After being on a bus for what seemed like forever, 13 hours to be exact. We arrived in Airlie Beach, the departure point to the Whitsunday Islands. I was really excited about this, I had seen the pictures and it looked incredible. We got off the coach into some lovely sunshine which made a nice change to the bad weather we had been having.

We found our hostel, Magnums, yes I know it sounds a little bit suspect but it was a backpacker hostel I swear! In fact it's a chain and the biggest in Airlie Beach so there. We checked in and had a quick nap and then went to the shops to grab some food. Crackers and tuna, all different flavours too, it was actually pretty nice. Tuan had been living on it for ages so me and Carrie decided to give it ago and became pretty fond of it. After lunch we headed on down to the lagoon for a swim, we couldn't go in the sea because again there were bleeding jellyfish, in fact pretty much all the way down the coast were jelly fish but we had accepted this by now. The lagoon was real nice, I preferred it to the Cairns one as it was a fair bit deeper and had nice grass all the way around it.

We had booked a Didgeridoo lesson that afternoon so after jumping out the lagoon we wondered up the road to try and find the didge shop. The shop was pretty cool, loads of didges and tribal art work , I would have bought some but it was a tad expensive! The two guys who ran the shop were pretty funny and go straight into the lesson, we were allowed to pick a didge from any display in the shop and then we were given the basics on how to play them. It was pretty funny watching everyone trying to get a sound, I was more interested in trying out any many didges as I could! After the lesson the guys gave us a show which was pretty cool, drum and bass beats with a didge, great fun and id like to learn it.

The next day was our boat trip so we checked in with the sailing company and booked our Scuba try dive, which I was real excited about. We decided to have an early night and by early night I mean go out for a few drinks and accidently not come back till 4am. Considering we had to be at the dock at 8am it probably wasnt the best move and trying to get up in the morning wasn't great added to the fact that the weather had turned bad again and by bad I mean torrential down pours, big time monsoon like rain L . Nevertheless we were hopeful that the weather would improve on the 2nd day maybe. We met the rest of our group down at the dock, there were 25 of us. Our boat was called The Hammer and was a retired race yacht who had won affair few races. We also found out that our Skipper Mike was a pretty well known skipper who knew his stuff and how to race!

The Hammer wasn't a party boat but more of a sailing experience boat which is what we wanted. Straight away Mike told us the weather wasn't going to be good but the trip will be what you make of it and there will be some great chances to get some good sailing in. Personally it didn't bother me, I was happy with doing some sailing in bad weather to get a feel of what its like. In fact it didn't bother many of us, we were lucky enough to have a pretty cool group who were ready to make the trip good no matter what.

We all boarded and got given our beds etc and then sat up on deck ready to set sail. The weather was spitting now and we could see light trying to push through the clouds so fingers crossed the sun will appear. We used the engine to get us out of harbour and when we were far enough out we raised the sails. Tuan and I volunteered from the start to help with the sailing whenever we could and Mike and the two deck hands taught us the basics. Our first job was to raise the sails…Not as easy as ya think but we got the job done after some teaching. The wind grabbed the sails and we were off! As soon as we passed the head and were exposed to the full power of the wind the speed really picked up. It was raining again now and yellow rain coats were handed out but they were more of a pain than anything so no top it was for the rest of the trip. It wasn't freezing, just wet. Mike gave us a quick speech on what was going to be needed from us when sailing in these conditions. The main thing was moving from side to side on deck. We were about to hit some real strong wind and pick up some more speed which meant the yacht was going to be tipping quite hard to the side. He explained that we would need to put all our weight on the high side when sailing like this. We all got into position and hit the wind, straight away you could feel the speed and the boat tip, we were at a 45 degree angle, it was awesome, like you see onTV, check the pics!

We sailed for a while like this all the way out to the Whitsunday Islands where the wind and rain stopped and we were given some calm weather. Mike told us because the weather had calmed down this may be the only chance to do the scuba diving so we were told to suit up and be ready in 10 mins! I headed down stairs and as soon as I went under deck it hit me, sea sickness…… I don't know what happened, ive never had it before but as soon as I was under deck I felt sick, above deck I felt fine. I was told that loosing sight of the horizon can trigger it so I focussed on that. I felt a bit better but I needed to be still and being on a boat that was hard. The scuba lesson guys arrived and we hopped onto their boat. I wasn't feeling to great still and had to throw up over the side, not nice but it did make me feel better haha. After a quick lesson we entered the water (we had moved well away from the sick by now) and instantly I felt better again, crazy stuff.

The scuba lesson was awesome, ive never done it before so it was really good to try something completely new. We saw loads of fish and coral but it could have been a lot better because the water was still a bit murky from the cyclone that hot a few months back. By murky I mean really clear compared to what I was used to in the sea around the UK but not as clear as the waters in Thailand.

After the scuba it was lunch, I was back on form now and put the sickness down to the "light" drinking the night before. Lunch was really nice, the deckhands could cook up a pretty tasty lunch! We carried on sailing round the islands and soon came to a snorkelling location so back in the water we went, oh, I forgot to mention, when we entered the water we had to wear stinger suits, a really attractive leotard looking bit of material that shows of all your bits mmm nice, ha!

Later that day we anchored in a cove to get shelter from the wind and where the water was calm. We took the tender to one of the islands to take a look at some ancient aboriginal art and a big Golden Orb spider, check the pics, this thing was the size of my hand! In the evening we played a few games and had a nice dinner, spag bol. We also saw hammer head shark swim by the boat which was cool and some big jelly fish. I don't know the name but they weren't the stinger ones.

One of the main attraction of the Whitsunday Islands is Whitehaven Beach, one of the best in the world apparently, I had seen pics and it was pretty nice. We were up early and headed to Whitsunday Island where Whitehaven beach was located. We arrived on the the other side of the island so we could walk up and over the top to see the beach from the view point. There were pictures of what it should look like but you had to be there at a certain time and we were not there at that time so it just looked like a small bot of beach to us but at least we saw it sort of. It still looked nice and our luck changed when we arrived because the sun came out in full force, really hot, we rushed down to the beach and threw our stinger suits on and went for a swim. The sand was silica sand so it squeaked when you walked on it, really nice fine sand with a high content of silica. After some swimming and chilling out we headed back to the boat for a race!

One of the deck hands told us mike had called him over the radio and said that Boomerang, another racing yacht was up for a race J . We headed back, had some lunch and then prepared to kick some ass. Mike was known as a pretty decent race skipper so I was looking forward to seeing what he could do. We were given a quick lesson on moving from side to side when Mike needed to swing the boom to turn sharp to left of right. After the lesson we lifted the sails and were off! It was great fun, Mike was cutting in behind boomerang to scare us all and boomerang was doing the same to us, it was pretty close sometimes but hey, we could all swim so it wasn't to bad ;) As we were moving away from the island we saw the rain come back in force and completely cover the island, we had just missed it by a few minutes and we could see it chasing us, it was pretty strange, we could see the rain literally about 50 meters next to us hitting the sea but we were in the dry sun still J

Needless to say we won the race and Mike decided that we were going to sling shot round the top of the Whitsundays to head back to harbour. He had never done this before in his career because the wind had never been right so this was a first for everyone, we managed to get some serious speed up and were crashing and cutting through the waves, it was a great end to the trip. We arrived back a bit earlier because of the speed we picked up and was welcomed by some more rain. The tide was out so we couldn't get back into the harbour and had to take then tender in small groups to shore in the hard core rain. It was funny to be honest and we can look back to say we experienced some pretty full on sailing in bad weather.

That evening we had to catch an overnight coach down to Town 1770. We were soaked, had no where to put our things and our coach was at mid night! We dried off and got changed in a travel shop we had been using and were lucky enough to have a friend we had net earlier staying in magnums so we could dump our stuff there. Everything worked out so all we had to do now is wait. Next stop Town 1770.