We are enjoying a three day break on Fraser Island, staying at Kingfisher Bay Resort. Fraser is the largest sand island in the world and is world heritage listed. It is 300 km north of Brisbane. The resort is an ecotourism resort with minimum interference with the environment. As I write I’m relaxing beside the pool.

It’s quite breezy so not many people are brave enough to be swimming.

The island is 120km long by 20km wide. The original people here were the ‘Butchella’ people and their name for the island was gari which means paradise. One of the fresh water creeks, Eli Creek, flows over 80 million litres of fresh water into the Pacific Ocean every day.

Yesterday we went on a whale watching cruise from the island. It was very windy which meant it was quite rough. The catamaran took us up to the northern end of the island where there is a sheltered bay on the mainland side. It’s called Platypus Bay and the humpback whales like to stop there for a week or so to rest and to teach their calves some life skills. The lungs of a humpback are the size of a small vehicle and a calf can drink up to 500 litres of milk per day. They can hold their breath for up to 45 minutes and the tail of each is unique like our finger prints.

We saw several pods of whales and some were quite close to us but they weren’t doing any of their party tricks. No clapping or breaching so this was very disappointing.

The wind was very strong and the waves were quite big so our little cat was bouncing a lot. My arm and leg muscles all felt very tight last night as they’d worked very hard just hanging on. It was quite exhausting. Quite a few people were ill but not us, fortunately.

It wasn’t safe to unload us at the island because of the wind so we were taken to Urangan on the mainland and then bussed to the ferry and brought back to Kingfisher by ferry. We have a voucher to do the cruise again because of the weather so hopefully we will get that chance on a better day when the whales want to play.

But we have seen whales. I can’t say we enjoyed the day but we endured the day and we did see whales.