Whitsundays, Dolphins and Torrential Rain

Happy Australia Day everybody!! Yesterday I got back from my trip to the Whitsunday Islands. These are a small island group just off of the Australia mainland. They are World Heritage listed and are generally regarded as some of the best beaches in the world. I was on a 3 day sailing trip on a boat called the Tallarook 3. As I have said before, the success of these kind of things tends to rely on how the group gets on and once again we were lucky. We had a good group of people and an excellent crew so we had won the first battle.

Our trip started with a ride out to the islands and pulling up for dinner. The food was fantastic. Goodness know how our chef managed to make brilliant food for 24 people using only a barbeque on a boat, but she did it. We visited the famous Whitehaven Beach, which is the beach you'll see on all the postcards from the Whitsundays. It's really impressive, the sand is incredibly fine, so fine that it's practically death to any electronic equipment. This was cool, but for me, a number of other things were more impressive than the beaches. I have rekindled my love of SCUBA diving.

I did 2 proper certified dives off of the boat. I had forgotton how amazing it is to be underwater swimming around with the fishes. I can't remember the names of all the fish I saw, but the colours on some of them where incredible, they looked like luminous marker pens. I also saw a turtle, just hanging around chilling on the coral ignoring us completely. He was very cool. I am thinking I would like to do some more diving over in New Zealand or in Fiji, but I'll see how it goes

The other thing that happened was pretty special. We had 3 dolphins swimming in the current of the boat, playing around for about 10 minutes. This is pretty much unheard of on a boat our size especially for the length of time they were there. I have never seen anything like this, they were so cool. Obviously just showing off because they kept looking up at us to make sure we were still watching them. They basically grabbed a free ride off of us and got pulled along by the boat, jumping and playing around until they got bored and swam off. The captain said there must be someone pretty special on this boat. I can only assume he was talking about me. Despite the rain, the crappy toilet and the fact that we had to wear really attractive stinger suits to swim, I had a excellent time. All in all a pretty good trip.

I am back in Airlie Beach now where I have found some other members of Team Spring Break. The rain here has been biblical for the last couple of days. It's still raining now. But it's so warm it's like taking a shower, outside. I leave for Brisbane tomorrow then I fly on to New Zealand so this might be my last post from Australia. Or maybe not. Not that it really matters. Ok I should go now.