Australia Day 18-20 - Whitsunday Islands

We got up early on the 4th and left our backpacks in storage for a few days, only bringing our day bag for our sailing trip. We had booked 3 days aboard Summertime - a wooden sailing boat built in 1941 (finished quite a few years later because the war stopped them from getting their timber). Very cool.

We got to the boat and it was tiny! I think there are 16 of us plus 4 crew. Very cozy beds below the deck, but nice enough.

We spent the next 3 days / 2 nights cruising around the Whitsundays - stopping to snorkel (with the option to dive which we turned down), swim, hike, kayak, or just laze on the beach or in the hot tub on board the ship. The crew prepared us breakfast, lunch and dinners and did a fantastic job with my vegetarian needs - in addition to the salads they also prepared different tofu / vegetarian dishes just for me. Awesome.

The snorkeling was really nice - we stopped at 3 different places to snorkel and saw lots of interesting fish and sea life. We saw sea turtles and clown fish and stingrays and sea cucumbers and angel fish and many types of coral and a whole bunch of other creatures whose names I don't know or remember.

We stopped at Tongue Bay on Whitsunday island and walked to Whithaven beach, which had really nice fine white sand (99.3% silica for the nerds in the crowd). The swimming there was nice and we had a walk up to a lookout overlooking the hill inlet that was quite spectacular.

We did our kayaking on the last day and saw lots of stingrays (they went right under our kayaks!) and mangroves. But alas, no sharks :(

In the evenings we docked and had dinner, dessert, then met in the lounge to watch a slide show of all the pictures the crew took during the day. They had two cameras which they took with us on our various expeditions and sold us the DVDs of photos at the end of the trip. So we have some good pictures of Craig and I that aren't self-shots! They also showed us various pictures and videos they had taken on other trips and told us about the sea life which was really really interesting. For instance, sea turtles look stoned because they are - they eat jellyfish and the toxin is converted into a drug for them. There was also a super awesome video of the police fish which protect the animals in their reef escorting a Morey eel (which is mostly blind) from one hole to another - they look around, check that the coast is clear and then tell the eel to follow them. When they get to the hole the cop fish change their colours into camouflage mode - very stealth. Also, there are the small fish that set up car washes but if there aren't any fish in the car wash they go out and start cleaning passerbys, often to the frustration of the big fish. One of the guys on our tour actually saw one of the car washes set up with a big line of patient fish waiting to be cleaned - so cool! Hearing all this information about how the reef animals work really made us want to watch Finding Nemo again :)

After dark, they turned on lights that shone into the water to attract plankton, thus attracting small fish, attracting squid, attracting dolphins to eat the squid. This is how we ended up being surrounded by dolphins after dark!

All in all, we loved our experience aboard Summertime (it was one of my highlights of our entire trip) and would really recommend it to anyone travelling in the area!