Wonderful Whitsunday's - day 9 & 10

Last Days in the Whitsunday Islands

9th - 11th September 2014

Day 9 - Hayman Island

Saving the best till last we were all very excited to sail to Hayman Island for the day, having heard that Blue Pearl bay offered some of the most impressive snorkelling in the Whitsundays. This area was pretty busy, and we were lucky to get a mooring within 10 minutes of arriving. It’s a bit like driving round the Westfield car park, you just have to wait for someone else to go! Blue Pearl didn’t disappoint, the snorkelling was good from the beach, but really great towards the south of the bay near castle rock. Simon stayed in the tender so that we had support as the water was pretty deep with some strong currents at times.



Looking from Langford to Hook Island

 This area is popular with large party style boats, and a few of them erected huge inflatable slides from their masts. Our kids looked on enviously, but it was strictly over 18s!! To add insult to injury a large flashy power boat moored next to us for the afternoon, and the boys couldn’t believe their eyes when 20 bikini clad girls surrounded one bloke who took them out to splash around!!



Langford Island

After lunch we moved to Langford Island, which has a huge sand bank exposed at low tide, and although the plan was to go for a walk, I couldn’t resist another snorkel!! It wasn’t long before the whole family joined me for one of the top snorkel experiences of the trip! The coral was truly amazing, with vast forests of staghorn coral, brightly coloured blooms flowering everywhere, and lots of colourful fish species. We spotted a few large fish, but they weren’t as prevalent as the brightly coloured reef fish. This was our last snorkel of the holiday and it was a great note to finish on. Strong winds were forecast for the evening so we headed into Stonehaven to weather the storm.



Getting a bit arty!

Day 10 - Wet and Wild on the Trapeze



A big swell ensured some great waves!

With a strong wind we headed out for a sail, with no particular end destination we challenged ourselves to get the fastest speed from Mintaka. The kids were roped onto the trapeze for a wet and wild ride and we reached over 5 knots under sail!! 

 

What we didn’t anticipate was how far we travelled and before we knew it we almost reached the limits of the charter zone!! Heading back into land meant going up wind and the cat was sluggish and unresponsive to these conditions, with speed dropping to 2 knots or less!! So on went the engines and we motored a couple of fuel guzzling hours to reach Nara Inlet and anchor overnight.

 

 

Last Fish of the Holiday

We had expert advice that Nara was going to be a fisherman's dream, so everyone went off in the tender with high expectations. However it was a snagging nightmare and with the engine running on fumes alone we weren’t able to head towards the end of the inlet where the large fish wait at the drop off. So no fish for tea again!!

 

All good things come to an end…Boo!!

 

 

We set off early having organised and packed first thing, sailing as much of the way with a light wind. However, we had to turn the engines on when Daydream Island stole our wind and our speed dropped. It turned out that we had used much more fuel than we had realised on our previous day, and the port engine actually cut out just outside of Shute Harbour!! When we handed the boat over and re-fuelled I was glad that I had been blissfully ignorant of our empty fuel tanks, otherwise it would have been a nail biting journey back to the mainland!!

 

There isn’t a fuel gauge as such on the boat, but you calculate your fuel consumption from the engine hours. A full tank which can do 25 running hours . As we had re-fuelled at Hamilton we thought we had put in a full tank, but the pre-set payment required meant we had under estimated how much fuel to put in and therefore ran Mintaka dry on the home run!!

 

So handover was very smooth and easy, we said our farewells to the fantastic Cumberland team and re-loaded everything back into the camper trailer ready for more adventures.