Horseshoe bay Peel Island
Sunrise over Peel Island
Saturday 25th June 2022
We awoke to a beautiful sunrise this morning and decided to head to the beach to explore horseshoe Bay which is on the southside of peel Island. This island has an interesting history and was set up as a leper colony in the 1880s and there’s still a settlement there which is, at the moment, restricted access but they are thinking of turning it into a tourist attraction. We took little Puss in and wandered to the west and then back to the east along the beach.Horseshoe by has a significant beach on the southside. The slopes gently down to the waters edge. We noticed that there was a Lagoon 40 that was beached and that they were working on as the tide was going out. Nola also found lots of pieces of tortoise shell in the shallows. They were very flimsy and not hard like you would expect. They were beautiful but we decided to leave them as having part of these gorgeous animals felt wrong and unnecessary.
We noticed There was already crowds beginning to come in and we came across a few Marques where they were cooking a full pig on a rotisserie and what looked like at least 100 kg of beef. We asked for an invitation, just in case you never know but none was forth coming. Little did we know that this was going to be lunch for at least 100 cruises that were coming in
Small part of armada that descended on us
At about 11 o’clock in the morning an Armarda of Boats started arriving, all motor cruises a lot of them ex fishing boats but all beautifully restored with quite literally hundreds of people on board, it felt like an invasion. It was surprisingly amicable and well civilized in regard to the moorings with everybody maintaining a safe distance, although many late comers had to drive around for quite some time to find a space suitable.
It was a magnificent day with very little wind beautiful sunshine and a gorgeous sunset. Perfect winter weather.
Ugly grinner
The fishing is abysmal, I caught a Grinner, that was described as the worst eating fish in the world, ugly as shit however good bait. It smelt terrible, so I put it back. That was the only bite of the day, seems like they don’t like chicken fat after all!
It’s a curry laksa kind of night.
Sunday, 26 June 2022.
Another beautiful day in Horseshoe Bay of Peel Island, the number of neighbors significantly reduced this morning however it still would be called an Amanda, if we were Organizing an invasion. The morning started off a little Rolling but by about 9 o’clock it was flat with very little wind and very flat seas so we decided it would be a great day to go and explore the local area and have a bit of a fish. We took off in Little Puss towards the east and just outside of the Bay came across the wreck of the Platypus. This was an old dredge that was built in the 1880s decommissioned in around 1940. And scuttled to form part of the jetty that supported the leper colony on Peel island. Nowadays there’s still quite a bit of the infrastructure above the water including the boilers and bow and stern of the boat. It sits in about 1 1/2 m of water surrounded by reef.
Wreck of The Platapus on Peel Island
After going around the wreck [see photos] we headed out to do some fishing off the east side of the reef. We caught a lot of baby snapper, a Trevally and some small flat head, nothing that we could keep. It was such a beautiful day so we headed over towards Goat Island and continue to fish going over a huge sandbank that was littered with hundreds of large starfish, neither of us had seen so many starfish in one place. We proceeded to catch lots of puffer fish, a couple of grinners ( you’ll be able to tell from the photo which one was the grinners) and something that looked like a rainbow color Grinner but didn’t look too appetizing either, so despite no keepers it was a very pleasurable few hours out fishing. We Were visited by a dolphin which always makes the day.
We came back to the boat and proceeded to have early sundowners just because we can. Nola got a call from David and Lisa from Elektra who we first met in Coffs Harbour and they came over to finish off the sundowners with us and share stories. I’ve known Lisa in a previous life as an ergonomist, it’s such a small world.
The majority of the boats have now left the bay with only a handful of us remaining. There is horse tail clouds in the sky which means there’s wind coming in the next few days so will head into a safe anchorage at Raby Bay for the next few days before heading north to Fraser Island.
