The Nist Walkabout: Cruising the Whitsundays... Day 3...

For the sake of time, I'm going to eventually have to start combining days - much to my regret. We just did and saw so much it is hard to work it down to just a few snippets for you to enjoy. Oh well...

Travel day 3 - "Reddish-Brown"

We left Butterfly Bay early and backtracked just a bit to do some snorkeling along the top end of Hook Island. We were told these were the best spots and the lived up to the reputation! Our first stop was at Manta Ray Bay where we had the best snorkeling of the entire trip. Beautiful fish and coral, calm water, bright sunshine and not a single other human until we were ready to move on. Fantastic! I'm not going to inundate you with snorkeling photos (though I could) - I'm working on a snorkeling slideshow I'll add to the next post. But I have to include shots of us feeding the 3 large bat fish that swam up to our boat looking for a handout. We gave them each a couple of pieces of bread - they even ate some straight from Jon's hand!

Clarice took a video on her camera, but the camera is dying and videos won't play well.

Instead of moving the whole boat, we took the dinghy to the next bay over - Luncheon Bay - for a hike along its "beach" made entirely of broken bits of coral. Glad we brought the shoes as the book suggested. We're slowly moving along when Clarice says, "Look! Turtle!" Now after red pandas my favorite animals are sea turtles (of any variety) so I was a bit skeptical. I said, "Probably just a big fish..." and no sooner were the words out of my mouth than the turtle popped his little head out of the blue waters. But we didn't bring the camera! No matter, in a very "Steve Irwin" moment I had my mask on and was overboard almost before Clarice could say, "Do you want to get out?" This little guys was perfectly happy just lazily moving on his merry way, but I got 4-5 minutes to swim alongside him since I made sure to keep my arms tucked in and leave him a bit of space. Awesome!

Some fun trees. Check out the roots on the one on the right!

After we made it back to the boat we were pretty tired and decided to head around Hook Island and try to have a bit of a rest at low tide on Langford Island. Langford is a bit of rock with a long shallow sandy area the appears, as if by magic, at low tide. The Hayman Island Resort (across the water on Hayman Island - natch) ferries its highfalutin guests over there for a bit of sand and sun. Russ, our charter operator, told us that Langford was the best place to go if we wanted to see sea turtles, but we were tired of the swimming and just lounged around on the beach enjoying the peacefulness of the setting. As late afternoon approached, we ducked across the little bay over to Stonehaven Anchorage for the night. Excellent choice with one of the prettiest sunsets I've ever seen.