We were supposed to go to diving in Great Keppel island but the weather was crap, so we decided to motor the 500km up to Airlie beach, figuring the weather would probably be better up there. We had a sailing trip booked for christmas day and were planning on doing some diving in the days before. Turned out that no-one operates a dedicated dive boat, so we would have to hop onto a one day cruise and dive from that. While sitting outside the dive shop looking at 1 day cruise brouchures, a boat charter owner walked past and said that we shouldn't bother going on those boats, he had just had 6 people cancel and had space on his boat -2 day, 2 night dive boat for $100 each! (down from $420) The only downside was the boat was leaving in 1 hour, so we had to get our stuff together and be back at the marina in 1 hour. For some reason, we sat there for 15 minutes deciding on whether this was a good idea or not and in the end realised it was and we should get our arses into gear. We made it with about 5 minutes to spare, including enough time to swing by the the booze shop!! The cruise was a bit backpackery, but every one was good fun and had a pretty cool time. The diving was pretty average though and felt like the dive sites had been over-dived (broken coral everywhere etc.) but we still did our first night dive which was cool.
We arrived back on the 24th, had one night in the campsite, before getting back down to the marina the next morning to get onto the boat we had actually booked. This was way more chilled we were pretty much left to do wht we liked which was nice. Fortunately, we went to different sites this time with Whitehaven Beach being the only place we saw twice. The beach is stunning, so we weren't complaining! We were also camping on the islands which was very cool. Literally. When we had booked, we wanted to get a private cabin but they were sold out - beach camping was the next best thing. However, with no aircon or real windows on the boat, everyone ended up sleeping on the wooden deck, which made our tent look like luxury!
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