Lady Musgrave Island

That's Lady Musgrave Island from the air, not our photo, we took the boat.

It's a 2 hour boat ride across to Lady Musgrave Island.  Our cruise boat seated 120 people, luckily only about 90 people were on today's cruise so it was not too crowded.

Still fairly chipper at this point

Thanks to modern medication I did not get seasick, but Leo was not so lucky, nor were a lot of other people.

Arriving at the island

The island itself is quite small, it took us about 45 minutes to walk across it

In full safari gear (If I look grouchy it's because I was stumbling about  from gravol withdrawal)

and is home to a colony of thousands of Noddy Terns

who nest in the pisonia trees.

As the signs say

We saw numerous birds in various stages of entrapment and decay, and there was one woman on our tour who could not obey the sign and tried fruitlessly to clean a bird.

We also saw shearwater burrows, two small reef sharks temporarily trapped by the falling tide,

turtle tracks and nests and numerous other birds.

A bridled tern

After the walk we took a glass bottomed boat

over a portion of the reef where 3 species of turtles rest

 and then back to the main boat where we had 2 hours to snorkel the reef.

Some of the 400 species of coral

No photos but it was pretty amazing.  We were told there are 1500 species of fish and we must have seen them all.  We also saw green and hawk sbill turtles and one lonely purple starfish (not the one that's killing the coral).

About half our fellow passengers were a tour group from China and we returned to find many of them napping in the cabin.  The tour must have a breakneck pace to miss out on the snorkelling!  Or possibly they aren't comfortable swimming. No sharks though

The next morning as we were packing up to leave we saw this guy

A common brushtail possum

Yet to see - platypus, koala, and cassowary