Cocos Keeling: A Slice of Paradise

May 25, 2016

There are places that you hear about from other cruisers, special places. Perhaps the first time will be over sundowners in someone’s cockpit, and then again online, or through the coconut telegraph. After a while, a few of these places rise to the top, they become legendary.  We have had the incredible good fortune of having visited many of them, but this one, we almost missed.

We had originally planned to take the North Indian Ocean route, which would have shown us Sri Lanka, Maldives, Chagos (another storied cruiser destination) and possibly Seychelles. The wind died early for that route, this year, and we missed our chance. Then we decided to go from Padang, Sumatra, directly to Madagascar, but the winds weren’t really blowing that way and we didn’t have the fuel to motor to the wind. So we lucked out.

Cocos Keeling, is like Suwarrow done Aussie style. The Australians have figured out how to augment nature in a way that doesn’t detract from it’s beauty, but makes it more accessible to the general population. So here, nearly 1600 nautical miles from Perth, in the most remote reach of the Australian territories,  there are benches, tables, BBQs toilets and rain catchment. There are moorings for the dinghies just off the low water line, and chickens, ripe for the pluckin’.

It is glorious here. Turquoise water mixes abruptly to navy just a few miles North of the island, and gradients of so many shades of blue exist in the dozen meters between Convivia and the shore, that it would be hard to count them, much less qualify them. The thing that clinches this spot though, is kids. There are two other kid boats here, which means that our kids disappear for hours each day and come home happy and full of stories.

Weather will tear us away from this paradise, soon enough, but for now we will do what cruisers do best. Sundowners, BBQs, and messing about in boats.

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