Steve and Jodies Travel Diary: Lord Howe Island Trip

Day 5 - 19/11/2015 - North Bay Snorkelling

Well no rest for the wicked. It was an early start again because we were booked on a North Bay Turtle and Nature tour and we had to be at the booking shed at 9am to get organised for a 9:15am departure. I was again hiring the GoPro and we also opted for the wetsuits. These wetsuits weren’t however the full length ones so it was going to be interesting to see if there was any noticeable temperature difference between the two wetsuit lengths.

Another beautiful start to the day!

For the first part of the tour we spent a bit of time in the glass bottom boat idling over the coral near the north passage to the Lagoon to try and find some turtles resting in the coral. The turtles come into the Lagoon for a rest from the ocean currents and make “holes” in the coral as they rest on the coral. Unfortunately there were no turtles to be spotted but we did see a black sting ray near one of the holes that a turtle had made.

The next stop was the “Favorite” ship wreck for some snorkelling. There are conflicting spellings so I am going with the spelling that appears on the LHI map and NSW government website http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/resources/heritagebranch/maritime/shipwreckslordhowe.pdf. The ship sank in 1965 and there is not much left of it now. The coral on the way to and around the wreck was unbelievable.

A Lion fish hiding under the wreck.

It was like swimming through an aquarium. See the video below. For those of you reading this via email the videos are probably not displaying so if you want to view them you will have to go to the blog site and view them from there. Here is the link http://blog.sjbowden.com/p/lord-howe-island-2015.html and look for day 5.

Here is a video of one of the friendly fish!

This is a video of swimming around what is left of the Favorite ship wreck.

After snorkelling for about 45 minutes we then made our way to North Bay beach from some smoko at the North Bay picnic area.

During smoko time we had a few spare minutes so we did a small walk to Old Gulch. It was a rocky walk and a bit rough on our tender office feet. We hadn’t bothered to bring any shoes as we didn’t think we would be walking anywhere other than on a beach.

Wading through the water over the track to Old Gulch. The water was from the rain the day before we arrived.

Old Gulch

After smoko we had the choice of what we wanted to do, you could do either some small bush walks, take a guided tour along the beach and watch the birds feeding their chicks or do some more snorkelling. I took the option to do a bit more snorkelling off the beach and Jodie did the walk with the guide along the beach.

There were mothers and their chick everywhere. It would have been good to bring the camera with the good zoom lens. The people that were more interested in the birds than the snorkelling did.

Unfortunately the reef off the beach wasn’t anywhere near as impressive as the reef around the ship wreck. I think I ended up spending more time experimenting with the functions on the GoPro than actually snorkelling.

A bad action selfie!

After about 45 minutes everyone met back at the boat to board and start heading back. On the way back we stopped around the North passage looking for turtles again. This time we found one. It was quite active and also checking us out by coming closer to the boat.