Fitzroy Island to the Whitsundays - A little leap down the coast...

At 2030 on the 12th of October we departed Fitzroy Island for somewhere further south. The conditions had improved, but we still had to motorsail all night into southeasterly winds. By the sunrise we were approximately 15 nautical miles east of Dunk Island with light easterly winds.

We decided to continue down the edge of the reef and see if we could make it to the Whitsundays before the predicted strong southeasterly winds arrived. If the wind looked like it was about to kick in early we had the option of stopping on the outer reef or pulling into Magnetic Island before nightfall.

The conditions remained perfect for the day and we landed several fish, however, we only kept the Spanish Mackerel. Eric and Ryan supervised the fish filleting operation and helped clean up after the task was complete.

The wind picked up a little overnight as it started to swing back to the southeast, but by dawn we were off Gloucester Island. We pushed on to Langford Island and picked up a mooring around 1030 on the 14th of October before hitting the water for an early snorkel.

The 260 nautical mile trip down was fast and we missed some of the coast we had wanted to explore, but we made up sufficient time to allow family to visit us in the Whitsundays. Life is about trade-offs and everyone was happy to be moving again!

Around and about in the Whitsundays

Last week was a wet and windy old week in the Whitsundays, and we had been running around hiding in various little hidey holes, trying to stay dry. We spent more time at Hamilton Island Marina (just in case I haven't said it before, we can highly recommend a stop or five here ;-). We then spent a couple of nights in Cid Harbour, before moving on to Butterfly Bay, followed by a few nights in Stonehaven, then a night moored off Black Island (aka Bali Hai), and we wrapped it all up with another night in Cid Harbour.

In between times we visited beautiful Luncheon Bay on the north side of Hook Island and also went to Langford Island, just south of Hayman Island. Towards the end of the week the wind starting dying down and the clouds started clearing so we managed to get in some diving and snorkelling in these places too.

Langford in particular is a nice place to stop, where you can easily pick up one of several moorings located just off the sand spit joining Langford Island and One Foot Island. It is then a simple matter to don your diving gear, hook yourself up to the Powerdive unit and step off the back of the boat into your own private fish filled, coral garden...so we did!

A bunch of Damsels in distress...

The very rare, yellow-nailed, yellow-tentacled, yellow-eyed, yellow-belted, bubbling, black boo bear!

Nick took Emily into some very shallow water near the beach and taught her how to use the Powerdive unit. She took to it like, well, a fish in water! Unfortunately it was a bit murky here due to the wind and strong currents, but you can see her clearly enough above to know that she looked like she was preparing to go trick-or-treating!!

A shy little Blackback Anemonefish, hiding in a Bulb-tipped Anemone.

I have recently invested in a great little e-product which so far has come in very handy indeed. It is Neville Coleman's Marine Life Identification eGuide (Asia/Indo-Pacific)...and you can find out more about it here. Pretty much everything I have seen in the water up here to date, I have been able to ID pretty reliably in Neville's Guide...(well, as reliably as I can with the pictures I have)? Having the guide on my iPod means we don't need to have lots of big books on board, hogging valuable space, either. I hope to go back and ID the other things I have posted pics of recently...when I get a quiet minute or two.

Billions of big Batfish...not exactly sure which ones

A type of Acanthastrea or stony coral

Elephant Ear Sponge

That's all I have had time to edit and get together for the blog. Gonna go have some yummy pizza for dinner now.

Ciao, ciao!