In Cairns on Thursday we had booked a trip for all six of us to go to Fitzroy Island for the day on the following Sunday. But sadly Mum was feeling even worse than the day before, and decided to not come and insisted the rest of us go anyway. The boat left at 9am from Cairns and took 45 minutes to get to the island. There are a couple of beaches, water activities (swimming, snorkelling, kayaking, stand up paddleboarding, a water trampoline), a whale-watching trip, a bar/restaurant, a general store, and a resort that day-triplets aren't lower to enter. When we arrived we went to Nudey Beach (not a nudist beach!), which was pretty, and sat in the sun there for about an hour and a half. There was a young woman there who was taking selfies for the whole time. I'm not exaggerating. Literally an hour and a half. Anyway, at one point another woman came along and said "Have you seen the whales?". Apparently they had been swimming along the channel in front of us for half an hour and nobody had noticed. She pointed out where they roughly were and a moment later one breached - not fully, just a tail slam, but still awesome!
We did the whale-watching trip a while later... and got soaking wet sitting at the front, which isn't funny when you're wearing summer clothes and cold from the wind as it is. We did see the whales though, which was great: four humpbacks, one swimming ahead and three others following a few hundred metres behind. The boat guide thought it might be it might be a female with three males chasing her and competing with each other, as they were travelling faster than they would if they were simply migrating, and weren't interested in us (whales are curious and will often come over to a boat). We stayed parallel with them (300 feet away) for about 45 minutes, then went back to the island, where we picked up a packed lunch and ate on the other beach. I had a bit of a swim and a ten-minute paddle in a kayak, and we got the 4pm boat back to Cairns. The water round the island is so clear that we saw a school of big fish, two huge tuna-like fish which weren't tuna, and a turtle just next to the jetty as we waited. We'd seen the turtle a few times over the day :) Back in Cairns we went back to the car, drove back 'up the hill', stopped off in Tolga for some takeaway dinner, and went back to the house and to Mum.
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