Our Whitsundays Adventure.

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Originally uploaded by theslaad.

A lot of people come to the Whitsunday Islands to get on a sailing boat and sail around for 3 days and 2 nights. We don't really have the luxury of time to be able to do this so when we finally arrived in Airlie Beach we took ourselves off to a travel agent to see what day trips were available. Ideally we would have liked to have done a dive/snorkle trip but unsurprisingly they were already booked up for the following day so we opted for just a snorkle trip aboard a boat called The Fury.
The Fury has 4 outboards and is 900 horse power so we thought that would be quite fun.

We had a cool day. The boat went very fast and felt a bit like a rollercoaster at times. We stopped for a snorkle, but before we could go in we had to don a rather attractive and stylish stinger suit as the stingers in these parts kill you quite frankly and we don't really want that. We're at the end of the Great Barrier reef here and so we saw an amazing amount of coral, it was stunning. We also saw some nice fish, including anemone fish with bright blue stripes and huge parrot fish, we might have seen a maori wrasse too but we're not really sure - it hid under some coral too quickly. Luckily we didn't encounter any stingers so we live to snorkle another day (the 30th on the Great Barrier Reef to be precise).
We had a spot of lunch on the boat before we were whizzed off to our beach destination - Whitehaven Beach, which is apparently one of the top 10 beaches in the world. It was very nice, with clear blue water and fine white sand.
We had quite a cloudy day, but we were quite grateful for that really as when the sun did come out it was scorchingly hot. Queensland is much hotter than we've been experiencing, very humid and in the middle 30s. Not as hot as it's going to be when we go to the middle though!