Day 6: Whitsunday Islands

Day 6

Summary: Boarded sailboat, sailed to Whitsunday Islands, explored Whitehaven Beach, slept on board

Tuesday, January 7th

We barely slept on the overnight train, so when the sun came up we gave up on trying to sleep and instead watched out the window for kangaroos and wallabies.  We saw so many of them!

We arrived at Prosperine Station around 7am and took a shuttle to our hostel, YHA Airlie Beach.  Quickly, we loaded little canvas tote bags with whatever we would need for our overnight sailing trip and stored our luggage in lockers at the hostel.  It was a crazy rush because we had taxis waiting to take us to the marina and we didn’t want to be late to the boat because there were other passengers waiting.  It was tricky because our stuff was a little scattered since we had just spent the night on a train.  But we did our best, loaded up, and drove to the marina to board our sailboat named “Siska”.

There were about 24 passengers total, including the 12 of us, plus the skipper and two deckhands.  We put our bags below deck on our bunk in the hull of the boat.  Greg and I shared a double bed on the bottom bunk and one of our tour-mates joined our little cubicle and slept on the single bed on top.

We hung out on deck while the skipper and his deckhands gave us information about living on the boat, safety, and our plans for the trip.  The skipper’s dry humor cracked me up!  They made us feel like we were in good hands.

It was hot and sunny so we changed into bathing suits to lounge on deck.  That’s when we realized Greg had forgotten to pack our sunscreen!  We had just purchased a new bottle the day before, but in the rush of packing the canvas bag at the hostel, he hadn’t checked all the pockets of his backpack and missed the sunscreen.  He was very angry at himself for the mistake, but luckily we were part of a big group so we were able to bum some off a few different people over the two days.  The sun is really intense in Australia so it was important to keep reapplying throughout the day.  We felt bad asking to use people’s sunscreen, but everyone was nice about it.  We also used some of the skipper’s sunscreen – he had a big jug of it with a pump on top.  They don’t mess around about sunscreen in Australia!

Everyone laid out on the deck while we sailed (and motored) among the Whitsunday Islands.  They served us all of our meals on the boat, and after lunch we arrived at Whitsunday Island (the largest of the group of islands called Whitsundays) and rode the dingy to go explore Whitehaven Beach.

First, we hiked up through the trees to the lookouts so we could get an aerial view of the beach – it is beautiful!  The turquoise water and white silica sand swirl together to make a beautiful landscape.

Part of the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, “Dead Men Tell No Tales”, was filmed here in 2015!  I’m not sure which scenes, I’ll have to watch it again to see!

As we hiked down to the beach, we saw a rhinoceros beetle, Australia’s largest beetle!

The beach was gorgeous!  The water was so warm and clear with soft white sand.  We brought a towel and shawl to prevent our shoulders from burning since we had gotten so much sun already that day just on laying the boat.

Some of the pictures Greg took make it look like I’m the only one on the island!  While that wasn’t the case, there actually weren’t too many people around because we arrived in the afternoon.  The skipper timed it just right so we had a more private experience.

To protect myself from the sun, I covered my face with my shawl and we kept singing “Rey’s Theme” from Star Wars because I looked like her when she scavenges a star destroyer in “The Force Awakens”.

via PicsArt

A little ways inland from the shore, we saw masses of quarter-sized crabs that skittered away and dug themselves into small holes when you walked towards them.  There were thousands of them and it was really entertaining.

We were tired from the heat and lack of sleep from the night before, so we laid down underneath a tree and rested for a while.  At 5pm, we walked back through the trees and rode the dingy back to the sailboat.  We sailed to a calm place to moor to a buoy and stayed there for the night.

They made us all dinner (catering every meal to everyone’s dietary needs in a tiny kitchen) and we all hung out on the deck as the sun went down.  We watched the stars come out and eventually everyone drifted off to bed.

Thanks for reading!

-Rebecca

 

Continue on to day 7!