S09º00.894, E159º16.012 ,
By far the best anchorage in the Russells. If you are looking for a wild tropical paradise looking island bordered with rainforest tree full of birds, surrounded by a reef lagoon, this is IT! And to my belief, no crocodile lives here. No people either, just the occasional motor canoes come to fish the reef edge. The KUNA was safe there and could be left for the whole day.
The lagoon is large, 10 to 5 m deep in sand and sparse small bommies and the choice of the location is yours, but the trick is to get in!
To get inside the lagoon, the KUNA had to go over a very narrow passage in between bommies, which yields 1.8 m depth (that’s not at Datum, that’s with the tide!). The tides in the Russells are diurnal (range varying between 20 and 80 cm), which means the high tide occurs only once a day, and unfortunately, high tide does not conveniently happen at the time of the day when reef navigation is at its optimum light wise (between 10am and 3pm). Studying the tide tables tightly, I found late in the neap tide week seems to be the highest water level at the best time, towards 4pm. Low tide occurs right at 12 noon during spring tides, and high tide in the middle of the night!!!
The entrance in oriented East West so neither the early morning nor the late afternoon are convenient as one always looks into the sun, bugger!
So there is basically no choice but going in blind, so to get around this problem, several kayak and snorkelling reccies were necessary to get to know the 5m narrow passage properly, checking that a person’s height worth of water was over the ground at every point. The safest way to proceed, while shorthanded for crew, was to actually mark the edge of the bommies (not visible in the available light) with fenders and fishing buoys, so the passage could be followed! It takes a bit of time to set up the buoys and the morning tide was dropping rapidly: 20cm DO make a difference here, and to get out, we just made it before a rain squall.
The passage marked by fenders and buoys, crossed in a squall, not so dodgy with good markers!
The passage through the reef is directly East of the GPS position S9º00.682, E159º 15.407 and is to the north of a large round flat bommie with a defined edge. There is a break in the vegetation on the island, which is good to aim for from this position, bearing 87ºT, though the course for the passage itself is about 80ºT. I must say, didn’t have time to check the exact course, I was too busy squeezing between the bommies for 50 meters! After that it gets deep again and navigation is easy.
The snorkelling and diving are pretty good all around the very steep walls of the reef, vertical walls with lots of caves.
But the lack of large predatory fish such as coral trout, cods, trevallies, snappers was remarkable and the explanation has yet to be found. They either may have been intensively fished for the Esky market (canoes take them to Honiara for selling) or eaten locally during the beche de Mer harvest (now closed). Or the wall coral is just not the right habitat, despite the numerous caves ? ON the NW and SE corners, a reasonable amount of current occurs (2-3knots), making for a lot of large gorgonians and a lot of zooplankton reduced the visibility to 15-20m. Some eagle rays were spotted and some babay black tip sharks under the trees along the beach, along with a few land dwellers
Kingfishers hover in the trees above the lagoon at dusk
A goanna visits the picinic place, attracted by the grilled fish smell?
Hermit crabs are fierce competitors of my shell collection: they virtually inhabit every shell on the beach, except cowries...
Early sunset in the tropics
