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It took us all morning to make our way to the Lacepede Islands. These lie just South of Cape Lévesque.  They are four small, low spits of sand and coral and support Western Australia’s most important turtle breeding ground, as well as a sizable breeding ground for Frigatebirds and Boobies.

The Lacepedes have a rather fascinating past, having been the site of an international incident. In the 1870s, the mining of guano (bird droppings) was in full swing as it was highly sought after as a fertiliser (phosphate), and the islands were attracting large numbers of trading ships from as far away as the Americas. After a while, some shipowners started to get a little greedy for the rich source of guano and this resulted in an altercation, which in turn lead to the raising of the American Flag and the claiming that it was an American possession.  This forced the Western Australian Government to station a representative at the lonely outpost and reclaim it for Australia.

The Lacepedes were also the site of numerous shipwrecks. In February 1877, ten large sailing ships were destroyed in one of the most devastating cyclones on record. By the time the guano began to run out pearling luggers from Broome started to arrive in search of pearl shell and Aboriginal divers and deckhands – a practice known as ‘blackbirding’. They hunted down the Aboriginal people, chained them,  and held them on the Lacepedes until they could take them to have them signed officially as labour for a particular pearling boat.

But all this was in the past and by the time we got there, things were relatively quiet – that is if you excluded the millions of noisy sea birds and what seemed to be thousands of fornicating turtles. This was obviously the pre-game entertainment before they hit the beaches to lay their eggs at night. Not only did we see heaps of couples going hard at it, but we also witnessed quite a few threesomes. 

But I think the funniest sight we saw was a bird sitting on top of a fornicating (male) turtle shell for at least ten minutes – not really Earth moving stuff.

The beach landing was reasonably challenging due to the combination of a bit of a swell and some rocks below the waterline at high tide. Once ashore, we set about circumnavigating East Island – the largest of the four cays. We wondered past lots of shells and nesting birds, frigate birds on the beach side, boobys on the rocky side. Royce and Deb found a few dead turtles that didn’t quite make it back to the water – it looked like an exhausting crawl up to their nesting sites. If you didn’t know it was turtles, you would have thought that a four wheel drive convention had been on the beach.

We left the Lacepedes in mid afternoon and set out for Broome. For some reason, unlike just about every other day on the trip, Kim didn’t declare an “alcohol free day” and as a result, nobody had anything to drink – what a strange coincidence.

As we got closer to Broome, we turned on the TV and caught up with news that we hadn’t seen since Darwin. We were hit with a deluge of news about the US Elections – up to that point we had no idea if Obama had won or not. After 10 minutes, I felt like turning it off again – it was a little bit over bearing after 12 days without hardly any contact with the outside world (except for the occasional Satellite Phone call).

The sail down the Coast that night was magical – the shimmer from the moon danced across the top of the waves as we passed numerous pearling leases. Sitting on the side of the cockpit, the occasional spray would hit you gently in the face, the wind and the swell just right for a relaxing night sail. I was well and truly hooked on the freedom and the cruising lifestyle. As we got closer, the lights of Broome started to appear in the distance.  I really didn’t want to get to Broome – I was quite happy for this to go on for ever.