Saga : The Cocos (Keeling) Islands

An atoll lost in the Indian Ocean!

Ten years after their first visit to the Cocos Islands with Moby (an Outremer 51), the old crew are back in this unusual archipelago that they love so much.

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Published on 21/03/2024

By Gilles Ruffet

Issue: 195

Published: May. / Jun. 2024

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Who: Bénédicte and Loïc, Arthur, Anna and Victor
Where: Cocos Islands (or Keeling Islands), Indian Ocean
Multihull: Outremer 55
Blog : www.sagavoyage.com

An Australian possession, inhabited by a few hundred Malays and a handful of Australian civil servants, the Cocos Islands are above all an ideal stopover during an Indian Ocean crossing. The only authorized anchorage is Direction Island, but it’s a real paradise: a dream beach, equipped in the Australian style with BBQs and tables for picnic evenings with shipmates, great drift snorkeling and a fantastic stretch of water for surfing. We all had a wonderful time sailing Wing Foils every day, which has become our favorite sport aboard Saga. The tradition is to leave a trace of one’s passage through a piece of salvaged art: the children worked all week with their friends to complete their projects, some with multicolored flip-flops and others with a fisherman’s buoy transformed into a globe, which will be placed near the Moby sign, which is still in place since our visit in 2018. We also spent a very nice day on Home Island, inhabited by the Malay community: we took a walking tour of the island via the beaches, the cemetery and the particularly well-organized rubbish dump. We also visited the small museum that recounts the turbulent history of this very strategic atoll, and had lunch at Oceania House, the home of the Clunie-Ross family, who once owned Cocos and who welcomed Queen Elizabeth II. We were sorry to leave this unique and highly enjoyable stopover for a new destination that thankfully would prove to be just as enjoyable: Rodrigues.