22:51 Sun.

8 Oct, 2017

Sailing Part #1

WhitSundays

Tags: catamaran, islands, sailing, snorkelling, stingrays, sunrise, sunset, white sands, whitsundays, wings 2

Airlie Beach , Australia

26 °C

Partly Cloudy

5:39 am

12:00 am

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.

Our bus at a petrol stop. — We stopped on two small shops beside petrol stations on our way down.

Landscape through the window. Sadly it was nearly impossible to take some more interesting pictures from a bus.

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.

Toilet and a shower. It was really small.

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.

Food was surprisingly plentiful and despite using simple/normal ingredients it tasted very good. We had one of the best meals in Australia on this boat.

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.

When we were here, the low tide was coming so a lot of them were swimming from shallow ends to the deeper end of the bay.

Whitsundays from air, taken by our skipper.

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.

Sailing Part #2

Whales

Tags: cockotoo, Coral reef, corals, diving, humpback whale, sailing, snorkelling, turtles, whales, whitsundays, wings 2

Airlie Beach , Australia

26 °C

Partly Cloudy

5:39 am

12:00 am

Before going to Australia, I was kind of hoping to see couple of native animals such as kangaroos and koalas, but I was not prepared for what happened. In short we saw almost all animals that we saw in zoo also in nature. It is just an amazing experience, something you can rarely experience in Europe. The highlight of them all were probably whales. In total we saw them over 5 separate occasions (days) through our journey to the south, but the best experience was our first in Whitsundays.

While we were on the white beach skipper spotted something that looked like a whale in the distance. As soon as everyone was on board we chased after them. We were lucky to be in the area when we were (e.g. Australia), since the whales are only here around one month per year, when they migrate north to Arctic with their babies. They spend their time in the south to mate and to raise their children, which is great for us, since they are more active and do different stuff to teach their young ones.

It wasn’t long until we came close to the first group, we stopped about 300 m from them, they didn’t seem to mind us, as they continued to play for about an hour. After we continued our journey and on the way encountered two more groups before stopping in the afternoon for a snorkeling’s session. It was interesting going into the water, because if you dove about 2 m under the water you could hear some singing – a whale singing. I think I managed to record some.

Snorkelling was also great. The water was a bit clearer here and had more animals. Remember how happy I was that I saw a turtle last time? Well here I saw around 5 or 6.

Me trying to photo a turtle. It's not as easy as it looks. It can hold it's breath much longer than I. — Me trying to photo a turtle. It’s not as easy as it looks. It can hold it’s breath much longer than I. I think in the video above you can see my photographer from this photo. 🙂

After getting out of the water we prepared for our next snorkelling location but a couple of whales close to our boat caught our attention instead. Another mother and child playing about 200 m from our boat. I didn’t mention before, the specie of a whale was Hump whale, and adult one can weight about 30 tons and can be more than 10 m in length. It wasn’t long before we could see what that means for ourselfs. Without further ado, I give you probably the best action photo that I ever witnessed in real life, of course with my luck I missed my shot and only caught the splash afterwards, so here I present the photo taken by our skipper and a splash aftermath taken by me.

This enormous creature jumped out of the water about 200m from our ship. It is hard to tell how large it is. The closes I can say is it felt like a big truck jumped out of the water. — This enormous creature jumped out of the water about 200 m from our ship. It is hard to tell how large it is. The closes I can say is it felt like a big truck jumped out of the water.

Even the splash that followed was amazing.

Humpback jump aftermath, at least I got this. :'(

After this we did a couple more dives.

I don't know why this reminds me of a brain. — I don’t know why this reminds me of a brain.

Finding Nemo. This time I found it myself.

The last morning we had a chance to watch another sunrise early morning, before going for a last snorkel. I can’t believe how fast these 3 days went by, but it was one of my favourite experiences on this trip. Really worth doing it if you happen to be around Airlie beach.

Everyone was already up and ready to go snorkelling early in the morning.

After we got back we had another day left in Airlie to watch some cockatoos. I don’t know why but I find them so funny. You can normally hear them way before you see them and they have this smurky expression on their face all the time. I think I read somewhere that alongside parrots they are the most intelligent birds on Earth. We caught them stealing some food from a nest of another parrot and it was funny when parrot came back he chased them away, but as soon as he left they came back with this funny expression and raided his supplies… poor parrot.

Quite big parrot, about 3/4 size of a Cockatoo. Guarding his stash, but not long after he was gone they raided it again.

Caught in the act.

On Wednesday evening we prepared for our departure, another thousand kilometres to the south!

Sailing

The great barrier reef

Tags: Coral reef, sailing, whale

Airlie Beach , Australia

20 °C

Mostly Cloudy

6:11 am

5:57 pm

We have just arrived from a 3 day sailing trip around the coral reef near Airline Beach.

We spent 3 days on this boat with 14 other young people. We split the time between snorkeling and sailing along the islands.

It was loads of fun, we have seen everything from small fishes to stingrays, sharks and even a gigantic humpback whale with a baby.

Mother teaching a baby how to jump from water. She must have been more than 10m long, larger than our boat.

Now we are staying in a hostel and tomorrow we’ll continue to the Freiser island, another 1000 kilometers to the south. We are going to spend about 5 days there, looking for dingos and learning to surf after that we have something really cool planed in the Brisbane.

Since I’m writing this from a phone I’m going to keep it short. It’s incredibly hard to edit or even add photos to the posts from it. I’ll come back to these topics when I ger to computer, probably not sooner than in Slovenia.

Ah yea almost forgot, I also managed to caught a cold, which is incredibly annoying for snorkeling, also I’m blowing through tissue like no tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll get better before Brisbane, since some of the activities require me not being sick.