Cruising Log—21...Luncheon Bay to Whitehaven

Monday 25 September, and it is time to start working our way south, having reached the northernmost point of our journey, four and a half months after setting out, and with almost 800 nautical miles on the clock.

We sailed down the east side of Hook Island and then part of Whitsunday Island, to Tongue Bay, which has good shelter from the continuing south-east wind. We went trolling in the dinghy and Leanne soon landed a dinner-sized Talang Queenfish. This one I baked in Moroccan spices, accompanied with baked potato and sweet potato done in olive oil, garlic and rosemary. Yum!

Interestingly, neither the fish life nor the water visibility in the Whitsundays are as good as at the Keppels, but the coral is infinitely better and the underwater landscapes much more dramatic.

At Luncheon Bay the best snorkelling is over on the east side, from the last mooring out to the point at the east end of the bay. There are huge drop-offs, caves, chasms, and both delicately beautiful and impressively massive coral structures.

No visit to the Whitsundays would be complete without a walk from Tongue Bay to the lookout over Hill Inlet and Whitehaven Beach. It is hard to describe the scene, just miles and miles of the whitest sand imaginable, with every shade of blue water, the colour varying with the depth over the white sand. All set to a rugged, heavily forested backdrop. Magic!

There followed the obligatory visit and swim over the white sands at the mouth of Hill Inlet. In this we were careful as from the lookout we had seen that the shallows were teeming with large stingrays. We didn’t want to do a Steve Irwin.

The shallows were also well populated with young Lemon Sharks, which our book says grow to 3.3 metres in length and weigh up to 91 kg and are “generally harmless to divers but potentially dangerous.” A rather ambivalent description, I think. I wonder where the parents are?

OK, the place is a tourist trap, but despite the hordes it is worth the visit.

On Thursday 28 September we left Tongue Bay for the anchorage at Whitehaven Beach, an obligatory stop, where we celebrated Leanne’s birthday the following day. Whitehaven is rated one of the ten best beaches in the world, not hard to see why.