we arrived in Airlie Beach in the evening and went out for a meal with all of the guys we travelled down on the coach with in the bar below our hostel. pretty expensive here for alcohol and such like but it's a really great place. our hostel room holds 8 people and on the first night we were in with a load of malaysians who decided to have a snoring competition which was fun! the next day we went to check in with the company we were sailing around the whitsundays with, we decided to change the boat we were on so we ended up on a beautiful boat called the Avatar. it's a trimaran so there was plenty of space for some hard earned sun bathing! that evening me and jim went for a meal in a place called cactus jacks, which was really nice, we had some cool nacho things but dessert was amazing, coholate nachos with chocolate sauce, cream and ice cream- i know what you're thinking, but it tasted like heaven! we had to wake up early the next morning and go down to the marina to meet the people we were going to be on the boat with and meet our crew etc. we met some really really wicked people called justin, rich, fred and karen- who were all great characters and by the end of the trip we call had about 5 nicknames each (most of mine revolved around the fact i was the colour of a beetroot and flaking...nice) we all teamed up against this french family who all were really annoying and the mum genuinely did look like a frog, which was comical, they stole all of the food and annoyed the crew, cuh! but anyway, we went to whitehaven beach on the first day which is better than a photograph, crystal clear water and white sand which is so fine you can brush your teeth with it (which i found out when i caught a lot of sand in my mouth when fred threw a badly aimed frisbee at me), we returned to our boat at sunset. The meals that DJ Dave, one of the crew, cooked was amazing considering he had a teeny kitchen, we ate really well for the 3 days. we went snorkelling twice on the second day and saw some wicked fish as well as a whale and its baby just 200 metres from our boat, eagles which we fed, dolphins chasing our boat and a giant turtle, pretty amazing huh! on the third day it was really windy so we did some proper sailing which involved a lot if getting soaked but it was great fun and the guys loved the macho task of hoisting the sail, which was apparently a very tough job :) we returned back to airlie looking very red and very happy with our trip. we went out with all of the people we'd met in the evening and got pretty tipsy, we all had a great night! we found out that we had to stay here for another 3 days though as all of the busses were fully booked but hey, it's quite a nice place to get stuck in to be honest!!