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Published: October 16th 2007
Well on we plough on our campervan adventures and our next destination was Mission Beach, a quite beautiful 14km stretch of coast that is almost all Beach!!
We were staying in a Van park only 100m from the beach so spent 2 days just ambling across to the beach sunning ourselves, having a swim in the sea (no stingers have arrived yet!!), wandering back to the van for lunch and then back to the beach for the afternoon. It was really nice to have a couple of days of doing nothing after all the miles we have racked up over the last 5weeks.
We couldn't sit still for too long however and we were soon getting up at 6.30am to head out on a days sea kayaking. We were to cross the 4.5km stretch of sea over to Dunk Island where we would have some lunch, a snorkell, a walk in the rainforest and then paddle back. Now those of you that know Vicky will know that she doesn't have the best directional sense, so when the Kayak lady said I would be in the back and Vicky would go up front and do the steering I was extremely
nervous of dissappearing out to sea to never be seen again!!
However she proved to be quite excellent at guiding our craft across and back which was not easy as on the return journey we were paddling through 2metre swells which kept engulfing the kayak!! This was great fun if a little scary at times!
The following day there was to be no resting as we were off to the Great Barrier Reef!! We were heading out to Eddy Reef on a boat called Calypso 2. The staff on board were all very friendly despite the fact that our Austalian hostess was a bit upset about the rugby! After an hours trip to the reef we were into the water in double quick time before all the snorkellers got in! We set off on a dive around the inner section of the reef in a group of 4 plus our dive guide. The reef itself was very beautiful and we saw some new fish and corals that we hadn't seen in Bali. Of particular note were the Giant Sea Clams! Vicky even saw a stingray! Our second dive was around the outer edge of the reef and the
highlights of this were some very cool cuttle fish and a large puffer fish!! The visibility was not as good as it normally is due to the good weather!! They need a good bit of rain and wind sometimes to help clear the silt and sand deposits on the bottom.
After the diving we had time for a quick snorkel as well which enabled us to see alot of the colourful corals and smaller fish. For those that don't know as you go deeper under water you lose colour on the way down so things look darker and some of the corals are covered in an algae which makes them look brown!!
I even thought I had seen a small shark at one point only to find out it was a sucker fish!!
We can't wait to do some more diving and as I write this we are waiting on the weather reports to find out if we can do a dive tomorrow on the SS Yongala wreck!!
From Mission beach we are headed down to Townsville and Magnetic Island........
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mum
non-member comment
fish!
What an amazing amount of fish! As to the multi coloured fish - dare I say it looks like it may be one of the Rainbow fish family. There are hundreds of them! The sea looks so inviting!