Sailing the Whitsundays

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I caught the Oz bus to Airlie beach, a real tourist town consisting mainly of one road about a mile long populated entirley by travel agencies, souvineer shops and fast food takeaways. It's also 'Party HQ'; i stayed in 'Beaches' hostel which has this huge bar underneath it that closes at 12, it's this fact that i believe is the reason for everybody in the hostel being completely slaughtered by 8 o'clock. Seriously, we got there at about half seven and there was a girl passed out infront of our door, we stood there for a couple of minutes wondering whether we should tell someone before the door across the hall opened and her mate dragged her inside. However i went out that night with Magnus and two canadian girls called Ashley and Erin, and it's actually quite a good night out.

We had booked ourselves on a Whitsundays sailing tour (the whitsundays are a string of islands off the coast supposed to embody the idea of paradise on earth), but we were worried it was going to be cancelled due to the terrible weather at the time. Luckily when we got the harbour they gave us the all clear.
Our boat was a 40ft racing maxi yacht called 'Siska', unfortunately as it was a sail boat the owners had to cut off a large portion of the keel in order for it to be able to sail around the reef, this also meant it was rather top heavey, making it swing like a metronome in the water.
This didn't bother me as iv'e been sailing since i was a kid, however when we were sailing out it got very very rough and about 5 chinese girls on the boat got very very sea sick, well i won't go into detail but it did end with most of us huddeled in the middle of the deck while certain fluids raced down the sides of the boat. It was so bad for them that when we actually got tro the whitsundays they had to be put on a daytrip boat and be taken home.
We dropped anchor in the bay of Whitsunday island and decided to go for a bushwalk to the beach, which is in the top 10 most beautiful beaches of the world. I had to do the bushwalk barefoot as i hadn't brought my thongs (what the aussies call flip flops) and it was a very strange experience, i felt like paul hogan trekking throught this rainforest withmy feet covered in mud and sand.
Whitsunday beach was very pretty, i decided to go for a swim and proceeded to put on my stinger suit (a wetsuit to protect you from killer jellyfish) the wrong way round, which everone else found hilarious. That night they pulled the sail over the boom and rigged it up like a roof to shield us from the rain and we had a barbie in the cockpit. The next day the sun decided to show its face and give us some good weather. We went on another bushwalk to see some aboriginal paintings in a cave on another island and then took the dingey around to the bottom of this waterfall, which i and magnbus climbed up.
I was a bit dissapointed about the amount of sailing i got to do, all they let me do was raise the main sail on the way back, and because of the way the winds channel between the mainland and the islands we didn't even need to tack. I started to think about taking my competent crew license over here until i asked captain Kane how much it would be and he told me $2000.

When we got back i had top say goodbye to magnus as i couldn't get on the same bus as him which was a bit of a bummer, but i did go out that night with some irish girls from my dorm room that night.

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Comments

[Kerry]

Sailing
Me and Jody did our competant crew course in the Whitsundays and it only cost around 600 bucks each. Maybe if you shop around you could get it cheaper than $2000.