Whitsundays Holiday - Part 2

Day 2 – Monday 13th October
Continued from here:


The sun finally rose after an interminable night in Cid Harbour (2). It had been a very hot night, but because it kept raining we were unable to have our hatches open so it was rather stuffy in the cabin. Milord snored and twitched until I was ready to kill him and I had managed to get sunburnt the day before which didn’t help, as every time I moved in my sleep that woke me up too!

(How silly is that? Lily-white after a Sydney winter we walk into the tropical sun without any sunscreen or even a hat. Born in Africa, living in Australia – I have no excuse! Milord also has no excuse, and his burnt baldness was bright red for days until it started to peel. Nice.)

Milord volunteered to move into another cabin for the rest of the trip, which made a great improvement and will go on the to-do list for next time! The beds on a boat are just too small to share with a large man.

Apart from that our anchorage had been perfect – out of the wind and practically no rolling.


I made coffee and orange juice and unearthed provisions from the bottom of the chest fridge, and Milord cooked us bacon and egg sandwiches on the deck barbeque. Although we had the occasional rain shower it was pleasantly warm and we were sheltered by our awning. We tidied up, consulted the charts, packed away the awning, raised the anchor and headed north again.

We were headed to Butterfly Bay on Hook Island for a spot of snorkelling, which involved us sailing past our proposed night anchorage in Stonehaven (3) on the way. We got to Butterfly Bay (4) a couple of hours later, took the dinghy to the reef and dropped its little anchor on a patch of sand, and slipped into the sea.

Diving in the Whitsundays is horrible. The islands are close to the mainland so there is plenty of runoff carrying silt, plus the tides get compressed and churn up a lot of muck too. The visibility is not great – probably about 5m (15ft), so once you get to 5m it’s pretty murky down there! We dived on our last trip and didn’t enjoy it, so this time we had decided just to snorkel.

The reef and fish are superb, although the visibility isn’t very good. The water was 26C which is a little chilly – we didn’t wear wetsuits but a shortie wetsuit would have been nice - I might have to buy one! I did wear a “stinger suit” which is a full-body swimsuit that protects you from sunburn and coral. I’m glad I had that, because whenever I went swimming without it I came up in little incredibly itchy welts on my body that lasted a week, possibly caused by bits of jellyfish or nymph anemones. Luckily I’d thought to pack antihistamine ointment and pills.

We snorkelled for about an hour and we saw huge napoleon wrasse and a school of baby barracuda in addition to the normal oodles of fish among the coral. It was pretty good.


Then back on board for a shower, and we headed back to Stonehaven with a ham and cheese roll and a beer in hand.

Dinner was barramundi (fish) on the barbeque with salad and white wine, watching a spectacular sunset. Our anchorage was a bit rolly and gusty, but we hoped things would settle down in the night.



...continued here.

South Africa 2008: Sodwana Bay

I’d always heard that the place to scuba dive in South Africa is Sodwana Bay. It’s about as close to the equator as you can get in SA, and the warm current travels south along the east coast bringing lovely warm water with it. To be honest that’s about all I knew about the place. When I started looking online for a place to stay there I noticed that the pickings were rather slim, and that the emphasis seemed to be a little, uh, rustic. For example, only a couple of the places offered en-suite bathrooms, and a few expected you cook for yourself over open fires. Yes, lovely if that’s what you want, but I was on honeymoon dammit!

I ended up choosing the Sodwana Bay Lodge, as they advertised a “honeymoon cabin”. They also had an on-site dive operator, and good sounding accommodation plus diving packages. I have to say, I was very happy with the place. Our accommodation included dinner and breakfast, and not the one-buffet-suits-all variety either. Breakfast had a bit of a buffet going on, but you could have your eggs or an omelette made to order, and toast and coffee is brought to your table. Dinner is a la carte, and very good too. They also have a good wine list, which while not included in the price was not expensive.


Our room was basic but nice, a spacious thatched bamboo hut with en-suite and veranda. We had a spa tub (I think that is what made it the “honeymoon” cabin) and plenty of hot water, and a kettle for coffee. Our bed was huge and very comfortable, with a decent mosquito net to drape over it (it is a malaria area so you really don’t want to be bitten by mozzies) – you need this as the bamboo isn’t exactly bug-proof! Or soundproof… our neighbours had a toddler and we could hear him whinging and wailing every minute he wasn’t asleep – a bit of a passion killer actually! The bay itself is a marine reserve, so the accommodation is several kilometres away outside the park boundaries. We were disappointed not to be staying on the beach, but our bush view was lovely too.


So, the diving… Milord and I have dived all over Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and in the Red Sea, and I have also dived in Thailand. We agreed that the diving at Sodwana was world-class, better than any diving we have done in Australia and the best we’ve had since meeting in the Red Sea back in 2005. The water is warm (26 deg C when we were there, we didn’t need wetsuits), the reef is close to shore and quite shallow (I didn’t go deeper than 20m) and teeming with life and soft and hard corals. But the best part had to be the service we received from the diving operator. I have never been so spoiled while diving… I didn’t carry a tank once! On our first day a lovely bloke called Thulani took charge of us and from then onward looked after our gear, hooked it up, loaded it on the boat, took it off the boat, washed it and prepped it for the next dive. On the boat the driver and dive master help you into your gear, and after the dive they take it all off you in the water and you don’t touch it again! What a pleasure! The dive boats are big rigid inflatable boats launched from the beach and you all sit in a row on the inflated sides, hanging onto ropes as the boats bounce through the waves to deep water. Great fun actually, and even more fun coming back to shore “surfing” the waves right up onto the sand at a million miles an hour with everyone whooping and screaming!


Apart from one white guy all the dive masters are young black men, and they’re very good. This is their livelihood and they’re thrilled with it. I’m really enjoying the younger generation of black people who have grown up post-apartheid. In general they’re friendly and joyful and don’t have any baggage with the white people, it’s such a nice change from the “bad old days” and gives me hope for the future of my homeland. It was Milord’s first brush with black South Africans and I think he was pleasantly surprised.


All dives are guided, which I don’t mind as long as they don’t rush me. Not a worry at Sodwana! The dive masters try to find the little funky creatures like nudibrancs and paperfish and ghost leaf pipefish (tiny little weird critters that divers get very excited about because they are hard to find). The group moves along the reef slowly, examining every crevice and coral and clownfish in its anemone. The fish life is abundant, and sometimes you can barely see the reef for the fish. Visibility wasn’t bad considering how close we were to the beach – about 15 to 20m I reckon. And of course we saw big stuff too – moray eels and turtles and manta rays and dolphins and a whale shark!

The whale shark was awesome! We had just finished our dive and surfaced when the dive boat came racing over. We threw our dive gear aboard and scrambled on, keeping our fins and masks on (that’s flippers and goggles for you uncool non-divers!), the boat dashed across the water a little way and we all rolled off… to find ourselves a couple of metres away from the biggest sea creature I have ever seen! Ok, everything looks bigger underwater, but this thing was easily 3 or 4 man-lengths long. It was huge! Milord and I took up position just to the left of its head and finned along beside it. It was a meter or so under the surface, just cruising along, and we kept pace with it for probably 20 minutes. Wow. I will admit that I was thinking “Do they call it a whale shark because it’s a really big shark, or because it’s a whale with a pointy dorsal fin?” and was a bit freaked out to be so close to it! It’s a whale with a dorsal fin by the way – it eats plankton!


That yellow snorkel is me!

We did 6 dives over 3 days in Sodwana Bay, and I totally recommend it for divers. There’s not much for non divers though – maybe fishing – as the surf is a bit rough for snorkelling and the reef is too deep. If you go, stay at the Sodwana Bay lodge and tell Ben Jones (the Liverpudlian dive instructor) the loud Aussies say Hi and buy him a beer on us, ok?

Harbour Cleanup Dive

On Sunday 22nd April Milord and I participated in a harbour cleanup scuba dive to bring up fishing line clogging the bottom at a popular fishing spot in the Ku-Ring-Gai National Park, about half an hour’s drive north of Sydney.

Whenever someone says “harbour” to me I always think of smelly, oily, concrete boat harbours with high walls and breakwaters. Well, in Sydney they just mean an estuary, which has oodles of river mouths and bays and peninsulas and moorings. While there are a few mud banks around, in most places the shore is sheer and rocky and there are some impressive sandstone cliffs.

Illawong Bay has a nice grassy picnic area, and a rocky shore covered in razor sharp oyster shells below the tide line, turning to sludge at around 10m. As you may imagine it’s not particularly good for diving, with plenty of murk and not much coral or whatnot. I’m not sure why it’s good for fishing either, as we didn’t see anything over 10cm long while we were down there.

What we did see was a lot of was fishing line! We came to the conclusion that no fisherman goes home with their line (or a fish) after casting off Illawong Bay, as there are areas where the layers of snarled line, hooks and sinkers are close to a foot deep. I couldn’t work out what I was looking at at first, as it resembled ropes and cables on the sea bed, not slender nylon fishing line! There are also quite a number of rods down there, and bottles and cups, the odd chair and even a few lorry parts. It is amazing what people throw into the sea!

Yes, that really is fishing line - and the vis was that bad!

We were down for nearly an hour, tearing and cutting line away, and stuffing it into a woven bag. The weight of the sinkers we brought up was startling; I reckon we had about 10kg of lead in the bag by the end, which made for some interesting buoyancy control. At one point I got tired and handed the bag to Milord – as I let go he sank like a stone and I rocketed towards the surface! Lots of bubbles and thrashing ensued while we sorted it out, only to do the reverse a bit later when he handed the bag back to me ;-).

10 divers went down for line, and several other folk walked the shoreline collecting litter. Sadly we don’t think we made much difference, as there is just so much to bring up. Hopefully the HarbourKeepers organization will be organizing another cleanup there, with more divers and extra tanks to have another attempt. It's not exactly a great recreational dive, but it's good to be putting something back into the community.