Tuesday 16th October – Whale watching

We were originally scheduled to go Whale watching this afternoon, but we received a phone call yesterday to say that the afternoon trip had been cancelled as they didn’t have enough people but we could go on the morning one so obviously we said yes even though it was an even earlier start. We were picked up at 6.45 and taken round to the boat, luckily they provided coffee so after a couple of cups of that we were feeling human and ready for the day. We stopped at Fraser Island to pick up a number of people that are staying there but are booked on this cruise then we were off. We had been underway for what seemed like a couple of hours when the captain came on to say this was the area where they have been seen so we needed to keep a look out. It didn’t take very long before we saw a mother and her calf in the distance, after pointing this out to the crew we were off and managed to get really close to them. The calf looked quite small but they kept coming to the surface so we had a good view although they didn’t breach or flip the tail over but they are so majestic you can forgive them for not putting on a massive show. After about half an hour we moved on and it wasn’t long before we saw another mother and calf this one seemed a little bigger but still quite small. Again we sat watching them for some time and then it was time to move on again to our final stop. A third mother and calf were waiting for us at this site as we had been on the go for a few hours the crew served up coffee and some cakes and just as the queue was forming and Chris and I had decided it was probably better to join the queue than hope something would still be left at the end the calf decided to start practicing his breaching! This obviously encouraged mum to have a go and we had the spectacular sight of whales leaping out of the water. They kept this up for about 15 minutes so we sat watching them for that whole time. It would seem that they are as curious about us as we are about them, at least when they are young they are so the calf swam very close to the boat giving us a fantastic view. After a while another boat arrived so the calf decided to go off an investigate them, although they seemed to stop breaching as they went to investigate the other boat so we definitely had a better view. Unfortunately it was time to head back so after a fantastic morning we set off for the dock. I think we had done well to change to the morning trip as we were out for just over six hours which I don’t think we would have been able to do if we had gone out in the afternoon. We should have been taken back to the apartment but we decided we would stay down by the harbour and watch the boats while having something to eat which we did then we set off back to the room about 3pm which gave us time to sort out the washing / packing before we leave tomorrow.