Our second day in the Whitsundays was filled with adventures. From our overnight anchorage at Stonehaven we made our way around Langford Island so that we could pick up some of the mooring buoys on the far side of the island against the reef.
Because the reef here extends out over a large area we needed to motor carefully around the hidden coral. As we were slowly making our way around the island we spotted a shape in the water ahead of us. With our minds focused on avoiding the coral heads and rocks it took us a minute to realised that it was a whale.
We immediately shut off the engine as we had been instructed to do when in the national park and watched as the whale surfaced just ahead of our boat. We watched for a while, and once we hadn’t seen the whale for a few minutes we went to turn the engine back on and continue our journey around the island.
I think it is fair to say that we were both pretty surprised when the whale suddenly breached just behind the boat. It was an incredible sight, and so unexpected. As we stood on the back of the boat watching we realised that the whale was swimming towards us.
The huge whale passed right underneath the corner of the boat, giving us the most amazing close-up view as it passed underneath us before diving deep into the ocean. We couldn’t believe how lucky we had been to have been so close to a whale; we knew when we booked that humpback whales would be passing through the area on their annual migration, but I don’t think either of us expected to see one and certainly not quite so close to the boat!
After making sure the whale had really swum away, we continued around Langford Island and were able to get a mooring off of the reef. After some lunch we took the dinghy ashore to explore the sandbar.
The tide was low enough that parts of the reef were exposed, allowing us to get a close-up view of some of the unusual corals.
We knew that the area was good for snorkeling and so set off to explore more of the underwater reef.
We saw so many fish in this part of the reef and could even hear the large parrot fish in the photo above crunching on the coral. Everywhere we swam there were shoals of tiny fish all over the coral.
Eventually we made our way back to the boat, so that we could sail around to one of the inlets on Hook Island for the night.
We were able to find a mooring buoy in the second inlet we tried called Maureen’s Cove. After getting settled we packed ourselves a little picnic and took the dinghy over to the beach.
We sat on the coral watching the sun set over the headlands we had just sailed around.
It was a great end to a pretty exciting day. We made our way back to the boat to cook dinner and spent another evening sitting out watching the stars.