Sailing the Whitsundays
Sunday, June 19th, 2005The nicest thing at Whitsundays came at the very end of our sail. It was a young Humpback whale. Not a baby, but not fully grown, it just showed off by our boat for around 10 minuts, jumping out of the water, waving its tail at us, and generally having fun at the ocean. We saw it on our way back from the islands to Airlie-Beach, and everybody was pretty fascinated by the majestic animal.
The islands themselves are nice, though not exceptional. We were 24 persons on the boat, in addition to crew of 4 persons; it was extremely small, but nobody really cared (except Roey, who got this sea-sickness every time the boat was sailing and not standing in place). On the first day I did a nice dive at a place called Pearl-Bay - nice corals, plenty of small fish, but no pearls there; I also did some snorkeling at another bay there, at the morning of our second day - I didn’t take another dive because they had only small air baloons and I figured out that it wouldn’t last me much time and thus was not cost-effective.
We also visited some nice beaches, including the famous WhiteHaven Beach - a 6 K”m stretch of pure silicon, which means exceptionally thin grains of purely white sand - more like a white sand-powder than a sand. You can actually hear it squeech when you walk on this sand.
The last night we parked on Cid’s bay. According to one of our crew (I still didn’t decide if I believe him or not), Cid was the dog of Captain Cook, and he died jsut here and was buried in the island now bearing his name - Cid Island. I think that if it is true, it is very amusing that old Cook named an island after his dog rather then, let’s say, his wife - the poor lady who waited in England while he was having his three round-the-world tours from which he never got back home.
Actually, he was probably sick of all this naming thingy: up north there are island groups called, respectively, “Tuesday Islands”, “Wednesday Islands”, and - yes - “Thursday Islands”. Guess when Cook passed these islands. The Whitsundays, by the way, are named so because Cook erretically thought he was passing them at Whitsunday (a christian date, something like our SHAVUOT). He was off by one day, though, failing to notice that he passed the date line - an error he only found too late, when he was back in London.
The Whitsundays are “mainland” type islands - not coral cays like Lady-Musgrave, but actually forested hills, the type we usually think of as tops of underwater mountains. They do have, of course, some tropical guidlines (for example, we were one day on a tidal beach, e.g. a beach that appears only at low tide but is totally covered by water on the high tide). Today we made a nice one-hour walk to a lookout point on one of the islands, where we caught a really good glimps of the entire island-group: very nice sight!
On the ship itself we were the only three Israelies; there were plenty of Dutch guys (who were, actually, most dominant socially) and some other europeans - a girl from Finland accompanied by her French boyfriend; a few Canadians; and some more. The food was excellent, and in the nights we all drank and played some drinking and other social games. The western social games aer very different than the ones I saw inHong-Kong (read my post from there), but I will describe them at a later time - now I have to go and prepare myself for the after-sail party we are all having tonight.
