was very inquisitive and great fun.

From there we moved up to White Bank Island and started to get serious about looking for western rock lobster (known by everyone as crays). We found a few, but they were all too small to keep.

We met some locals on the power boat next to us and they invited us over for drinks. It was quite novel for us to be sociable with another boat - the pandemic and lack of other boats has put a dampener on that. They told us that they hadn’t managed to get crays either, so we didn’t feel too bad.

We had another sealion encounter whilst looking for crays. In fact, I was under a ledge trying to get one out and the sealion was watching me intently. I think he’d have had the cray had I won the battle (which I didn’t!). We abandoned cray hunting and filmed with the sealion. He was great fun!

Our time at the Easter group was coming to an end. We took the opportunity to dive the Anenome Lump, and on the way over caught a nice bigeye tuna! The dive was pretty awesome too! From there, we headed over to the Wallabi group, home to the sites related to the wreck of the Batavia…