The Whitsundays - Sailing and Diving

After nearly two years working in Australia for Connell Wagner I finished work for the final time with them on Friday 9th March 2007.

With still over a week to go until I flew out of Australia, I decided to go for one last Australian holiday. One place where I had not yet been on the east coast of Australia was to the Whitsunday Islands. Everyone seems to say that they are beautiful and I should go before leaving. I'd considered going plenty of times before, but as the main thing that everyone goes to the Whitsundays for is sailing, and as I get sea sick with the slightest wave, I'd always decided not to go.

However, before leaving Australia, I wanted to do some diving and as diving generally involves sailing and water of some sort, I decided to go for it and book a 3 day 2 night trip to the Whitsundays and the Great Barrier Reef.

During my time in Australia, I've become a qualified PADI Open Water Diver. However, due to one thing or another (which generally involved having too much beer on a Friday and Saturday night meaning that I could not dive the following day) I'd not made the most of my diving qualification and had only completed a couple of dives since getting my PADI about a year ago.

The Kiana, the boat that I booked the trip with appeared to be geared up for diving as well as sailing (much more than most of the other boats which seemed to be geared up to taking 30 or so European backpackers around the islands in a drunken stupor). The boat was also about the only one that seemed to go out to the Barrier Reef from Airlie Beach. From Airlie Beach, the reef is quite a way out from the main land, much further than it is from say Cains which means that not a lot of the boats do it.

Fourteen of us plus a crew of three with myself armed with a lot of sea sickness tablets, departed from Airlie Beach on a beautiful morning on Monday 12th March. Fortunately for me, the sea was as calm as anything, so much so that we couldn't put the sails up on the boat and had to use the Motor for the next two and a half days. The captain kept apologising to us all that we couldn't do any "actual sailing" but to me, this was an absolute god send.

We sailed for around 5 hours before reaching the reef where we had time for just one dive and some snorkeling. There were just four of us who were qualified divers and we dived with the diving instructor to a depth of around 10m for around 40 minutes. As the attached photographs show, while diving we saw lots of fish, turtles, and a couple of reef sharks, but unfortunately no sting rays or anything bigger.

Unfortunately, by the time we had finished our dive and the instructor had taken people out on introductory dives, it was too late to do any more diving and we anchored up for the night.

After a bit of a crampt night sleeping below deck in which the sea was fortunately fairly calm, it was a 6am wake up call for a 7am start for the second dive. The dive site was in a slightly different part of the same reef and was where the reef suddenly drops by around 70m. It was another fantastic 35 minute dive down to about 16m where we saw more of the same as the previous day but with a lot more schools of fish. And two turtles who were swimming about 10m above our heads.

The rest of the morning was spent snorkeling and partaking in a third dive. Then after lunch, we moved the boat slightly to a dive spot called the "Stepping Stones". I've now done about 10 proper dives plus countless 'introductory' dives (including one in an old water filled quarry in Leicestershire during January when there was snow on the ground - which put me off diving for about 10 years) but this final dive of the trip was the best dive I've ever done. Not so much for the fish life that we saw as it was much the same as the previous three dives, but because we were swimming through canyons, tunnels, caves etc. Unfortunately due to the depth and time of previous dives we could only manage a 30 minutes dive but it was just fantastic.

After the diving, it was then a long cruse back towards the main land and the Whitsunday Islands, again with the motor on as there was still no wind for sailing.

Anchoring up for the night in the shelter of one of the islands we had a storm. Fortunately the protection given to us by the Islands meant that the sea was still not too rough.

The following day we visited Whitehaven beach which was nice although I still think that the beaches of the Southern Thai islands are the best in the world that I visited so far (but it was cloudy and overcast when we visited Whitehaven so that might have made a difference).

After a morning spent at Whitehaven Beach, we began the sail back to the mainland and Airlie Beach, this time under sail. We arrived back at the main land at around 4pm.

All in all, the trip was fantastic, the diving was good although we didn't see all that much of the Whitsunday Islands themselves. However, as it was mainly the diving that I went for, this was a secondary matter.

[The majority of the photographs were taken by the Diving Instructor who doubled up as the official photographer as well as the Diving instructor over this and other trips. However, there are some of mine attached. You can probably guess which ones due to the difference quality]

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