We surprised Dad and Rob at the airport early in the morning and took them back to our aprtments for a much needed sleep - think they were a little tender after a few days at the Hong Kong Sevens (too much excitement apparently!).

That afternoon we headed to the Sky Rail to take a cable car up to Kuranda. We stopped off on the way to have a walk through the rainforest and to see Barron Falls, which were beautiful. Luckily the rain held off for the whole afternoon!! That night we took Dad and Rob for a look around the night markets and then to the legendary Toad Races at Johnno's Bar. Dad even got to start the race...but he didn't quite do it right; only lifting the lid of the bucket instead of the whole thing! So unfortunately he had to endure a few customary 'Pommy' jokes before getting the races under way again!

The next morning we headed down to Airlie Beach, the gateway to the Whitsundays, around a 7 hour drive, which wasn't too bad between us all. When we arrived we headed straight to the Marina to check out our boat ready for the next day and stocked up on provisions...enough to feed the 5000! We even took Dad and Rob to a Drive Thru Off Licence which Rob thought was amazing!

The next morning we went to the marina for our briefing and learnt about how to read charts, use the parallel rulers to map a journey and looked at which areas were good overnighters etc. Our skipper, Damien, took us to our boat to teach us the basics. We did some practicing with the anchor and with moorings and he showed us how to use the radio to do our 2 daily "sched's" (which are at 9am and 15.45pm to tell them where we were heading for the day and where we were anchored for the night) and a trial run through "Unsafe Passage"!!! Think the name is telling us something there - but we managed it without any mishaps! Then it was time to drop our skipper off and go it alone...in the open seas!! Apart from the pretty awful weather we had a really nice few days. We sailed to Nara Inlet, Whitehaven Beach, Tongue Bay, Maureen's Cove, Butterfly Bay and Macona Inlet. We also had a chance to do some snorkelling, with our very attractive stinger suits (think full body tights!), as it is currently stinger season. We saw loads of colourful fishes among the coral and luckily no sharks or jellies! We think it would be even more beautiful in the sun, but the sea was still pretty clear.

The weather got progressively worse over the 3 days so the wind had picked up to 25 knots which made for an uncomfortable trip back to the marina - to put it mildly!! The boat kept tipping on a 45 degree angle and the currents were so strong the boat kept spinning round, which was even more scary as there was about 50m of sea below us!! But luckily Rob managed to get us to safety and we spent the rest of the day swaying as we made our way back up to Cairns for Rob and Dad to catch their flight back to the UK and for us to catch a flight down to Brisbane.