Sailing the High Seas at the Whitsundays

Airlie Beach and the Whitsundays

Arriving in Airlie Beach around 9AM, I found remarkably little to do til the 3PM departure of my boat. The town is made up entirely of resorts, hostels and tour booking shops and offers nothing more than a beachside walk and a public pool for entertainment. I boarded the sailing vessel Jade shortly after three along with thirty other backpacking types. The boat had just traded hands and was on its maiden voyage with the new crew. The massive sails were never unfurled (except for a ten minute block where they were, so as to prove we actually had sails – during this time, we drifted backwards about half a kilometre), the single motor helped the heavily laden catamaran rocket along at a steady 6 knots.

The first day was used solely to drive to the island resort where half the passengers would be spending the night. The seas were calm and we drifted for 3 hours through a few dozen picturesque isles covered in lush, nearly-tropical rainforest. We had dinner on the boat (while firmly attached to a perfectly good chunk of dry land) – the lack of substance or taste was attributed to the inexperience of the crew and the understanding that food at sea is supposed to be terrible. The island was part of the national park and offered dozens of friendly wallabies, several walking trails and a five-star resort complete with jacuzzi, sauna and nightly karaoke. I had signed up to stay on the boat and was assigned a mattress in a tiny nook of the common cabin – this seemed unfair at first until all the other passengers migrated to the adjoining couches from their dank, cockroach-infested private cabins.

We were awoken at 7, fed a breakfast of corn flakes and white bread and taken out on the open seas. On this particular day, the winds were considerable and we were facing 2-3m waves. Already suffering from the binge drinking of the previous night, half the passengers were soon leaning over the rails. The captain explained that the conditions would necessitate 3 hours of seas twice the size of what we'd seen so far to reach the famed Whitehaven Beach; he put it to a vote as to whether to dock at the posh resort town on Hamilton Island for 3 hours or to continue on, puking our guts out and losing people over the sides; my block was outvoted 28 to 2.

Hamilton was swarming with golf-cart driving millionaires; everywhere there were overpriced restaurants, highrise hotels and lawnchair-spotted beaches. Our group of unwashed, rucksack wielding backpackers seemed a bit out of place, shooting up and down in the glass-elevators of the central tower.

After lounging at the pool for a time, we moved on to the main island of the group – Whitsunday Island. Some of us hiked through the bush to Dugong Bay where there was a disturbing lack of dugongs. On the return to our resort on Long Island, an Israeli girl who was fresh out of the army talked me into facing the massive oncoming waves clinging to the hammocks on the bow of the ship; this was a bit on the freezing size but entertaining nonetheless.

Back in the harbour we had beef lasagne and all the over-cooked potato salad we could eat. The group proceeded to sneak substantial supplies of boos into the resort and challenged the other guests to a beer-pong tourney.

We started out around 8am the next day and kept to calmer waters on the way to the diving beach. The advertised “Free Scuba Dive" turned out to be all of 10 minutes long, and I opted to snorkel instead. The waters were filled with hundreds of jellyfish and the first half-dozen attempts at swimming were prematurely ended with a mad dash to the safety of shore. We eventually discovered that the vast majority of the jellies were harmless, and so were soon merrily flinging the blobs at each other and at those who were still huddled in morbid fear on the beach. The reef was about 5 meters across but had plenty of fish on offer; giant “batfish" feasted on the bread that the crew had hidden from us over breakfast.

We returned to port and I killed a few hours hiking random trails that promised estuarine crocodiles (though I spotted none). The 8PM bus to Cairns showed Rush Hour 2, and though I had once believed that nothing could be more annoying than Chris Tucker's voice, broken tracking that caused every syllable to ring out in a high-pitched static pop, filled that void nicely.

While the rest of Australia struggles with drought conditions, the tropical north tries to deal with its surplus