Day 39 : Taking the Condor to Whit"sun"days

Having had almost no sleep, the Asian girl in my room was snoring as if she was having an orgasm every time she took a breath, I woke up at 9.15 am and checked out at 10.00 am. Together with Babs, we walked in the rain, trying to find a bar to have breakfast. On the way back to the hostel, we ran into Ollie, Amelia, Gabi and Rebecca (Fraser Island Group Members). We stayed with them until it was time for me to go to the Barcelona Cafe to take the sailing boat, named ‘Condor’, to the Whitsunday Islands.

We set off to the islands with a group of 25 people and it didn’t take 15 minutes or we already had a rainstorm. Soaked and wet we arrived a couple of hours later to our first stop, ‘The Whitsunday Islands National Park’. There we saw an aboriginal cave with arts on the wall. We stayed there for 10 minutes and went back to the boat. Apparently our boat is famous in sailing competitions,

that fact gave me a more secure feeling. I am not that fancy of boats to be honest.

As the sun went down, the captain decided to moor the boat at a bay where there was supposed to be not a lot of wind so we could have a decent sleep. I would like to make clear that in this case the accent falls on ‘supposed to’. The wind was so heavy that the captain and his crew needed to remove the anchor in the middle of the night. As I was sleeping in the middle, right above the anchor, I was wide awake when they removed the anchor. It was so bumpy. Because I didn’t know that time why they removed anchor, I was already thinking of the worst case scenario and that we were going home in the middle of the night because there was too much storm. I woke up and think I stood by the stairs/emergency exit for more than 15 minutes while everybody else was still sleeping. I was really that scared. I could not go up as there was too much rain.

One moment one of the crew members, Eric, came down and asked me why I was standing at the emergency exit. I just told him that I was so scared and that in case something would happen, I would be the first one being able to go up on the deck. He felt sorry for me, gave me a hug and said that everything would be just fine. I went back to bed and he said I could always wake him up in case it was necessary. That was nice of him. Even if I would have been terrified, I would never have disturbed him. He needs his sleep as well. I think I slept maximum 2 hours.