Island Hopping

Unfortunately our planned trip for the day, a sail on the Derwent to the north islands was cancelled owing to ‘potential’ weather conditions (or possibly they did not have enough people!).

So we adjusted our plans and instead went to visit two of the closer islands, both with resorts on them, namely Daydream Island and Long Island.

This was another early morning, the alarm rattling through Muriel at 6am, for our pick up at 7.35am.  A short trip to Abel Point Harbour and Samantha was staring her nemesis in the face, a catamaran ferry called Tusa.

A little quiet and with sweaty palms we boarded the boat, Jonny obviously thinking that if this does not go well we could well be out of here by teatime with not another boat trip ever likely to happen, Samantha imagining we were about to re-enact The Titantic.

We left the overcast Airlie Beach behind and ‘bobbed’ over to Daydream Island with only one minor squeal from Samantha.  

As we arrived the clouds parted and we were treated to glorious sunshine as we explored Daydream Island (I told you the Derwent just didn’t have enough people).  Our first stop was the (man made) reef lagoon where the rays floated by, the sharks drifted and another bloke without a proper job cleaned out the leaves.

We then played the inaugural TeamJam Southern Hemisphere Open Golf Championship on Australia’s longest course (19 holes) - before anyone gets carried away this was of course a ‘crazy golf’ course!  For the record Jonny won by 5 shots but it all could have been very different if Samantha had not had a six on the sixteenth.

Championship over, we rested on the hammocks - fortunately these went very smoothly for both of us with no hilarious £250 video moments coming our way.

Then the Rock Wallabies (endangered cousins of kangaroos) decided to put in an appearance on the beach, any form of hopping marsupial would appear to love a photo opportunity!

After a wander around the island, avoiding the 1km forest walk as it was too hilly (I’ll let you guess where that came from?) and a lovely lunch by the beach, it was time to leave Daydream Island and head to Long Island.

Luckily we only had a short time on Long Island as quite frankly we thought it was crap – no more to say!

Back on the ferry and the turtles came to say hello before we ‘bobbed’ back to Airlie Beach, thinking we would like to stay on Daydream Island one day and that one day on Long Island would be a waste of 24 hours.

Back home we saw a kookaburra, it just dropped into our ‘garden’ - we had been hearing them all trip but it was lovely to see one for real.  In the evening we returned to the Hogs Breath Café for the most fantastic steak, avoiding the partying backpackers along the way (we really are getting old) and were tucked up in Muriel by 10pm!

Another early day tomorrow as Samantha’s sea legs are further tested by a proper sailing trip – hope she sleeps well – night, night.