We had one of those days. Ones that you don’t get very often.

The plan was to go and explore the Tetrodon loop. The charts show it as being very shallow (0.3m) but the satellite images suggest that there is a way in that would put us alongside the sand dunes of Dirk Hartog island. Its 20nm from Denham, so we made a prompt start and were rewarded with some nice, light wind spinnaker sailing.

The lines were in and we caught a couple of mackerel. We pickled some, bbq-ed a bit more and froze the rest. However, as forecast, the wind disappeared and we socked the spinnaker when we had under 5 knots of wind. Motor on…

We planned to anchor near to the loop and explore by dinghy first as the timing meant we’d not be there for the high tide. We anchored just east of the entrance, and took the dinghy for an explore. It wasn’t long before we found dolphins who were totally unworried by us drifting in the dinghy alongside them. I suspect they’d been habituated to humans a bit by the feeding at Monkey Mia (which is a big tourist thing in Shark Bay).

We headed into the loop and found The Gathering anchored in there! We had a coffee with them, and worked out we could probably get in at high tide. On our way back to the boat we saw dugongs, and decided the best way to see them up close would be with the drone. It didn’t disappoint.

They stayed near the boat for quite a while, and we got some great video of them.

We also saw turtles and rays near by, but as we were preparing tea, we were visited by a rather large tiger shark (no pics unfortunately).

We had really maximised how shallow we had anchored - with less than 10cm beneath the keels at low tide. There was no swell and the water was gin clear - what a spot!

The sunset was incredible…

Days like that don’t occur often, and this one was unexpected - a very nice surprise.