Sailing the Whitsundays

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On Saturday, we decided to put some miles on the clock and therefore took the 16-hour night bus up to Airlie Beach, leaving the Sunshine Coast (with it's rain) far behind us. Setting off on saturday afternoon, that basically occupied the weekend.

On Monday, we set off on the second of our tours in this part of the world, sailing the Coral Sea around the Whitsunday Islands on the "British Defender", an 83ft Maxi racing yacht once crewed by the British armed forces and a veteran of the Whitbread Round-the-World race. We had specifically chosen to go out on a "proper" racing yacht rather than many of the more sedate tall ships and larger yachts on offer and were rewarded with some really exciting sailing (tilting right over in the sea) and lots of fun grinding, hoisting/lowering sails, hanging on for one's life and swabbing the decks (no, not really, but we did all the rest). We lived and slept on board for three days.

The highlights were:

- seeing two humpbacks fully breaching right alongside the yacht whilst we were sailing between Hook and Whitsunday islands

- snorkeling the reef (every day) around the islands (sort of part of the Great Barrier Reef) and seeing some amazing coral and amazing fish

- being nibbled by fish whilst snorkling

- walking up to see Hill Inlet from Turtle Bay and the as-close-to-perfect-as-you're-gonna-get Whitehaven beach

- seeing more whales on the second day playing in the surf as we sailed past

- anchoring next to but not landing on Esk Island which has the largest population of death adders in the world

After the three days we returned to land and partied the night away at Airlie beach with the guys from the trip.

The strangest thing was that after returing to land everyone reported feeling a sensation of 'swaying' as if we were still on board the yacht. This would continue for several days.

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