Direction Island

Beaches & CovesCocos Islands

Fragile nature — stay on the trail, leave no trace.

An uninhabited coral islet in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands with a 300-metre white beach and a tidal channel that carries swimmers into the lagoon.

September·Peaking now

Aug–Nov

The dry season: rain falls to its yearly low — October the driest month near 79 mm — runoff clears and The Rip drifts glass-blue over the reef. The sea sits around 26.5–27.5°C, the Thursday–Saturday ferry runs reliably, and Cossies Beach is at its finest.

Year-round The Rip runs on the tide, not the calendar; reef sharks, trevally and resident green turtles work the channel in every month.

Direction Island is an uninhabited coral islet in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean halfway between Perth and Sri Lanka, with a beach of white sand 300 metres long and a tidal channel called the Rip that carries swimmers from the open ocean into the lagoon on the flooding tide, and it is reached by ferry across the lagoon from West Island a few days a week, with no airstrip and no residents. The atoll is a ring of 27 islets around a lagoon, and Direction Island sits at the gap where the ocean enters, so that the flooding tide drives the open sea through the channel between it and neighbouring Prison Island and the snorkeller rides it in, over coral and past reef sharks, turtles and schools of fish moving with the current, a drift of a few minutes that is repeated by walking back along the sand; the green turtles grazing the seagrass in the lagoon are not passing through but a population that breeds here and belongs nowhere else, and the beach, Cossies, has thatched pondok shelters standing back in the shade, each first-come and free, with a wood-fired barbecue nearby. The island had a cable station in 1914, when the German cruiser Emden landed a raiding party of fifty men to destroy it and was caught and wrecked by HMAS Sydney offshore in the first naval battle of the war; the raiding party, still ashore, seized a schooner and sailed away rather than surrender, and the heritage trail through the coconut palms passes the remains of the station. The palms are the plantation of the Clunies-Ross family, who ruled the atoll as their own for 150 years until 1978, and the Cocos Malay people of Home Island, descended from their workers, run the ferry. September and October are the driest and clearest months, and the cyclone season squalls can cancel a sailing. Direction Island is a beach on the way into a lagoon, and the tide does the swimming.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Swim The Rip with the flood, never against it — the current pours from the ocean into the lagoon and is far too strong to fight, so wear fins and let it carry you.
The tide sets the speed of the drift — a high flood runs fast and hard, while slacker water nearer low tide gives you time to look down and actually see the reef.
Do not panic at the sharks — the blacktips and whitetips cruising The Rip are small reef species that keep to the channel floor and pay passing snorkellers no attention.
Nothing is sold on the island — no shop, no cafe, no drinking water and no lifeguard, so carry your own food, water and reef-safe sunscreen for the whole day.

Things to do

1
Drift-snorkel The Rip channel
The flooding tide drives the open ocean through the gap between Direction Island and neighbouring Prison Island, and you ride it in. Slip in at the top of the channel and the current sweeps you over the drop-off, past blacktip reef sharks holding into the flow, schooling trevally and the occasional turtle, before spilling you out into the shallow lagoon. Swimming back up it is not an option.
2
Claim a pondok on Cossies Beach
Thatched pondok shelters stand back in the shade behind the sand, each one first-come and free, with a wood-fired barbecue nearby. The water off the beach lies flat and clear over talcum-white shallows. Once the drift-snorkellers have washed out of the channel, this is where the whole ferry crowd scatters, to swim, to eat and to do very little at all until the boat back.
3
Walk the heritage trail through the coconut palms
A track leads off the beach into a dense stand of coconut palms, cool and quiet a few steps back from the glare of the sand. It doubles as the island's heritage trail. It passes what is left of the telegraph cable station that a German landing party from the raider Emden came ashore to destroy in 1914, and a slipway from the later years when flying boats used the lagoon.
4
Cross the lagoon on the ferry from West Island
The island has no airstrip and no residents, so every visit begins with a boat. The ferry runs out across the lagoon from West Island or Home Island and ties up at a stilted jetty. The water beneath it is clear enough to throw the shadows of the pylons down onto the sand, and you wade the last stretch ashore.