Day 69 - Whitsundays

You may have noticed that I have omitted the word cruising from the title as I'm not quite sure that this is what I would call a cruise. Don't get me wrong, the crew are great, the company good but the facilities aboard are definitely not of the cruise variety; it's all pretty basic and not what we expected at all. Sleep last night was in rather short supply to say the least. It was incredibly stuffy down below with no movement of air and with the cabin doors open every noise seemed magnified even with my ear plugs in; quite a bit of snoring and the heads are pretty noisy too (that's the loo to the non sailing types). Weather today has been very changeable; one minute it is beautiful sunshine the next it's raining, it's also very choppy with quite strong gusts coming through. We stopped mid morning at Whitehaven beach where we trekked to the lookout and then down to the most wondrous fine white sandy beach for a swim. The tide was just on the turn exposing huge sandbars which when mingled with the turquoise sea was fantastic. The sun came out for our swim but just as we were walking back the heavens opened again, just as well we were wet already!

The afternoon had us motoring back, no sails again to a cove that they can't normally get to for snorkelling because it is usually too windy but today was flat calm, raining again which was a shame as it made the water rather murky and visibility wasn't as great as it may have been but we did see some impressive coral and a good variety of fish. The sighting of the day was turtles though. I saw one sat on the coral but Bill, Pat and Jonathan saw two others and actually swam with them eye to eye. I unfortunately had already gone back to the dinghy as I was getting a bit cold - typical………