Seventeen hours on a coach is no ones idea of a good time, but if anything could be worth such an extended period of purgatory it would surely be the chance to indulge in a few days of leisurely sailing through a tropical archipelago. And having spent the previous two weeks giving both my upper body (on my Noosa River kayak trip) and then my lower body (on the Cooloola Great Walk) a workout, I figured it was about time I gave my tan a good workout too. So after taking the overnight coach about a thousand kilometres north from Noosa I ended up back in the tiny coastal town of Airlie Beach, where I had spent my first year as a backpacker way back in 2006. And just like I had during those heady days of my twenties, I had booked myself on a sailing trip through the Whitsunday Islands.
Waking to a cloudless sky on Monday morning (June 21st), I was soon making my way along the foreshore boardwalk towards the Coral Sea Marina, where I met my fourteen fellow passengers along with Dave the skipper and Elliott the deckhand for our trip aboard the SV
Whitehaven, a steel ketch. As with any extended group tour (the likes of which I very rarely participate in) the dynamics of the group can have a massive impact on your experience, but thankfully it soon became apparent that, much like my previous Whitsundays sailing trip (not to mention a slightly more recent sailing trip along the Turkish coast) I had lucked out with my which included a family of five, three younger couples, a pair of ladies in their sixties (one of whom in particular would prove to be the life of the party onboard) and a German radiologist named Uli. It was also a very refreshing change during these accursed days of no foreign tourists to have a mixture of accents onboard, with three Germans (all living in Sydney) and a South Zealander couple amongst our number.
So with introductions having been conducted and the oversized esky/cooler box/chilly bin having been thoroughly stocked (the boat having a BYO drinks policy) we cast off the bowlines and headed out into the Coral Sea to begin threading our way through the Whitsundays in exactly the sort of weather you dream about having for such an
occasion. Passing to the north of the Molle Island group, with the distant Hayman Island seeming to float on a sea of sparkling jewels, we eventually made our way into the long, slender embrace of Nara Inlet at the southern end of Hook Island (the in the group), where we went ashore in the little tender to check out some old aboriginal artworks left behind by the Ngaro people, who lived in this region for thousands of years while it was still connected to the mainland, long before rising sea levels had flooded the valleys and created the archipelago now beloved of sailors and tourists alike.
Back onboard we devoured our buffet lunch, before motoring our way out of Nara Inlet and then back up into the adjacent Macona Inlet, where we had our first opportunity to go for a paddle in the tandem sea kayaks kept onboard. With Uli (who was about the same height as me) as my kayak partner - as opposed to all of my recent kayak trips which had been done solo - it felt as though I had a small outboard motor for assistance, as every paddle stroke seemed to propel me
twice as far forward as I was expecting! So with little effort at all we made our way alongside a section of mangroves to arrive at a lovely little beach on the eastern shoreline of Macona Inlet, where I indulged in a refreshing swim after a spot of before we headed back to the mothership to get cleaned up in time for dinner - a lovely spaghetti bolognese prepared by the Elliott, who at one stage during the afternoon had managed to snag his hair with the hook of a fishing rod suspended from the ceiling of the back deck! By his own admission, it was the first time he had caught anything with that fishing rod, despite numerous previous attempts at fishing...
