Turquoise water
Trip Start
Oct 05, 2005
1
28
33
Trip End
Oct 01, 2006
Yeppoon, Australia
Thursday, August 17, 2006
There is absolutely no hassle with boardies here in Australia. We are guessing that they don't know what to think about us because people in surf-kayaks are still very rare here.
We found an article in the newspaper about the swell and we had to laugh when they talked about the cold:
"It might be mid-winter but surfers who brave the cold..."
Surfers here wear a shortie wetsuit or just shorts and a rash vest to brave the cold :-) (see photos)
Our 3rd surf lesson was very successful
01 Noosa Beach
. First our instructor gave us a push every time we went for a wave making it easier to catch it but after a while we were able to catch them on our own.We went off and bought a board, a 7ft 9 mini-mal. Ohh, it is so much shorter, narrower, thinner and therefore more unstable than the foam-boards we did our lessons on! We will need a lot of practice!
We also did a mountain bike trip near Noosa which confirmed that the bikes the campervan company rented to us are definitely not mountain bikes. But we enjoyed the views.
From Noosa we went to Rainbow Beach named after the coloured sand cliffs along the beach. The colours and shapes were impressive. We also cycled to Carlo Sandblow, a 120m-high sand dune where the sand gets blown up from the beach below. It looked like a little desert right beside the sea.
Next stop Hervey Bay which wasn't great. We have seen too many nice beaches so we are getting very critical if they are not perfect :-)
Next were the two little towns of Agnes Water and Town of 1770 on the Discovery Coast
02 We "brasved the cold" too
. Yes, 1770 is actually the name. It used to have a different name but they renamed it in honour of Captain Cook's landing there in 1770. The beach is Queensland's most Northern surf beach. And we got surf!One day I went out on the board. At the beginning I fell all over the place again but eventually I did something that you could call surfing :-) It felt nice to actually be in control of the board (well, some of the time) and not the other way round. I stayed out for ages until my arms went on strike.
Sean went out the next day but the waves weren't as nice any more, smaller and breaking closer to the rocks so they were much harder to catch. But after the initial looking-like-a-complete-beginner-again-phase he got some waves and even stayed on the shoulder.
But we still have an awful lot to learn!
I went out on a boogie board. I have to admit turning is much harder than it looks.
From 1770 we went on a boat trip out to Lady Musgrave Island (about 50 km off the mainland) which is part of the Southern Great Barrier Reef. On the way out the sea was very rough, in the lagoon in the middle of the reef it was calmer but still choppy from the wind. On a walk around the island we saw flightless birds and held a sea-urchin (soft and a bit slimey).
Then we went snorkelling. Even with our wetsuits we only lasted half an hour - it's not Hawaii! Also what we saw didn't come close to Hawaii. It had been so much more colourful there - the coral as well as the fish. A lot of the coral was brown, grey and white. Just a few were yellow but not as glowing as in Hawaii
03 Our new toy
. And some had fluorescent blue ends. But the shapes of the coral were more impressive here. Some reminded me of deer antlers, some looked like cabbage.We saw some huge fish - the 2 of us would be eating for about two week on one of them :-) And some skinny long ones that even jumped out of the water when they had food and tried to get away from the others.
As the tide dropped the reef came out of the water. We were surrounded by corals except for a small corridor that we needed to get out again.
We have now reached our turn-around point: Yeppoon on the Capricorn Coast. Our plan to go all the way to Cairns was out the window pretty early into our trip when we stayed for ages at all the surf spots further South. It's still another 1000km to Cairns from here, a long distance just to get to another part of the Great Barrier Reef that's closer to the mainland. And the problem up there are lethal marine stingers (jelly-fish with very long and very poisonous tentacles) and crocodiles in the water - reason enough to be happy with the water down here which is absolutely beautiful (so clear and turquoise) but still no warmer than 19 degrees. But the air temperature is definitely warmer here, we are reaching 25-26 degrees regularly now and sometimes even have to hide from the sun.
From here we took a boat to Big Keppel Island (about 13 km off-shore), a lovely island with a lot of beautiful and quiet beaches. There is a small resort, accommodation and restaurants at the beach where you arrive, all very tastefully built inbetween trees. From there you walk to whatever beach you want to go to. We walked through bush and over a little mountain to Monkey Beach where we soaked up the sun, snorkelled around a reef (it's not part of the Great Barrier Reef but I couldn't really see a difference) and did some exploring on land
04 Trying to look professional
.We spent the night in a permanent tent (it's called a tent but it had a proper door) and were kept awake by the wildlife. Possums were running across the roof of the tent and birds seemed to fight all night. During dinner we still admired the elegant birds that were walking around the tables in search for leftovers and we had some close encounters with possums but during the night we wished they weren't nocturnal.
Next day we went to Long Beach for some more sun and snorkelling. We saw a huge school of small yellow and blue fish. And a group of big fish that were busy having lunch on whatever grew on the rocks.
We are getting quite brown now, the beach was even quiet enough to work on the all-around tan! We are running through tubs of suntan lotion!
We have 3 weeks left before we have to be back in Sydney again, so we'll start heading South tomorrow and visit the spots that we liked best and where we hope to find surf. Our boats haven't seen water in a while so that will hopefully change in Noosa.
