We left our home and friends behind in Surfers early on Sunday morning to head out on our trip to Witsundays & Fraser Island.
We arrived at Airlie Beach around mid morning, and we booked a hostel @ Nomads, but we couldn't check in until 1pm..so we went on a mission to buy towels and have a bite for lunch.
Airlie kinda reminded me a little of Byron, in the sense that its only really like one main street strip... with a few side streets mainly catering to beach surf shops & resty's along the waterfront. Due to many stingers (jelly fish) in the water here, it is not advised to swim at the beach unless you wear a stinger suit.... so instead, they have created a man-made 'lagoon' here... pretty sweet...although sometimes when your really hot, due to the amount of people swimming and the shallow waters, the water can be quite warm and not that refreshing..but it beats getting stung by jellies - so it was a great place to lounge around all day
We booked our Witsunday Cruise with a company called "power play". Its was a 2 night 3 day catamaran cruise around the Witsunday Islands. There are 74 island in total, and we ended up stopping at 4 locations.
Day 1 - hop on boat @ 11:30am
There are 16 others that came along the cruise with us. We all took are shoes off and put them in a bag..no shoes on the boat! The skipper and crew go over a few 'rules' and then we are off to our first destination at Mantaray Bay. Along our way out into the ocean, we spot a few dolphins following the boat...pretty sweet...15 mins into our ride and we are already spotting dolphins...sick!
First Stop - Raven's Cove, Beach
We make it to our first snorkelling spot...
We are gear up in our stinger suits.. get our 'flippers' on, goggles and jump in the green blue waters.
Compared to Julian rocks snorkelling, that we did in Byron..this place was a million times better..(well of course, it should be) its the freaking GREAT BARRIER REEF!!
I will not make you jealous and go on and on about how awesome this was... but it was.
The colours of the reef here were the brightest coolest shit ever! SO many different colours, yellows, purples, green, blue... so much to see!!! Brad and I held hands and every time we saw something cool we would squeeze each others hand and point out the amazing fish we would see. The water here was shallow...and the fish were smaller... after we got out of the water and back on the boat we spotted turtles swimming along the shore and coming up for air..
Afterwards, Brad took out the surf board to try some surf paddling
Day 2 - Whithaven Beach - where Fools Gold was filmed
We get off the boat and trek through a rainforest to get to the beach 'lookout'
It was pretty humid going through the rainforest... and the bugs were pretty bad.
whithaven beach
other side of beach view
spotted some sting rays
The Beach! Just as we started to walk to the beach the sun peered out from the clouds..and it was hot! There are also jellies here so we were suppose to wear our suits if we went out farther than our thighs... we saw sting rays, smaller fish and a couple baby lemon sharks!!!
We spent about 3 hrs here, lounging in the shallow water, playing frizbee, lying on the beach and spotting marine life. About 5 minutes before we were scheduled to leave the beach, the tide came in pretty quick and the beach was almost completely under water. This sand was soooo soft, it was like walking on powder... very fine ..another paradise beach for sure! Apparently Whithaven Beach is the rated the most beautiful beach in the world...either way, it was breath taking!
Hook Island
Our second stop for the day to get out in the water and do some more snorkelling and scuba diving!
There were only 3 of us Canadians out of all 16 ppl who actually wanted to dive... we gear up!
Weight belts.. flippers, goggles, scuba vest & tank... at this point.. its pretty heavy and hard to stand up.
The one crew member, Allen, a 20yr old American who has spent a total off 1 month underwater in 'dives' was our instructor. So, the 4 of us hop into the 'dingy' boat and head out to a shallow part of the ocean near the reef to practice and get ready to start scuba'in!
Kinda freaked out at this point, due to how heavy I was feeling, we all lean back and fall off the boat backwards and start to fall to the bottom of the ocean. At this point, once I got to the bottom..Allen was checking everyone to make sure we all were okay etc... i was not.
My mask started to fill up with water continuously and I started to freak out, and started swallowing salt water because I panicked.. I couldn't see... I felt heavy.. and I wanted to go back up to the surface at this point to catch my breath!
I tried on Allen's mask and went back down to try it again... but at this point, I'm more nervous now, as that was not a nice feeling... felt like I was pegged down by something, and I was drowning... attempt # 2.. same thing... I try looking up to the surface, pushing the section of my mask in-between my eyes, while exhaling through my nose to let the water out.. but as soon as I brought my head back down to eye level.. it began to fill back up again... so I didn't feel comfortable with this .. I guess the masks were just to large for my narrow face lol... anyways, I was pretty disappointed not being able to scuba... but I didn't want to waste anymore of the other guys time to scuba...cos you can only go down for so long with the amount the air in the tanks..so I said I would think about trying it again maybe at the next stop.
Instead I went on my own and just snorkelled around where we were.... and I'm glad in some way that it worked out that way...cos again, there was some pretty amazing marine life happening on this part of the reef also. The colours weren't as bright i found..but the marine life was larger... huge giant fish... large bright purple fish w/ blue lips... nemo's...angle fish... and tonnes of zebra fish just surrounded me and I floated around and stalked a few fish... pretty cool.. I felt like I was part of the school..and they just swim right up to you, I coulda touched them... such a cool feeling! At this point, I took our under water camera and went to town on lotssssss of things.. so i HOPE TO GAWD they worked.. I assume we will get them developed somewhere close down the line... fingers crossed!
Brad went scuba diving twice and on the second time..it was just him and Allen, which is pretty awesome, cos it was like having his own personal diving instructor. This last dive, he said was amazing! They went down 11m ..swimming through caves .. came across sweet fish ... but ill let him go into detail on all of that and his experience...
Brad getting ready to launch off boat
Big ass giant fish... at bottom of picture.. brad to the left in scuba gear.. for scale lol
During the evening on the boat, after dinner, it was nice, they had a blue light that they would shine into the water... this attracted all sorts of marine life.... first the small fish.... then the squid.... then DOLPHINS!!
It was wicked! The dolphins would just swim around the boat...sometimes peering up from the deep blue... they stayed for about an hour or so, and apparently after most of us had gone to bed, they had returned again...
Overall, we were suppose to have horrible weather the whole time...rain, storm, rain .. but when your on the water, weather changes very quick and most of the rain is land based..so it sprinkled a bit over night and stormed the first night while we were sleeping..but otherwise, it was beautiful the whole time and even though we wore 30+ sunscreen... we still got a little burnt... aka.. now a tan!
Here's a few other scenery pictures for you guys..
sunset one night with clouds
another view of 1st snorkel spot
after the storm rainbow back at Airlie Beach
coming around the bend of one the the island's
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