Airlie/Whitsunday Islands/Brisbane

The past five days have probably been the best days/nights of my trip thus far. The first night I arrived in Airlie beach I met up with a group of random people that had just been sailing and scored some of their free food and booze that you get with every trip. Other than that I don't really remember much of the night other than I know that I was a dancing fool dropping funk kicks all over town. I was out for way too long and had to wake up extra early to start the sailing trip, jagerbombs were a bad choice! The sailing trip was the best thing that I've done since I've been in Oz and pretty much one of the best things I've done my in life.

We set sail about 10am with a pretty large group of 21 passengers and four crew members. Our boat was called Apollo and was apparently one hell of a racing boat back in its time, winning all sorts of local and worldwide races. The crew pretty much made us do most of the hard work like raising the sails and all that jazz which I made sure to do as much as I could. Sailing was nuts as the boat would turn to about a 50 degree angle while we cut through the water beating most of the other boats around us in our starting race. For the next three days that is what we spent a lot of our time doing; just sailing around the amazingly blue/clear colored waters and stopping at the occasional island. One of which was Whitehaven Beach, a top ten beach in the world with the finest sand you can get on Earth, it was 7ks of the nicest beach I've ever seen, including all of the Greek islands. But when we weren't sailing, we were scuba diving or snorkeling which I spent a ton of time doing. It was my first scuba dive which was a little weird but the Great Barrier Reef was one of the best things I've ever seen in my life. I was diving/snorkeling with fish that were larger than I, getting within arms distance of massive sea turtles, and even seeing stingrays. The reef and fish were made up of colors that I can't even begin to explain. It really reminded me of a child's coloring book just filled with seemingly random colors. Nights on the boat were pretty good as we had a fair amount of social people so we would pretty much start drinking while watching the sun set behind the ocean and other passing boats, I won't even try to described these sunsets as my pictures will have to speak for themselves. In fact I'll be done trying to write about the sailing because I just can't describe it in such a short amount of time.

My last night in Airlie beach was once again filled with funk kicks and drinking until I caught my flight to Brisbane. In Brisbane I met up with a Londoner from the boat named Lloyd (lloyd works for the nfl in the UK so that was pretty much what we talked about the entire trip) and we went out with some of guys from London in brizzy. It was a pretty ridiculous night and I'll just leave it at that.

All in all, the past five days have been amazing filled with unbelievable scenery, people, and activities. I'm now in Byron Bay the most easterly point of Oz trying to decide whether I want to try and surf or skydive but will probably end up doing both. I'll be home in less than a week so let's get ready to do some partying out there!