Sailing Part #1

Friday 7 AM

And so it began, our long long way down to Sydney. First stop was Airline Beach, around 800 km south of Cairns. It took as about 10 hours with a bus, with 2 short breaks in between. The bus was nothing special, no WiFi or chargers in it, at least it was interesting to look through the window and watch the Australian landscape, which is quite different from what we have here in Europe.

In the evening we arrived to Airline beach, where our next adventure awaited. As soon as we disembarked the bus we were greeted by two local Cockatoos who were screaming over our heads, but we had no time for them since we were in a hurry to check-in for our sailing trip in the following days.

The next day we boarded a small/medium? catamaran that will take us sailing around the islands for the following three days. We were joined by about 15 other young people, from Germany, Italy and UK. And were led by Kiwi (New Zeland) skipper and Aussie guide.

The boat was surprisingly spacious inside, I think there were 25 or even 30 sleeping spaces on board. Veronika and I were positioned on the left side of the boat, but we didn’t spent a lot of time inside, since it was so beautiful to be on deck and watch the sights around us.

We did variety of things on the boat, we prepared the sails, watched for turtles and other animals in the water, plaid games, talked and so on. A big surprise to all of us was the food. It was plentiful and good. It turned out that the skipper was a very good chef in youth, owning a couple of restaurants but decided later that he wants to do something else in his life.

We sailed around the islands, stopping at different locations in order to go snorkelling. One of such locations was Whitsundays beach. It is a large beach that goes way inland and is covered by a snow white, very fine sand. All in all it makes the water look nice shade of light blue and to top it off, whole bay is full of stingrays and other large fishes. I even saw a shark, 5 m from me in the water (I was standing in the water at that time). Luckily it wasn’t vicious, only about 3m in length and by the looks of it afraid of me, since it swam away from me as soon as I started to walk toward it.

We spent whole morning on the second day here. Swimming, and looking for stingrays. They were plentiful and can almost disappear in the sand – I almost stepped on them 3 times and you don’t want to do that, they can sting you with their enormous stinger on the tail.

It really was an incredibly beautiful beach and the time just flew by.

The evenings and mornings were especially amazing. It was cold, but the colors of the sky were amazing. I don’t remember ever seeing such a purple color of the sky before.

As I said in previous post in general it is very dangerous to swim anywhere in Australia, you have tons of animals that can kill you, sharks, crocodiles but the most dangerous are jelly fish, that is why we always had a wet-suit on when we went swimming, even if the water was above 24 C.