19:58.544 S22/08/09    22:30

Another day with variable mostly weak wind.  The weather is following its pattern of some nice hours of sun during the day and rain squalsl a few hours after sunset.We are currently 90 odd miles from the reef and I’ve started motoring again as gentle sailing is very nice but we’d like to arrive in  the morning as we’ll probably only stay one night.

23/08/09   07:00

We carried on motoring as the wind turned against us.  At about  6:30  we passed LOON III

A Canadian boat who had left Palmerston the day before we did.  They are also motoring  but more slowly than we are.  The gave us a waypoint for the pass which is in a slightly different position than we thought.

17:00 

We arrived Beveridge Reef late morning;

It turned out the  LOON III’s pass  latitude was out by  ½ mile.  The Electronic chart was also out but at least a mile.  When we got in  I radioed them the corrected position.

 On the way here we saw many more humpbacks and stopped the boat to try to approach them. One swam under us but didn’t do any acrobatics. We did get a few snaps.

The reef is quite surreal in the middle of nowhere, its about two  miles across and the water is absolutely pristine.  The interior is mostly 12 meters deep.  We are anchored in a 5 meter patch. There are four other yachts here, two of them went to visit  a wreck and one of them managed to clip a white tip shark with their  outboard, it reacted angrily and bit their dinghy, puncturing the tube. They were towed back by the other dinghy with a partially submerged engine.

When we went to visit the wreck we didn’t have such an adventure.

I’ll post some pictures tomorrow.