When the landing party returned, we decided to have our barbecue before the second party went exploring. Chris wanted to move the boat nearer to our barbecue beach destination and this involved negotiating some very shallow seas at low tide. We’re able to set a “track” with our plotter which, once we’ve navigated successfully from A to B, we can use to return from B to A. So we were relatively confident that, bar grounding, we could get back to our anchorage and from there, back to the deeper(!) water. Off we went, two adults in front and Adam reading off the depth as it changed to Chris at the helm. At one point, still some way from our destination, we hastily reversed and tried a new route. The charts are pretty good, better than the plotter, but sand shifts and you just can’t be sure. Eventually, a couple of hundred metres off shore, it got really shallow. Chris decided that this was a golden opportunity – low tide and flat bottom – to see how Hakuna Matata would handle grounding – so he let it ground. Our first observation is that the depth gauge reads .2m and then about 8m – which is handy to know. The second is that even though we grounded so gently it was barely noticeable, we weren’t getting off the sand till the tide got higher and refloated us. The third was how weird it was to stand next to the boat hulls and be able to clean them off...

We abandoned ship and took to the beach with our barbecue. It was hot. There was no obvious shade. The rocks were sharp. The sand was baking. All that was missing was Kirsty Young, the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. The kids solved the shade issue by building the little shelter shown in the last photo and we had a really tasty and largely unburnt barbecue.

The tide started to rise, we’d finished the food so we went back to the boat to let the second group tackle the creek. Sadly the dinghy wasn’t playing ball and required some TLC and by the time we had that sorted we need to move the boat to somewhere where it wouldn’t ground at the next low tide overnight.. but it was still a great day.

Pics: Beautiful Beach and Interesting Rocks, The Shelter Detail