We awoke to the sun rising over the boat and the clinking of breakfast being prepared for us. It was another beautiful day in paradise and we started with a tropical fruit platter and cereal as we discussed what the day would hold for us.
The map of the lady with the plan
Today we would sail (the “yacht” was really a sailing catamaran) for a bit to get to the Whitsunday Islands – specifically Whitehaven beach, the beach postcards were made for. After a few hours on the beach, we would head on over to Hill Inlet lookout, the other famous postcard place on the reef.
So we set off and sailed for about 2 hours, before the captain took us to the beach via the little Dinghy on the back of the boat. I was amazed to see how many helicopters and planes were around. A lot of people just flew there for an hour and flew back…. Meanwhile we had a nice 2-3 hours walking up the never-ending beach and back again, noticing some great things along the way. One was a Japanese film crew filming three dudes swimming to Whitehaven Beach as part of some comedy sketch. They were there for all of 30 minutes – but during that time the air was filled with drones and the beach was covered in camera crews….
After that we saw a crab in a shell, though he didn’t want to walk for us and two sand-flies making love. Careful, some of the images below might be a bit graphic.
When we got back some of our crew-mates had seen a small fish in the water – I managed to catch the little bugger on my go-pro swimming between our legs 😁
Splish-splash 😀
We spent a bit of time splashing about before we were picked up by the boat for lunch.
We felt like we had only just eaten, but lunch looked delicious so we had “some” more food while we sailed on. The trip was prepared for 8 people and we only had 6, but the company had standardised rations so…. There was a LOT of food to be had!
It wasn’t long before we got to our next stop – Hills inlet. We decided to head up to the lookout first and spotted this cute Monitor watching the people go by.
Monitor is Monitoring
At the lookout we took a few photos of hill inlet. We didn’t need to take too many as we would come back for sunrise so we headed down to the beach pretty quickly.
Back at the base of the path to the lookout, we turned off to hit the beach. It really is a super pretty place!
Because of the way the currents flowed between high and low tide, a small lake had formed on the beach, where we spotted a few mini-sharks. Eventually I caught one on camera under the water while Manja filmed from above – they are really well hidden under the water!
The “Mouth” to this temporary lake had a really strong current, which pulled a few stingrays into the lake. I managed to get into the middle of it and capture a few floating on by.
We headed back to the boat to have dinner prepared, unfortunately the captain had bad news. The Generator had an issue, so we wouldn’t be able to charge the batteries as intended. This also meant we had to remain in an area of reception, and needed to run the engines for a while, and we would motor back to anchor in the same spot we were at last night. All this meant that we would not be able to return for the sunrise 🙁
We were all a little disappointed, but the awesome dinner really did make up for it a bit. Besides, the captain promised he would take us to some amazing snorkelling instead. Tired from the hard day at sea, we dropped into bed not much after dark.
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