Due to the Oz Experience bus schedule, I arrived in Airlie Beach four days before my ship was due to sail. Thankfully, I was able to check-in to my hostel early, and met Martin and the girls in the bar that night.
Airlie Beach only really exists as a port to the Whitsunday Islands. As a result its economy is based on tourism. There are a couple of nice hotels and restaurants, but most places are aimed at backpackers, which was good for us! The bar in Beaches (where we were staying) was cheap, busy and did great food. It also closed at midnight, so the hostel itself was quiet enough to sleep well after then.
Martin had just come back from a boat called “Powerplay” which the girls were due to sail on a few days later. Unfortunately none of them seemed to enjoy it very much, citing that it was more of a “couples boat” and a bit crowded, with 18 people on board.
I had been looking forward to doing some sailing even before I left Aberdeen, and had gone out of my way to find a good boat. Solway Lass didn’t disappoint! There was a full load of 32 passengers and 6 crew on board when we left, made-up of a mixture of families, couples and backpackers. Still, the ship didn’t feel crowded at all, even in the 6-bed cabin at the bow! As we left port at around 8 o’clock at night it was too dark to get a good view of the ship, but when we got on deck for breakfast the next morning I was struck by the scale of the masts and rigging.
After breakfast, our first stop was to be the brilliant white sands of Whitehaven Beach. This sand is said to be 99% pure, and fine enough to clean jewelry with. Up until this point we had been using a diesel engine for power, as Solway Lass has no keel so cannot sail into the wind, but once we left Whitehaven the wind was at our back and the crew started setting sails. The sails stayed up for rest of the day, until we dropped the anchor for the night in a small bay and watched the sun set behind the islands.
Unfortunately the wind changed during the night, and we were unable to use the sails much on the second day. Although Solway Lass is not equipped for SCUBA diving, we were met by a ribbed dive-boat and myself and another passenger spent the morning diving further round the coast. It was my first dive away from Magnetic Island, and the water was much clearer and the coral and fish were far more colourful. At one point toward the end of our dive, we heard whales calling loud enough that at one point our guide thought they were right behind us! He wasn’t far off, as we saw a pod of whales swimming a couple of hundred metres away once we got back on the dive-boat! After lunch and an afternoon of snorkeling, we anchored for the night in a long inlet, between hills covered in thick forest.
With the wind at our back again, our last day on the ship was spent mostly under sail as we made our way back to Airlie Beach. I had grown used to the calm and quiet on board the ship, but after a relatively quiet night out in Airlie Beach, I was back on the bus at 7am and heading down to Fraser Island.
