Hey, Just returned from our 3 night Whitsunday sailing trip! Luckily we had been upgraded to the Whitsunday magic for free! this is the best boat that tours round the islands. Once onboard we quickly made a few friends (hello Sean, Billiana, Camilla, Catherine, Yoshi, Lee, caroline - hope you enjoy the pictures!) before setting sail. Had a quality chef onboard which produced the finest gourmet food - including what could be the best pork ever cooked! after a good first nights kip we headed to the outer barrier reef to do a bit of........snorkelling! Saw much better coral than whats up at Cairns too! Once back onboard someone shouted shark and we all looked over and sure enough it definately looked like a shark to me, but one eagle eyed crew noticed it was infact a mantaray! then we saw a couple more - apparently this was very rare to see them out here and it woulld be a once in a lifetime opportunity to swim with them in open water! So about 10 of us quickly put our stinger suits back on the dingies were lowered and we were took out close to where they were! Only a few people managed to swim near to them and luckily we were two of them! they were pretty big probably around 2 metres in diameter! it turned around after swimming past us and swam towards us with its huge mouth open, we could see right down inside as it swam straight to us and then swam about a metre directly below - we nearly clipped its tail with our feet! The rest of the trip was spent learning too many new card games for my memory to cope with, enjoying awesome food, more snorkelling (in which we saw a small shark resting on the ocean bed), and a trip to Whitehaven beach where the sand is 98% silicone! Oh yer we also saw a few turtles swim by our boat! we were pretty reluctant to leave the boat and contemplated a mutiny! but if anyones coming to Aus soon they should definately go to the Whitsundays.