Montgomery Reef is an huge area of reef just off the Kimberley coast. Its 154 square miles in size. This huge area dries at each low tide and the water leaving the reef has cut a large channel into it. All along the channel, water falls form as the water runs off, carving channels into the sides as well as along the length.

Given some care, we can get up the channel quite a way and anchor. You want to do it at low tide to see the best effect, but navigating up narrow channels on a falling tide needs to be done careful. So at 4:30am, we were up and moving 10minutes later to take the tide out from Raft Point. The sunrise was beautiful behind us.

We had enough wind to sail out under headsail, which was a nice surprise. We took the route in we’d seen some of the cruise ships use - so had plenty of water. The spring tide yesterday saw 3 yachts and 3 cruise ships. Today we could see Diversity 2, a smaller cruise ship, and the huge Coral Adventurer anchored off the reef.

In the distance, we could see white objects - it slowly dawned on me that these were the waterfalls off the reef that we could see already! We slipped into the channel early, and were rewarded with the place to ourselves for 30minutes. It was worth it.

30 minutes later, Diversity arrived and anchored further in than us and then the tenders from Coral Adventurer arrived. We took a spin in the dinghy to see the outflows, as well as turtles and huge jumping fish. It was all spectacular!

Now we head north, to Deception Bay most likely. The wind is dying off, but due to come back later, so we’ll see what progress we can make even though it will be slow…