Lets go Sailing
Trip Start
Sep 10, 2007
1
75
95
Trip End
Ongoing
Airlie Beach,
Australia
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Airlie beach is where all the boat trips for the Whitsundays leave from. Its a really lovely town, but you can`t swim on the beach due to it being stinger season so they built a lagoon so we can go swimming in there - nice one. The weather here is much hotter than Rainbow beach, you would know that we have traveled north for 12hours.
So we checked into our boat for the next day and went out for the night. Airlie beach is a great spot of going out, there are lots of pubs and clubs here. So we headed out to check it out. We ended up meeting up with the 2 Cork girls that are in our dorm with us and many more Irish as well, so it was a good night
Captain
. The next morning we got picked up for our 3 day sailing trip. The boat we picked is called the Defender and it was a good choice (there must be about 100boats to choose from, its crazy, so its a bit of hit and miss with them), there were only 27 people on board with 3 crew, so we would have to do some work. Nice one as we have never been sailing before & it wouild be nice to learn a bit about it. The boat is a racing boat so it would go up on its side and everyone would have to be sitting on the topo side, so the first day they gave us our introduction to racing, it was great, most people got soaked and we were going pretty fast ith the waves rushing up over the boat (& most of the time into the boat and all over us, as you can imagine the crew thought this was hilarious and kept crashing straight into the waves).
The other people on board were all around our age, so it was great. We docked at a port on Whitsunday island the first night and the party began......
The second day of the sailing, we went to Whitehaven beach. This is a really beautiful place, the sand on the beach here is the pure silica, they even used the silica here to make the glass for the lens they use on the space stations, wow, thats pretty high quality sand
Didgerido
! The photos don`t really do the beach justice as it was overcast and then it started raining. As its the wet season in Queensland at the moment, there is alot of rain (but they usually don`t get this much, this summer they have had the most amount of rain ever..we must have brought it with us!). So everyone was stuck waiting for the boat to come back for us on the beach and it was lashing, we were happy though as it was warm rain.....! O! we saw a snake here as well, a real wild snake, how cool is that!
So the boat eventually came back and we went sailing around the other islands, this was a more relaxing sail than the day before, it was lovely just sitting on the deck, taking it all in. After a lovely lunch we went snorkelling, this was better than I (Orla) expected, I`m not too keen on being in the water with fish swimming around me, but this was really beautiful (well its the Great Barrier Reef) all different colour fish and the coral at the bottom of the sea, WOW!, it was really beautiful. However, then I saw an ugly looking thing and decided that was enough of an adrenline rush for one day. Some of the others saw a sting ray....scary, obviously when we were snorkelling we were wearing stinger suits..attractive! as there are box jelly fish in the water as well....worth the risk though it was really amazing to see it
Going Snorkelling
. The next day we stopped at a deserted island, some people went snorkelling here again, we said we`d give it a miss but we went for a walk on the island istead. We were the only ones on the island (how romantic), (it was a pretty small island though, about 150m by 25m), so we were walking all around this massive island and then we spotted something dashing through the water close to the shore, when we looked closer and followed it, it was a shark......WOW! a real shark, not quite a great white though, it was a black tipped reef shark we found out later, cool eh!
We sailed back to Airlie beach as this was our last day, and the crew had some great fun with us, they absoultely soaked us, we went crashing into massive waves, really fast, it was great fun though, we`d love to have a sailing boat now..... It was a really great trip, everything was perfect about it, this was probably the best activity we did in Australia.
So we went back to our hostel for the evening and got ready to leave for Cairns the next day. There was a big night planned by the crew on the ship for tonight, so we got ready to go out. We headed out and after one drink we were both feeling really ill and decided that we were just knackered and we`d head home. We were both really dissappointed as we would miss the night out. We are both violently sick for the night, we had picked up a bout of food posioning, we reckoned that we got it from a salad we ate after we got off the boat. However, we would later learn in Cairns that it was the chicken that we ate on the boat the night before as alot of people were sick. It was a really great trip though and worth the posioning! The bus journey the next day to Cairns (10hours) was not very pleasant as we were both sick.
