Kayaking the Whitsunday Islands... pt. 1 (June 3, 2009)

At the Brissy airport Kate scared both of us as she was connecting from Sydney. We arrived via Jet Blue a few hours later.

We took the taxi to Airlie Beach and got to Shute Harbor the next morning at 6 am for our briefing with Salty Dog Kayaking Co… don’t know what Kate’s doing to Kimbo here… but it was early.

The shuttle was quite exciting… soaking us completely.

We took the boat shuttle out to Whitehaven Beach where we cooked up our lunch…

… with some visitors.

Kate, Kim, and I spent 5 days kayaking and snorkeling around the Whitsunday Islands. Whitehaven Beach… was amazing.

The water was perfect… got to practice my roll.

Whitehaven is one of the most famous beaches in the Whitsundays with the finest white sand I’ve ever been on… all minute grains of quartz, perfect temps, and the water temps were very inviting… we couldn’t stop smiling.

Some folks can’t spell…

Lots of cruises and planes came by.

Good snorkeling right from our campsite.

By dinner time we had the beach mostly to ourselves...

Some long-exposure fun…

We kayaked north the next day up into the Hill Inlet… where we dried out all of our clothes from the dew.

And caught a crab!!! There were plenty of stingrays as well… I’ve only got video of these… I believe. Stingrays are infamous as the animal that killed the croc hunter, Steve Irwin. We learned later that, although stingrays do have a venomous barb… and as Tim can attest… they kinda hurt… it rarely kills people. In fact only 3 deaths have been recorded in Aussie history. And all 3 occurred because the barb went right through the victim’s heart. And the final mistake that Steve Irwin made was that he pulled the barb out… there have been numerous survivors who left the stinger’s barb in place.

This is Kate’s attempt at ending a crab’s life.

After our impromptu lunch…

We took a small hike up to a view point. Hill Inlet is beautiful, especially at low tide.

… at low tide… the crabs come out.

Thousands of them…

A funny tree on our way down...

… we had more long-exposure fun at our second camp at Peter’s Bay…